Audit trails and recording actions

Question

Background

A discussion that has come up at work recently is how we handle audit logging and the recording of events. We are integrating with a 3rd party app so triggers are a no no from the off so we are handling it in code. We've written a number of prototype components for handling it but nothing feels right as yet. The main issue being we want to create Facebook style time lines for the users to see what action have happened recently but these don't seem to fit well with how we record audits.

My question is how would be best to handle this type of scenario?

• Should we tailor the audit log tables to fit the requirements of the front end?
• Should we have separate tables to handle the "Actions" and have the events and auditing separate
• Should we look to a more message based architecture so this will be more like an Event sourcing type component?

Input from somebody who has done this type of system would be much appreciated.