Best practice in designing a web app user activities logging?

Question

We have a web e-learning type system, and for this project, I am supposed to design an activities logging feature for the whole system so we can track down their daily activities and perhaps help them to be more productive.

Unfortunately this system most likely will be used to track the user's work during the official hours ( And the demand for this feature is possibly recession driven )

I am actually rather clueless in designing this type of system, and only some of our modules have activity logging.

I was thinking of listing down all available features that we currently have in the system, and list down what data that we would like to keep, and create a simple function which will be slowly and painfully added into each module, which will to start dumping logging data to our MySQL database.

It is a Perl application hooked up to a MySQL database, with AXKit, XML, XLST and JavaScript in between.

Does anyone have any good recommendations or resources from which I can read and learn?

Particularly about good design, UI, reports to generate, database load, etc.

Answer 1

I guess it depends a bit what kind of specific needs you have with your logging, but generally Log::Log4perl can be tricked into doing what you want.