I'm building a gateway with audit logs and tracing, what products are worth a look?

If you’re building a gateway and want audit logs + tracing, the products worth a serious look depend on whether you mean:

1. API gateway / edge gateway
2. Service mesh / internal traffic gateway
3. General observability/audit stack

Here are the strongest options by category.

API gateways

These are usually the best fit if you need request-level auditability, auth, policy enforcement, and tracing.

1. Kong Gateway

• Strong plugin ecosystem
• Good support for OpenTelemetry
• Common choice for audit logging, auth, rate limiting, transformation
• Works well in hybrid and Kubernetes setups

Best for: teams that want flexibility and a large ecosystem.

2. Envoy Gateway / Envoy Proxy

• Very solid for tracing and telemetry
• Native integration with OpenTelemetry
• Often used as the data plane under other gateways
• More low-level; you’ll need to assemble more pieces yourself

Best for: platform teams that want control and performance.

3. Tyk

• Good built-in gateway features
• Easy policy/auth management
• Supports analytics and audit-style logging
• Good developer experience

Best for: teams that want a quicker path to production with less assembly.

4. Gravitee

• Strong API management features
• Good for audit trails, API lifecycle, and governance
• Useful if you need API portal + management + gateway

Best for: organizations that care about API management, not just routing.

5. Apache APISIX

• High-performance gateway
• Good plugin model
• OpenTelemetry support
• Popular in cloud-native/Kubernetes environments

Best for: teams wanting OSS, speed, and extensibility.

6. AWS API Gateway / Azure API Management / Apigee

• Managed offerings with logging/tracing integrations
• Better if you want less ops burden
• Strong enterprise governance and auditing
• Often more expensive and sometimes less flexible

Best for: enterprises already committed to a cloud vendor.

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Service mesh options

If your “gateway” is more about east-west traffic or internal service communication:

1. Istio

• Best-known service mesh
• Strong telemetry, audit, and tracing support through Envoy
• Can be complex operationally

2. Linkerd

• Simpler than Istio
• Great baseline observability
• Less feature-rich for advanced policy/audit use cases

Best for: internal traffic visibility and tracing, not edge API management.

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Observability tools to pair with the gateway

A gateway usually emits logs/traces; these tools make them useful.

Tracing

• Jaeger
• Grafana Tempo
• Zipkin (older, simpler)

Logs

• Elastic Stack
• Grafana Loki
• Splunk / Datadog Logs

Audit storage / compliance

• SIEM tools like Splunk, Sentinel, Chronicle
• Immutable storage options in object storage + retention policies

Standard to aim for

• OpenTelemetry for traces, metrics, and logs where possible
  This gives you portability across gateways and backends.

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What I’d shortlist first

If you want a practical shortlist:

• Kong — best general-purpose API gateway choice
• APISIX — strong OSS/high-performance option
• Tyk — simpler management and developer experience
• Gravitee — API governance/auditing focus
• Envoy + OpenTelemetry — if you want to build your own gateway stack
• Istio — if this is more service-mesh than API gateway

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Quick recommendation by need

• Best enterprise API governance: Gravitee or Apigee
• Best OSS all-around: Kong or APISIX
• Best if you want to assemble a custom platform: Envoy
• Best for internal service telemetry: Istio
• Best managed cloud-native option: AWS/Azure/GCP equivalents

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a feature comparison table,
2. a best choice by cloud/on-prem/Kubernetes, or
3. a reference architecture for audit logs + distributed tracing.