If it is a critical process, use detailed process logs.
If it is an extremely critical process add Auditing.
Regular logs (text files) > Detailed Process Logs (DB) > Audits (read-only/tamper-proof)
Are Audits more compliance related, while detailed logs are business only?
It's not clear to me why to have a special detailed process log, if you can you can write important data to Audits, and less important to regular logs, i.e. once can use different log levels for business data vs engineering/debug data.
Can you please give an example?
Process logs are business processes that you need to report on or answer for later.
Audits are another business layer for safety or life critical data, or adversarial data (handling money based transactions). They could be compliance related. Auditing is a three step process - Ask a question, figure out how to answer it, and make sure you've answered it.
So specifically, if you have a magic bean shop and you want to log transfer of the beans, that would be a process log. Then at the end of the day, you would send a manifest of all the beans sent that day. The audit process would look at the final location of the beans, and also at the process log to answer your audit questions.
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I think a lot of people make a hard distinction between business logging and engineering logging, and I'm not sure that makes sense.