Building a custom Zeebe Exporter is indeed the recommended approach for consuming real-time engine events directly from Zeebe, bypassing Operate and Tasklist (available only in Self-Managed). I found the following relevant resources:
- Camunda exporters overview
- Custom exporter to filter specific records
- Install Zeebe exporters
- Connecting the workflow engine with your world - Apache Kafka
- Forum discussion: Custom process instance status tracker
- Forum discussion: Camunda 8 audit logging
Does this help? If not, can anyone from the community jump in? 
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