log4net vs Nlog

Question

Anyone have experience for both   How do they stack up against each other   We are planning on using one of them for logging in an enterprise application   References   log4net  nlog  EDIT  We have no existing dependencies to either nlog or log4net

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For anyone getting to this thread late  you may want to take a look back at the  Net Base Class Library  BCL    Many people missed the changes between  Net 1 1 and  Net 2 0 when the TraceSource class was introduced  circa 2005      Using the TraceSource is analagous to other logging frameworks  with granular control of logging  configuration in app config web config  and programmatic access - without the overhead of the enterprise application block     Net BCL Team Blog  Intro to Tracing - Part I  Look at Part II a b c as well    There are also a number of comparisons floating around   log4net vs TraceSource

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First look at the rest of your stack   If you are using NHibernate  it utilizes Log4Net directly  Other frameworks might have other specific loggers they need   Other than that  both work fine     I ve settled on Log4Net myself   It can be a pain to configure  and if it isn t configured correctly it is a pain to figure out what went wrong   But you can make it do almost anything you would want from a logger   If you don t have a standing issue with Log4Net  here is an article I wrote on how to get started with it  http   elegantcode com 2007 12 07 getting-started-with-log4net

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I think the general consensus is that nlog is a bit easier to configure and use  Both are quite capable  though

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I echo the above and do prefer nLog  Entlib is needlessly bloated    Re Log4net One thing that ALWAYS gets me with log4net is forgetting to add the following to the global asax to init the component    log4net Config XmlConfigurator Configure

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I was recently tasked to  prototype up some loggin   for an upcoming project   I didn t have any logging framework experience   I researched  ran through tutorials  made toy apps  etc  on Log4Net  NLog  and Enterprise Library for a few days   Came back 3-4 weeks later and put them together into a cohesive demo   Hopefully some of this is useful to you   My recommendation for our project is this    Use a logging facade  e g  Common Logging  SimpleLoggingFacade  to avoid direct dependencies  If we end up using Enterprise Library for other facilities  then use it for Logging  too  If we end up using something with a dependency on Log4Net  use Log4Net  If none of the above  use NLog  Which I d prefer    That s based on these findings  opinions      All 3 frameworks are capable and can do some sophisticated things   We want a quality solution  but frankly don t need ultra high performance or 60 types of event sinks  All 3 have very similar basic concepts  Each has its own cool tricks  like really advanced routing  or dynamic log filenames  file truncating  etc  All 3 are pretty well documented in their own way  For a complete newb like me  they were all a little awkward initially   No drastic differences here for the basics   I got over it  When revisiting things a few weeks later  NLog was clearly the easiest to resume   I needed very little brush up on it   With Log4Net  I had to revisit a few online examples to get going   With EntLib  I gave up and did the tutorials all over again from scratch - I was totally lost  I couldn t figure out how to get EntLib to do some things like log to the database   It might be easy  but it was beyond my time limit  Log4Net and NLog have a small in-code footprint   EntLib is spammy  but I d use a facade over it anyway  I accidentally mis-configured EntLib and it told me at run time   Log4Net didn t   I didn t have an accidental mis-config with NLog  EntLib comes with a nice looking app config editor  which you 100  need   NLog has a config file schema so you get  intellisense    Log4Net comes with nada    So obviously I like NLog so far   Not enough to use it in spite of having another solution available  though

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Based on my experience  SmartInspect beats both NLog and log4net   Its extremely easy to use  documentation is great  and you can view and filter previously logged messages with their interactive log viewer  which is a huge real world advantage   One thing I like is the tabbed views of data  like the browser tabs in Chrome  Each tab can provide a different filtered view of the log

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As I noticed  log4net locks their output files the whole time application is running  so you can t delete them  Otherwise they are similar   So I prefer NLog

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I second NLog too because it works with unmanaged code too  I suppose it could be possibe to use log4net and log4cxx together  but NLog handles both managed and unmanaged code out of the box   I also looked at Common Logging  a facade that makes abstraction of the logging api  it supports log4net  NLog and Entreprise Library  I don t think i ll use it  but i like how they use lambdas to improve performance when logging is disabled  a feature shared with NLog and probably others

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Having had an experience with both frameworks recently  I thought I can share my views on each frameworks   I was asked to evaluate the logging frameworks for an existing web application  I narrowed down my choices to NLog  v2 0  and log4net  v1 2 11  after going through various online forums  Here are my findings    Setting starting up with NLog is dead easy  You go through the Getting started tutorial on their website and you are done  You get a fair idea  how thing might be with nlog  Config file is so intuitive that anyone can understand the config  For example  if you want to set the internal logging on  you set the flag in Nlog config file s header node  which is where you would expect it to be  In log4net  you set different flags in web config s appSettings section  In log4net  internal logging doesnt output timestamp which is annoying  In Nlog  you get a nice log with timestamps  I found it very useful in my evaluations  Filters in log4net - You better check my this question - log4net filter - how to write AND filter to ignore log messages and if you find an answer solution for this  please let me know   I understand  there is a workaround for this question  as you can write your own custom filter  But something which is not easily available in log4net  Performance - I logged around 3000 log messages to database using a stored procedure  I used simple for loop  int i 0  i lt 3000  i      to log the same message 3000 times  For the writes  log4net AdoAppender took almost double the time than NLog   Log4net doesnt support asynchronous appender    It was sufficient comparison for me to choose NLog as the logging framework

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For us  the key difference is in overall perf      Have a look at Logger IsDebugEnabled in NLog versus Log4Net  from our tests  NLog has less overhead and that s what we are after  low-latency stuff    Cheers  Florian

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If you go here you can find a comprehensive matrix that includes both the NLog and Log4Net libs as well as Enterprise Lib and other products   Somebody could argue that the matrix is done in a way to underline the features of the only commercial lib present in the matrix  I think it s true but it was useful anyway to drive my choice versus NLog   Regards

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You might also consider Microsoft Enterprise Library Logging Block  It comes with nice designer

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Well    I used Enterprise library for database logging tasks and now I switched to NLog due to performance bottleneck   some comparison info    http   pauliusraila blogspot com 2010 10 solving-database-logging-bottlenecks html

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A key consideration that hasn t been much discussed is support and updates   Log4Net hasn t been updated since version 1 2 10 was published April 19  2006   In contrast  NLog has been actively supported since 2006 will soon release NLog 2 0 supporting many platforms that didn t exist when log4net was last updated such as    NET Framework 2 0 SP1 and above  3 5  amp  4 0  Client and Extended profiles  Silverlight 2 0  3 0  4 0  NET Compact Framework 2 0  3 5 Mono 2 x profile

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Shameless plug for an open source project I run  but given the lively discussion about which  NET logging framework is more active I thought I d post an obligatory link to Serilog   To use within an application  Serilog is similar to  and draws heavily on  log4net  Unlike other  NET logging options  however  Serilog is about preserving the structure of log events for offline analysis  When you write   Log Information  The answer is  Answer    42     Most logging libraries immediately render the message into a string  Serilog can do that too  but it preserves the   Answer  42   property so that later on  using one of a number of NoSQL data stores  you can properly query events based on the value of Answer   We re close to a 1 0 and support all of the modern   NET 4 5  Windows Store and Windows Phone 8  platforms

[log4net] log4net vs. Nlog

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