Logging best practices

Question

I d like to get stories on how people are handling tracing and logging in real applications  Here are some questions that might help to explain your answer    Frameworks  What frameworks do you use    log4net System Diagnostics Trace System Diagnostics TraceSource Logging application block Other    If you use tracing  do you make use of Trace Correlation StartLogicalOperation    Do you write this code manually  or do you use some form of aspect oriented programming to do it  Care to share a code snippet    Do you provide any form of granularity over trace sources  E g   WPF TraceSources allow you to configure them at various levels    System Windows - settings for all of WPF System Windows Animation - override specifically for Animation    Listeners  What log outputs do you use    Text files XML files Event log Other    If using files  do you use rolling logs or just a single file  How do you make the logs available for people to consume    Viewing  What tools to you use for viewing the logs    Notepad Tail Event viewer Systems Center Operations Manager Microsoft Operations Manger WCF Service Trace Viewer Other    If you are building an ASP NET solution  do you also use ASP NET Health Monitoring  Do you include trace output in the health monitor events  What about Trace axd    What about custom performance counters

User · Answer

We use Log4Net at work as the logging provider, with a singleton wrapper for the log instance (although the singleton is under review, questioning whether they are a good idea or not).

We chose it for the following reasons:

Simple configuration/ reconfiguration on various environments
Good number of pre-built appenders
One of the CMS's we use already had it built in
Nice number of log levels and configurations around them

I should mention, this is speaking from an ASP.NET development point of view

I can see some merits in using the Trace that is in the .NET framework but I'm not entirely sold on it, mainly because the components I work with don't really do any Trace calls. The only thing that I frequently use that does is System.Net.Mail from what I can tell.

So we have a library which wraps log4net and within our code we just need stuff like this:

Logger.Instance.Warn("Something to warn about");
Logger.Instance.Fatal("Something went bad!", new Exception());

try {
  var i = int.Parse("Hello World");
} catch(FormatException, ex) {
  Logger.Instance.Error(ex);
}

Within the methods we do a check to see if the logging level is enabled, so you don't have redundant calls to the log4net API (so if Debug isn't enabled, the debug statements are ignored), but when I get some time I'll be updating it to expose those so that you can do the checks yourself. This will prevent evaluations being undertaken when they shouldn't, eg:

Logger.Instance.Debug(string.Format("Something to debug at {0}", DateTime.Now);

This will become:

if(Logger.DebugEnabled) Logger.Instance.Debug(string.Format("Something to debug at {0}", DateTime.Now);

(Save a bit of execusion time)

By default we log at two locations:

File system of the website (in a non-served file extension)
Email sending for Error & Fatal

Files are done as rolling of each day or 10mb (IIRC). We don't use the EventLog as it can require higher security than we often want to give a site.

I find Notepad works just fine for reading logs.

User · Answer

We use log4net on our web applications     It s ability to customize logging at run-time by changing the XML configuration file is very handy when an application is malfunctioning at run-time and you need to see more information   It also allows you to target specific classes or attributes to log under   This is very handy when you have an idea where the error is occurring   A classic example is NHibernate where you want to see just the SQL going to the database   Edit   We write all events to a database and the Trace system   The event log we use for errors or exceptions   We log most events to a database so that we can create custom reports and let the users view the log if they want to right from the application

User · Answer

I have to join the chorus recommending log4net  in my case coming from a platform flexibility  desktop  Net Compact Framework  32 64-bit  point of view   However  wrapping it in a private-label API is a major anti-pattern   log4net ILogger is the  Net counterpart of the Commons Logging wrapper API already  so coupling is already minimized for you  and since it is also an Apache library  that s usually not even a concern because you re not giving up any control  fork it if you must   Most house wrapper libraries I ve seen also commit one or more of a litany of faults    Using a global singleton logger  or equivalently a static entry point  which loses the fine resolution of the recommended logger-per-class pattern for no other selectivity gain  Failing to expose the optional Exception argument  leading to multiple problems    It makes an exception logging policy even more difficult to maintain  so nothing  is done consistently with exceptions  Even with a consistent policy  formatting the exception away into a string loses data prematurely   I ve written a custom ILayout decorator that performs detailed drill-down on an exception to determine the chain of events   Failing to expose the IsLevelEnabled properties  which discards the ability to skip formatting code when areas or levels of logging are turned off

User · Answer

There are lots of great recommendations in the answers   A general best practice is to consider who will be reading the log  In my case it will be an administrator at the client site  So I log messages that gives them something they can act on  For Example   Unable to initialize application  This is usually caused by

User · Answer

As the authors of the tool  we of course use SmartInspect for logging and tracing  NET applications  We usually use the named pipe protocol for live logging and  encrypted  binary log files for end-user logs  We use the SmartInspect Console as the viewer and monitoring tool   There are actually quite a few logging frameworks and tools for  NET out there  There s an overview and comparison of the different tools on DotNetLogging com

User · Answer

Update  For extensions to System Diagnostics  providing some of the missing listeners you might want  see Essential Diagnostics on CodePlex  http   essentialdiagnostics codeplex com      Frameworks  Q  What frameworks do you use   A  System Diagnostics TraceSource  built in to  NET 2 0    It provides powerful  flexible  high performance logging for applications  however many developers are not aware of its capabilities and do not make full use of them    There are some areas where additional functionality is useful  or sometimes the functionality exists but is not well documented  however this does not mean that the entire logging framework  which is designed to be extensible  should be thrown away and completely replaced like some popular alternatives  NLog  log4net  Common Logging  and even EntLib Logging    Rather than change the way you add logging statements to your application and re-inventing the wheel  just extended the System Diagnostics framework in the few places you need it   It seems to me the other frameworks  even EntLib  simply suffer from Not Invented Here Syndrome  and I think they have wasted time re-inventing the basics that already work perfectly well in System Diagnostics  such as how you write log statements   rather than filling in the few gaps that exist  In short  don t use them -- they aren t needed   Features you may not have known    Using the TraceEvent overloads that take a format string and args can help performance as parameters are kept as separate references until after Filter ShouldTrace   has succeeded  This means no expensive calls to ToString   on parameter values until after the system has confirmed message will actually be logged     The Trace CorrelationManager allows you to correlate log statements about the same logical operation  see below      VisualBasic Logging FileLogTraceListener is good for writing to log files and supports file rotation  Although in the VisualBasic namespace  it can be just as easily used in a C   or other language  project simply by including the DLL     When using EventLogTraceListener if you call TraceEvent with multiple arguments and with empty or null format string  then the args are passed directly to the EventLog WriteEntry   if you are using localized message resources      The Service Trace Viewer tool  from WCF  is useful for viewing graphs of activity correlated log files  even if you aren t using WCF   This can really help debug complex issues where multiple threads activites are involved     Avoid overhead by clearing all listeners  or removing Default   otherwise Default will pass everything to the trace system  and incur all those ToString   overheads     Areas you might want to look at extending  if needed       Database trace listener   Colored console trace listener MSMQ   Email   WMI trace listeners  if needed  Implement a FileSystemWatcher to call Trace Refresh for dynamic configuration changes   Other Recommendations   Use structed event id s  and keep a reference list  e g  document them in an enum    Having unique event id s for each  significant  event in your system is very useful for correlating and finding specific issues  It is easy to track back to the specific code that logs uses the event ids  and can make it easy to provide guidance for common errors  e g  error 5178 means your database connection string is wrong  etc   Event id s should follow some kind of structure  similar to the Theory of Reply Codes used in email and HTTP   which allows you to treat them by category without knowing specific codes   e g  The first digit can detail the general class  1xxx can be used for  Start  operations  2xxx for normal behaviour  3xxx for activity tracing  4xxx for warnings  5xxx for errors  8xxx for  Stop  operations  9xxx for fatal errors  etc   The second digit can detail the area  e g  21xx for database information  41xx for database warnings  51xx for database errors   22xx for calculation mode  42xx for calculation warnings  etc   23xx for another module  etc   Assigned  structured event id s also allow you use them in filters   Q  If you use tracing  do you make use of Trace Correlation StartLogicalOperation   A  Trace CorrelationManager is very useful for correlating log statements in any sort of multi-threaded environment  which is pretty much anything these days    You need at least to set the ActivityId once for each logical operation in order to correlate   Start Stop and the LogicalOperationStack can then be used for simple stack-based context  For more complex contexts  e g  asynchronous operations   using TraceTransfer to the new ActivityId  before changing it   allows correlation    The Service Trace Viewer tool can be useful for viewing activity graphs  even if you aren t using WCF    Q  Do you write this code manually  or do you use some form of aspect oriented programming to do it  Care to share a code snippet   A  You may want to create a scope class  e g  LogicalOperationScope  that  a  sets up the context when created and  b  resets the context when disposed    This allows you to write code such as the following to automatically wrap operations     using  LogicalOperationScope operation   new LogicalOperationScope  Operation                   do work here       On creation the scope could first set ActivityId if needed  call StartLogicalOperation and then log a TraceEventType Start message  On Dispose it could log a Stop message  and then call StopLogicalOperation   Q  Do you provide any form of granularity over trace sources  E g   WPF TraceSources allow you to configure them at various levels   A  Yes  multiple Trace Sources are useful   important as systems get larger   Whilst you probably want to consistently log all Warning  amp  above  or all Information  amp  above messages  for any reasonably sized system the volume of Activity Tracing  Start  Stop  etc  and Verbose logging simply becomes too much   Rather than having only one switch that turns it all either on or off  it is useful to be able to turn on this information for one section of your system at a time   This way  you can locate significant problems from the usually logging  all warnings  errors  etc   and then  zoom in  on the sections you want and set them to Activity Tracing or even Debug levels   The number of trace sources you need depends on your application  e g  you may want one trace source per assembly or per major section of your application   If you need even more fine tuned control  add individual boolean switches to turn on off specific high volume tracing  e g  raw message dumps   Or a separate trace source could be used  similar to WCF WPF    You might also want to consider separate trace sources for Activity Tracing vs general  other  logging  as it can make it a bit easier to configure filters exactly how you want them    Note that messages can still be correlated via ActivityId even if different sources are used  so use as many as you need     Listeners  Q  What log outputs do you use   This can depend on what type of application you are writing  and what things are being logged  Usually different things go in different places  i e  multiple outputs    I generally classify outputs into three groups    1  Events - Windows Event Log  and trace files   e g  If writing a server service  then best practice on Windows is to use the Windows Event Log  you don t have a UI to report to     In this case all Fatal  Error  Warning and  service-level  Information events should go to the Windows Event Log  The Information level should be reserved for these type of high level events  the ones that you want to go in the event log  e g   Service Started    Service Stopped    Connected to Xyz   and maybe even  Schedule Initiated    User Logged On   etc   In some cases you may want to make writing to the event log a built-in part of your application and not via the trace system  i e  write Event Log entries directly   This means it can t accidentally be turned off   Note you still also want to note the same event in your trace system so you can correlate    In contrast  a Windows GUI application would generally report these to the user  although they may also log to the Windows Event Log    Events may also have related performance counters  e g  number of errors sec   and it can be important to co-ordinate any direct writing to the Event Log  performance counters  writing to the trace system and reporting to the user so they occur at the same time   i e  If a user sees an error message at a particular time  you should be able to find the same error message in the Windows Event Log  and then the same event with the same timestamp in the trace log  along with other trace details     2  Activities - Application Log files or database table  and trace files   This is the regular activity that a system does  e g  web page served  stock market trade lodged  order taken  calculation performed  etc    Activity Tracing  start  stop  etc  is useful here  at the right granuality    Also  it is very common to use a specific Application Log  sometimes called an Audit Log   Usually this is a database table or an application log file and contains structured data  i e  a set of fields    Things can get a bit blurred here depending on your application  A good example might be a web server which writes each request to a web log  similar examples might be a messaging system or calculation system where each operation is logged along with application-specific details   A not so good example is stock market trades or a sales ordering system  In these systems you are probably already logging the activity as they have important business value  however the principal of correlating them to other actions is still important   As well as custom application logs  activities also often have related peformance counters  e g  number of transactions per second   In generally you should co-ordinate logging of activities across different systems  i e  write to your application log at the same time as you increase your performance counter and log to your trace system  If you do all at the same time  or straight after each other in the code   then debugging problems is easier  than if they all occur at diffent times locations in the code     3  Debug Trace - Text file  or maybe XML or database   This is information at Verbose level and lower  e g  custom boolean switches to turn on off raw data dumps   This provides the guts or details of what a system is doing at a sub-activity level   This is the level you want to be able to turn on off for individual sections of your application  hence the multiple sources   You don t want this stuff cluttering up the Windows Event Log  Sometimes a database is used  but more likely are rolling log files that are purged after a certain time   A big difference between this information and an Application Log file is that it is unstructured  Whilst an Application Log may have fields for To  From  Amount  etc   Verbose debug traces may be whatever a programmer puts in  e g   checking values X  value   Y false   or random comments markers like  Done it  trying again    One important practice is to make sure things you put in application log files or the Windows Event Log also get logged to the trace system with the same details  e g  timestamp   This allows you to then correlate the different logs when investigating   If you are planning to use a particular log viewer because you have complex correlation  e g  the Service Trace Viewer  then you need to use an appropriate format i e  XML  Otherwise  a simple text file is usually good enough -- at the lower levels the information is largely unstructured  so you might find dumps of arrays  stack dumps  etc  Provided you can correlated back to more structured logs at higher levels  things should be okay   Q  If using files  do you use rolling logs or just a single file  How do you make the logs available for people to consume   A  For files  generally you want rolling log files from a manageability point of view  with System Diagnostics simply use VisualBasic Logging FileLogTraceListener    Availability again depends on the system  If you are only talking about files then for a server service  rolling files can just be accessed when necessary   Windows Event Log or Database Application Logs would have their own access mechanisms    If you don t have easy access to the file system  then debug tracing to a database may be easier   i e  implement a database TraceListener    One interesting solution I saw for a Windows GUI application was that it logged very detailed tracing information to a  flight recorder  whilst running and then when you shut it down if it had no problems then it simply deleted the file   If  however it crashed or encountered a problem then the file was not deleted  Either if it catches the error  or the next time it runs it will notice the file  and then it can take action  e g  compress it  e g  7zip  and email it or otherwise make available   Many systems these days incorporate automated reporting of failures to a central server  after checking with users  e g  for privacy reasons      Viewing  Q  What tools to you use for viewing the logs   A  If you have multiple logs for different reasons then you will use multiple viewers   Notepad vi Notepad   or any other text editor is the basic for plain text logs   If you have complex operations  e g  activities with transfers  then you would  obviously  use a specialized tool like the Service Trace Viewer   But if you don t need it  then a text editor is easier    As I generally log high level information to the Windows Event Log  then it provides a quick way to get an overview  in a structured manner  look for the pretty error warning icons   You only need to start hunting through text files if there is not enough in the log  although at least the log gives you a starting point   At this point  making sure your logs have co-ordinated entires becomes useful    Generally the Windows Event Log also makes these significant events available to monitoring tools like MOM or OpenView   Others --  If you log to a Database it can be easy to filter and sort informatio  e g  zoom in on a particular activity id   With text files you can use Grep PowerShell or similar to filter on the partiular GUID you want   MS Excel  or another spreadsheet program   This can be useful for analysing structured or semi-structured information if you can import it with the right delimiters so that different values go in different columns   When running a service in debug test I usually host it in a console application for simplicity I find a colored console logger useful  e g  red for errors  yellow for warnings  etc   You need to implement a custom trace listener   Note that the framework does not include a colored console logger or a database logger so  right now  you would need to write these if you need them  it s not too hard    It really annoys me that several frameworks  log4net  EntLib  etc  have wasted time re-inventing the wheel and re-implemented basic logging  filtering  and logging to text files  the Windows Event Log  and XML files  each in their own different way  log statements are different in each   each has then implemented their own version of  for example  a database logger  when most of that already existed and all that was needed was a couple more trace listeners for System Diagnostics  Talk about a big waste of duplicate effort   Q  If you are building an ASP NET solution  do you also use ASP NET Health Monitoring  Do you include trace output in the health monitor events  What about Trace axd   These things can be turned on off as needed  I find Trace axd quite useful for debugging how a server responds to certain things  but it s not generally useful in a heavily used environment or for long term tracing   Q  What about custom performance counters    For a professional application  especially a server service  I expect to see it fully instrumented with both Performance Monitor counters and logging to the Windows Event Log  These are the standard tools in Windows and should be used   You need to make sure you include installers for the performance counters and event logs that you use  these should be created at installation time  when installing as administrator   When your application is running normally it should not need have administration privileges  and so won t be able to create missing logs    This is a good reason to practice developing as a non-administrator  have a separate admin account for when you need to install services  etc   If writing to the Event Log   NET will automatically create a missing log the first time you write to it  if you develop as a non-admin you will catch this early and avoid a nasty surprise when a customer installs your system and then can t use it because they aren t running as administrator

User · Answer

What frameworks do you use   We use a mix of the logging application block  and a custom logging helper that works around the  Net framework bits  The LAB is configured to output fairly extensive log files included seperate general trace files for service method entry exit and specific error files for unexpected issues  The configuration includes date time  thread  pId etc  for debug assistance as well as the full exception detail and stack  in the case of an unexpected exception    The custom logging helper makes use of the Trace Correlation and is particularly handy in the context of logging in WF  For example we have a state machine that invokes a series of sequential workflows  At each of these invoke activities we log the start  using StartLogicalOperation  and then at the end we stop the logical operation with a gereric return event handler    This has proven useful a few times when attempting to debug failures in complex business sequences as it allows us to determine things like If Else branch decisions etc  more quickly based on the activity execution sequence   What log outputs do you use   We use text files and XML files  Text files are configured through the app block but we ve got XML outputs as well from our WF service  This enables us to capture the runtime events  persistence etc   as well as generic business type exceptions  The text files are rolling logs that are rolled by day and size  I believe total size of 1MB is a rollover point     What tools to you use for viewing the logs   We are using Notepad and WCF Service Trace Viewer depending on which output group we re looking at  The WCF Service Trace Viewer is really really handy if you ve got your output setup correctly and can make reading the output much simpler  That said  if I know roughly where the error is anyway - just reading a well annotated text file is good as well    The logs are sent to a single directory which is then split into sub-dirs based on the source service  The root dir is exposed via a website which has it s access controlled by a support user group  This allows us to take a look at production logs without having to put in requests and go through lengthy red tape processes for production data

User · Answer

I don t often develop in asp net  however when it comes to loggers I think a lot of best practices are universal  Here are some of my random thoughts on logging that I have learned over the years   Frameworks   Use a logger abstraction framework - like slf4j  or roll your own   so that you decouple the logger implementation from your API  I have seen a number of logger frameworks come and go and you are better off being able to adopt a new one without much hassle  Try to find a framework that supports a variety of output formats  Try to find a framework that supports plugins   custom filters  Use a framework that can be configured by external files  so that your customers   consumers can tweak the log output easily so that it can be read by commerical log management applications with ease  Be sure not to go overboard on custom logging levels  otherwise you may not be able to move to different logging frameworks    Logger Output   Try to avoid XML RSS style logs for logging that could encounter catastrophic failures  This is important because if the power switch is shut off without your logger writing the closing  lt  xxx gt  tag  your log is broken  Log threads  Otherwise  it can be very difficult to track the flow of your program  If you have to internationalize your logs  you may want to have a developer only log in English  or your language of choice   Sometimes having the option to insert logging statements into SQL queries can be a lifesaver in debugging situations  Such as        -- Invoking Class  com foocorp foopackage FooClass 9021     SELECT   FROM foo    You want class-level logging  You normally don t want static instances of loggers as well - it is not worth the micro-optimization  Marking and categorizing logged exceptions is sometimes useful because not all exceptions are created equal  So knowing a subset of important exceptions a head of time is helpful  if you have a log monitor that needs to send notifications upon critical states  Duplication filters will save your eyesight and hard disk  Do you really want to see the same logging statement repeated 10 10000000 times  Wouldn t it be better just to get a message like  This is my logging statement - Repeated 100 times   Also see this question of mine

User · Answer

As far as aspect oriented logging is concerned I was recommended PostSharp on another SO question -   Aspect Oriented Logging with Unity T4 anything else  The link provided in the answer is worth visiting if you are evaluating logging frameworks

User · Answer

I m not qualified to comment on logging for  Net  since my bread and butter is Java  but we ve had a migration in our logging over the last 8 years you may find a useful analogy to your question   We started with a Singleton logger that was used by every thread within the JVM  and set the logging level for the entire process   This resulted in huge logs if we had to debug even a very specific part of the system  so lesson number one is to segment your logging   Our current incarnation of the logger allows multiple instances with one defined as the default   We can instantiate any number of child loggers that have different logging levels  but the most useful facet of this architecture is the ability to create loggers for individual packages and classes by simply changing the logging properties   Lesson number two is to create a flexible system that allows overriding its behavior without changing code   We are using the Apache commons-logging library wrapped around Log4J   Hope this helps     Edit    After reading Jeffrey Hantin s post below  I realized that I should have noted what our internal logging wrapper has actually become   It s now essentially a factory and is strictly used to get a working logger using the correct properties file  which for legacy reasons hasn t been moved to the default position    Since you can specify the logging configuration file on command line now  I suspect it will become even leaner and if you re starting a new application  I d definitely agree with his statement that you shouldn t even bother wrapping the logger

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