All of my users are a short walk down the hall, and all of my programs run on workstations on the same LAN. Some years ago, I had the staff write the log files for all of their programs to a shared folder hierarchy, naming each log file after the machine name in a sub-directory named after the app.
But this arrangement wasn’t that great, since if the file server went down then none of the programs anywhere could write logs. Yet keeping logs local to each workstation would make it a pain in the ass to read them whenever we had to debug a problem.
We tried making a DNS alias for the logging fileserver so we could point it to a backup machine when necessary, but DNS aliases don’t work with Windows file shares.
Putting the path to the shared log folder in each program isn’t great–even if it’s field configurable–because we have dozens of programs on dozens of machines.
We’ve also looked into using Microsoft’s distributed file system, but the price is ridiculous.
I’d like a way to gather the logging for many programs on the local network into one place so I can tail and analyze them without paying a visit to the remote machine. We use .Net for all our programs.
Edit: I’d like to avoid setting up a file-share on each user’s workstation, or solutions that trawl for logs each night, since I want to be able to read fresh logs on demand, or moments after a problem is reported.
You can use MSMQ. Write your logs to a MSMQ queue, and then have a service that picks these logs up and puts them in a database or out to a file in a central location if you want. It wouldn’t be instantaneous, but you could tell it to run whenever you want to get new log entries. Plus it would be reliable since it uses MSMQ.