Question

I had considered logging to a database cluster using log4net (we currently in the process of outgrowing the use of log4net to log to a single database), but Scribe looked like a better solution, I’ve not had much success googling for alternatives, nor many examples of Scribe .net API’s/Interfaces.

We have multiple application servers with millions of hits each per day and the Scribe architecture of push to a central repository and let that do the time consuming activities seems like a logical way forward.

Does anyone know where I can find good scribe examples for .Net, and are there any alternative scalable, distributed logging options I should be considering?

Answer 1

I can’t help you with Scribe, so maybe my answer will be not helpful or even pointless.

I try to give our variant to

and are there any alternative scalable, distributed logging options I
should be considering?

In our project we are using NLog with similar goals. You don’t give much details about required scalability so I can’t decide is it suitable for you too.

NLog is compatible at source code level with log4net. I mean it requires small code changes to adapt your existing log4net logging code to log via NLog.

Take a look to supported Targets. You can use Network Target as is or write your own (it’s pretty simple) to communicate with mentioned Scribe if you decided to use it.

You can use Log2Console‘s source code as receiver example.

I can’t give ready to use log server solution (except for commercials such as Gibraltar), but you can write your own as we done.

Personally I would not recommend to use direct database logging capabilities of any logging system (including log4net, NLog and etc.). Better provide additional level which will communicate with log providers (e.g. via network), aggregate data and do batch updates to database (log files) as it done in Scribe. It can increase overall performance of logging subsystem.