Question

I have an azure worker role which I have configured to use a log4net Trace Appender which writes to WindowsAzure.Diagnostics. This is done by making the following calls in the RoleEntryPoint of the worker role.

using System;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics;
using log4net.Config;

namespace XXX
{
    public class WorkerRole : RoleEntryPoint
    {
        public override bool OnStart()
        {
            var config = DiagnosticMonitor.GetDefaultInitialConfiguration();

            config.Logs.ScheduledTransferLogLevelFilter = LogLevel.Warning;
            config.Logs.ScheduledTransferPeriod = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5);

            config.WindowsEventLog.DataSources.Add("System!*");
            config.WindowsEventLog.DataSources.Add("Application!*");
            config.WindowsEventLog.ScheduledTransferLogLevelFilter = LogLevel.Error;
            config.WindowsEventLog.ScheduledTransferPeriod = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5);

            DiagnosticMonitor.Start("Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString", config);

        XmlConfigurator.Configure();
        }
    }
}

The App.config file is configured in the following manner:

<log4net>
    <appender name="TraceAppender" type="log4net.Appender.TraceAppender">
        <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
            <conversionPattern value="%logger - %message" />
        </layout>
    </appender>
    <root>
        <level value="ALL" />
        <appender-ref ref="TraceAppender" />
    </root>
</log4net>

<system.diagnostics>
    <trace>
        <listeners>
            <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.7.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiagnostics">
                <filter type="" />
            </add>
        </listeners>
    </trace>
</system.diagnostics>

The result of this is that all messages (even errors) are logged in table storage as “verbose” level.

How to fix this?

Answer 1

A couple of blog posts deal with this issue: (here and here)

• It turns out that the log4net TraceAppender converts all log messages
  to Trace.Write messages and that the DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener converts all Trace.Write messages to verbose.

The answer in my case was to use Pete McEvoy’s solution and extend the TraceAppender in the following manner:

using System.Diagnostics;
using log4net.Appender;
using log4net.Core;
namespace XXX.Logging
{
    public class AzureTraceAppender : TraceAppender
    {
        protected override void Append(LoggingEvent loggingEvent)
        {
            var level = loggingEvent.Level;
            var message = RenderLoggingEvent(loggingEvent);

            if (level >= Level.Error)
              Trace.TraceError(message);
            else if (level >= Level.Warn)
              Trace.TraceWarning(message);
            else if (level >= Level.Info)
              Trace.TraceInformation(message);
            else
              Trace.WriteLine(message);
            if (ImmediateFlush)
              Trace.Flush();
        }
    }
}

This extension was then implemented in my App.config:

<log4net>
    <appender name="AzureTraceAppender" type="XXX.Logging.AzureTraceAppender">
        <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
            <conversionPattern value="%logger - %message" />
        </layout>
    </appender>
    <root>
        <level value="ALL" />
        <appender-ref ref="AzureTraceAppender" />
    </root>
</log4net>