I work on some ASP.NET projects in collaboration with other developpers and I’m thinking about building a homemade logging solution. But before starting anything I would like to know if something similar to what I’m intended to code already exists.
I’m looking for a tool, framework or whatever, that can be used to create a logging webservice.
The service will be reachable by all our websites. It offers a set of methods to send logging information to the service which will store them in a database. We can imagine a method named “Trace(String message, TraceLevel level)” where the first argument can be an XML string containing a set of structured useful information (error, debug or access).
One interesting feature will be that people can subscribe to a set of logs. For example, if I’m working on a “AnotherStackOverlow.com” project and I want to receive error logs, I can easily subscribe to the system choosing the corresponding TraceLevel.
Has anyone already used a system like this?
I’m also interested in general comments about security issues, coding issues, design problems and so on.
Thanks
In my opinion, doing logging through a web service is a very bad idea. You are relying on a connection between machines that may or may not be there which is going to lead to lost data.
I would take a look at Elmah which is a fairly easy ASP.NET logging tool to use.
You can have Elmah do the logging for you. You can then write a separate application to aggregate all of the log data (which is pretty trivial if you configure Elmah to log to a database) so that it can be viewed from a single location.