Question

In a semi-critical .NET service application, what would be a good strategy for raising application events that could be monitored by network administration tools? The events would be for errors, status changes, and possibly other notifications.

My company is planning to use some kind of tool down the road to monitor all critical machines and services. As of right now they are using Spice Works to do some monitoring but it is not known if they will keep this down the road.

By strategy I mean, perhaps using some sort of protocol ( my network admin has mentioned SNMP), perhaps a service such as windows event log. I have no idea what is available, so I’m leaving the options open.

With that in mind, here is a list of preferences I came up with:

1. Somewhat easy to use with .NET.
2. Reliability
3. Should work well with a variety of admin monitoring tools
4. Works with non – windows monitoring tools
5. Works with Spice Works

Answer 1

Use the EventLog It’s the standard Windows way of reporting events, easy to use in .NET. It’s well known and well supported, Spice Works has good support for it.