Choosing a logging protocol

Question

I am currently doing some upgrades to our very simple logging library, and I am thinking of implementing some standardized logging protocol in order to use existing tools for storing and viewing the logs. The only thing that came to mind was syslog. This seems to be a bit of overkill for my application though. Here are my requirements (in no specific order):

• tool support for Windows - most importantly viewing log-files with filtering, some kind of logging daemon is a nice-to-have.
• filtering should be done by two criteria: the message type (e.g.: error, warning, debug) and the component that sent the message

Is there any simple tool/protocol for that meets these requirements and is not overly complex?

EDIT I am writing native C++ on Windows XP.

Answer 1

Heavily depends on your requirements. However, the windows event log comes to mind. Either use the Win32 API or the .NET library, depending on what tool/language your logging library is using. Using the event viewer you can view log files, filter them, remotely view them, do correlation to other events, etc.

If your logging library can make use of .NET then also have a look at log4net. It's free and it logs in any format to almost anything you can possibly imagine. You can keep it simple or get as sophisticated as you like. Filtering can be done based on what logger and format you've used, e.g. could be Excel, a database, CSV, XML, etc.

I'm sure these are not the only options. I suggest these as I have used both in practice and they would be my recommendation on Windows / .NET.

Answer 2

You haven't mentioned which development tool you are using, but if it's .NET, Java or Delphi, you might want to look into SmartInspect, which supports various logging protocols and comes with a viewer application. It also comes with an optional log server/daemon.

Answer 3

For now I have discarded the idea of using a logging-daemon (this can be added later if actually needed). I am now using a custom logging format combined with the Kiwi Log Viewer. For the simple case in our application this is completely sufficient (also this viewer is quite powerful).