Please recommend a good debug logging framework for ASP.NET with a good viewer.

Question

First of all - I've seen this question, but mine is a bit different.

What I need is some framework for logging debug information. This information will NOT be present in production environment. It will be used for tracking down performance problems and other generic bugs. Especially for performance problems, so it will be used a lot together with load testing.

Therefore I expect that the logs will have a lot of messages and going through them by hand to find the slow ones is NOT an option.

At first I thought of using the build in Trace facilities of ASP.NET. They even have this great tool which would be perfect for my needs. Unfortunately, it seems that the ASP.NET trace is fundamentally flawed and cannot be relied upon, especially under heavy load. :(

So now I need something else, and it should come with a good analysis tool. Anything you could recommend?

Answer 1

Visual Studio Test Edition comes with a lot of what you're talking about. You could also look into using ANTS from RedGate to profile for performance bottlenecks.

If price is a barrier you'll probably want to go with log4net.

There are a couple parsers for log4net out there.

Answer 2

Log4Net is a common logging framework used in FOSS projects.

Other good tools are using Enterprise Library logging and global exception handling (this is useful even in production environments to have.)

Answer 3

I would recommend log4Net aswell, you can configure it to use several output types, so you can exactly configure how you like your logs to be created.

Answer 4

I'd also recommend Log4net. You can configure it to output messages to log files, database, etc. If you're looking for a good viewer, you can set up the UdpAppender, and then use a tool like Chainsaw to read the log messages. It's Java based though, so if you really want to avoid it, you could also try Log4net Viewer.

For more information and details on how to set things up, check out Using Chainsaw with Log4net.

Answer 5

You might want to take a look at our logging tool SmartInspect, as it comes with a quite powerful log viewer with filtering capabilities among other things. It also includes example projects for ASP.NET.