Overview

These notes discuss the differences between logging and tracing and the differences between the many logging APIs available in .NET.

Logging vs. Tracing

Both logging and tracing serve as a record of interesting events that occur while a program is running.

• Logging is expected to be collected all the time and should have low overhead.
  • Unstructured logging yields log entries that have free-form text content.
  • Structured logging yields log entries with well-defined schema and can be encoded in different machine-readable formats.
• Tracing is usually more invasive and collects more information and should be collected for short periods of time.
• Distributed tracing collects high-level activity and timing data for request-based systems and correlates the requests across services to give a holistic view of the system.

Also:

• Sinks are logging destinations. Many logging APIs have pre-built sinks.

.NET Logging APIs

ILogger

The best default choice:

• Supports structured logging
• Flexible configuration
• Contains a common sinks
• Serves as a facade over 3rd-party implementations

EventSource

An order, high-performance tracing API with structured logging:

• Integrates with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)
• Extended to support EventPipe for cross-platform tracing and EventListener for custom sinks
• Fewer built-in logging sinks than ILogger
• No configuration file support

Trace

Includes System.Diagnostics.Trace and System.Diagnostics.Debug:

• Legacy
• Best used for .NET Framework (not .NET Core)

comparison

Specialized .NET Logging APIs

Console

Uses System.Console’s Write and WriteLine methods:

• No structured logging support
• Not flexible
• No configuration file support
• No sink support
• Best used with ILogger or Trace APIs with a console sink

DiagnosticSource

System.Diagnostic.DiagnosticSource is for logging where messages will be analyzed synchronously and not persisted to storage:

• Allows source and listener to exchange .NET objects as messages
• Very fast if listener implemented correctly (tens of nanoseconds)

EventLog

System.Diagnostics.EventLog is for logging to the Windows Event Log:

• Use ILogger with an optional EventLog sink.

Tracing (Debug & Trace)

Use methods in the System.Diagnostics.Debug class to print debugging information and check logic with assertions.
Customize Debug and Trace output by adding a System.Diagnostics.TraceListener to the System.Diagnostics.Listeners collection.

• The Listeners collection is shared by both Debug and Trace.

If using Visual Studio:

• The DEBUG conditional compilation symbol is defined for debug builds
• The TRACE symbol is defined for both debug and release builds.

This means that, by default, debugging is enabled on debug builds, and debugging and tracing is enabled on both debug and release builds.

If not using Visual Studio, debugging and tracing need to be enabled manually.

System.Diagnostics.Debug is type safe.

Example [ Documentation]

public static void Main(string[] args)
{
  // Remove the original default trace listener.
  Trace.Listeners.RemoveAt(0);

  // Create and add a new default trace listener.
  DefaultTraceListener defaultListener = new DefaultTraceListener();
  Trace.Listeners.Add(defaultListener);

  // Assign the log file specification from the command line, if entered.
  if (args.Length>=2)
  {
    defaultListener.LogFileName = args[1];
  }

TextWriterTraceListener [ Documentation]

Directs tracing or debugging output to a TextWriter or a Stream. Implements IDisposable.

public static int Main(string[] args) 
{
    // Create a file for output named TestFile.txt.
    Stream myFile = File.Create("TestFile.txt");

    /* Create a new text writer using the output stream, and add it to the trace listeners. */
    TextWriterTraceListener myTextListener = new TextWriterTraceListener(myFile);
    Trace.Listeners.Add(myTextListener);

    // Write output to the file.
    Trace.Write("Test output ");

    // Flush the output.
    Trace.Flush();

    return 0;
}