Monitor your Applications with Kibana

Kibana is the powerful search interface of Elasticsearch. Depending on how many log messages you need to store you can run both tools locally or in the cloud. Today you will learn how you can install Kibana and what possibilities it has to monitor your applications. This post is part of the Improve Your Log …

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Elasticsearch as a Sink for Serilog

When multiple systems continuously produce log messages they accumulate quickly. In combination with a longer retention time we easily talk about millions of log messages that need to be stored and searched. A single System like Seq will reach its limits and we need a bigger, more scalable solution. Elasticsearch is such a system, which …

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Debugging Serilog

When you play with different configurations for Serilog or try to add another sink you may run into problems. If you are out of luck your application crashes without the slightest notice – Serilog silently eats it’s own errors. In such cases you have to dig a little deeper into Serilog to find out what’s …

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Seq as a Sink for Serilog

As I explained in the last posts, log messages are not just strings but have an inner meaning. When we use Serilog to write structured log messages we make them explicit to query them later. The tool we want to use to search for a specific orderId should give us this capability without the need …

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RavenDB as a Sink for Serilog

As I explained in the last post, creating JSON documents with Serilog is easy. But to make something useful with the log messages we must be able to query them. When I think about storing JSON documents then RavenDB is the first system that comes to my mind. RavenDB was the topic of many posts …

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Structured Logging with Serilog

As a .Net developer you can choose from a variety of logging frameworks. All are more or less built to mitigate the shortcomings of the built in tracing framework. While System.Diagnostics.Trace has some helpful concepts, it misses many basic features most other logging frameworks can offer out of the box. Serilog is not just another …

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The Missed Opportunities of Log Files

Log files could be a great place to find the answer on what went wrong in our applications. They should contain all the necessary information to understand the state of the application before and while the error happened. Instead most log files are giant collections of data without much structure and even less meaning. What …

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The Maintenance Developer Myth

As a little distraction from writing I was procrastinating on Hacker News and Reddit. The blog post “Why are we interviewing Developers by asking Architect questions?” caught my attention and got me thinking about the term “maintenance developer”. Those mythical species of developers who are so insisting that their work is so fundamentally different from …

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