What is Bootstrap logging? - c#

I'm exploring the serilog in asp.net core and come across the word bootstrap logging. I tried to find out more about it but there is nothing.
Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
.WriteTo.Console()
.CreateBootstrapLogger();
I got this syntax for initializing the bootstrap logger but didn't get the reason for using it.

Bootstrap logging is a way for logging messages during the early phases of an application's startup, before the main logging infrastructure has been fully initialized.
The startup process in .NET Core applications includes various stages, such as loading and initializing the program, establishing the application's dependencies, and configuring the logging infrastructure. During these early phases, it may be required to log messages for diagnostic or troubleshooting purposes.
Bootstrap logging, which allows you to log messages to a temporary storage destination (such as the console or a memory buffer) before the main logging infrastructure is fully configured, is one approach to accomplish this. This is handy if you need to log messages before the application's dependencies are configured, or if you need to troubleshoot issues that may arise during the application's startup.

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Azure Service fault logs in C# application

I am using different azure service,(Kuberentes cluster,API,Key vault,IOT HUB, ,cosmos db,storage account,datalake,ad b2c,Power BI).I want the failure message and time of these service in my c# (other any other language)application. Is there any api for this purpose ?.or any way to get failure message and time ?
Failure means
failure state or non responding state of azure service.
I just want the any failure or fault message.Not normal message and service message.i didn't find any such kind filter or rest api or type
Since you are already using multiple Azure Services your best bet would be to integrate your application with Azure Application Insights. Application Insights is a monitoring and diagnostics tool provided by Azure. Configuring Application Insights is extremely easy. You can check this link.
Depending upon your framework and choice of language there are multiple options. Once you have installed the Application Insights SDK in your solution, it will automatically start monitoring and reporting all failures. All external dependencies in your application will get automatically tracked and all failures will be logged automatically (in 90% of the scenarios you won't have to write custom code to track these errors). Other parameters like time and failure messages will also get logged. In case you are interested to check which Azure Services are monitored check the link here.
Along with this you will also get the option to log custom messages, events, metrics, exceptions or dependencies.
I don't know the exact purpose of your question ,But if you want to check the service is available or not (failed due to some internal issue of azure) then use resource health check.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-health/resource-health-faq
If you want to monitor azure services then you must create a diagnostic setting for each azure service to send its logs to log analytics workspace to use with an azure monitor or for archiving you can use Azure storage archive tier/cool tier or Azure Event hubs to forward outside of Azure(like configuring with Kafka).
For more information visit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/

Logging web services operations behind load balancer

I developed some web services will be installed on 4 different servers behind a load balancer mantains sessions.
I'm using c# and log4net.
The appenders are a RollingFileAppender and an AdoNetAppender.
I read from https://logging.apache.org/log4net/release/faq.html (section How do I get multiple process to log to the same file?)
If you use RollingFileAppender things become even worse as several
process may try to start rolling the log file concurrently.
RollingFileAppender completely ignores the locking model when rolling
files, rolling files is simply not compatible with this scenario.
I can't use RollingFileAppender with MinimalLock. But I want to log from the different servers to the same file.
I prefer to keep log4net but I'm interested also in other solution (not the linux syslog one). No commercial solutions allowed for costs.
Unfortunately, you'll discover that logging directly to the same file from multiple processes is not a very feasible option.
You have several alternatives:
Log to different files - each server can have a separate file
Send all your logs to one application, which will then log to the files. This will make your logging more brittle and require extra development effort.
Log to a database - databases are designed to have multiple processes writing to them at once
Log to a logging server - Seq, Stackify Retrace, and Azure Application Insights are some examples of solutions that are robust and designed to ingest logs from multiple applications - plus you get much better capabilities

Best way to read error messages from a Log4Net log file

I would like to display the log created by Log4Net on a web page in my admin interface.
Isnt there any methods available in the log4net library to read the error messages from the configured source (textfile or database)? At the moment I am using a database table to log all errors.
If not, there must be some third party libraries available that does this for me?
If you want an elegant solution to collect and search logs using log4net based logging, a syslog daemon like kiwi syslog in combination with log4net local or remote syslog appender would probably be the easiest way to do it. Logging in a database works, but in my opinion logs are of no concern to the application itself and should be kept away from it. For instance a failing database connection would probably not show up if the logs resided solely on the same database.

Live Trace Enable/Disable NLog

I am using NLog for production tracing of a large application. I am looking for a simple add in that allows me to remotely enable/disable various loggers / change their severity at the source during run time.
Are there any easy addins to do this? Do other frameworks support such things?
Update: To be clear, I am starting with logging turned off at startup, but would like to use my log viewer to remotely tell my application to begin sending trace information for particular loggers to log events of severity X or higher. Obviously I can write this myself, just looking for any libraries / logging frameworks that may have this built in.
Severity of log messages cannot be changed dynamic. The idea in NLog is not to change the severity of a message, but the routing of those messages.
If you enabled configuration auto-reload, you could turn off writing the trace messages, and enabled it when you need with (without application restart)

How would you centralize configuration across multiple projects?

I have a solution with about 10 projects with read-only config. They are web applications, windows services, console apps, etc. All projects except for one are on the same server. Each project has 3 environments - dev, test, and production. So there are 30 different sets of configuration, each one with a decent number of settings. It's cumbersome to keep the config consistent across every app and environment.
I've noticed most of the configuration is common across each project, so I was thinking it would be good to centralize the config in some way. I read somewhere that a WCF service might be a good approach. I thought maybe a library containing a hard-coded static class might actually work OK - despite having to compile to change config. Ideally the config should come out of an actual .config file.
How would you go about centralizing config for multiple projects?
If you want to maintain the standard configuration interface, take a look at the ProtectedConfigurationProvider. This provider lets you store your configuration data outside of a standard configuration file, encrypt it however you like, or redirect requests for configuration in any way you see fit:
Redirecting Configuration with a Custom Provider - Wrox
Implementing a Protected Configuration Provider - MSDN
Protected Configuration - Blayd Software
The beauty of this approach is that nothing changes in your existing applications. They don't need to know where their configuration is stored. The retrieval of configuration data is isolated in the provider. You can store it in a central file, store it in a database, or access it via a web service. If you change your mind, you only have to update your provider. Everything else stays the same.
You could certainly set up a WCF service that has a simple operation to retrieve configuration settings, taking in the application and environment as a parameter; you could then have the service load up the correct config from a file and return it to the caller. It might be a good idea to do nested configuration files, so that common settings are only defined once at their most generic level.
A potential issue could arise if the WCF service is down when starting up one of your apps -- you would need to decide if there is default config/caching of the previous copy for this situation, or if you just don't allow apps to start up if they cannot connect.
Another thing to consider, though, is the benefit of .config files in .NET in that when they change the app can respond; you may want to have a callback WCF service that notifies clients if their configuration has been updated on the central server, so they can request a new copy and update themselves if necessary.
Since they are (almost) all on the same server you could consider providing defaults in the machine.config and/or central web.config files. I'm not normally a fan of using/changing these file but they are there... in \Windows\Micsrosoft.NET\Framework<version>\Config\
You can use a centralized configuration sever like Lygeum which permits to manage applications and environments through web console or Command Line Interface with user management and client management module, clients may be in your case web apps, console services or whatever. The server installation is simple through docker.

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