Exception destructuring in Serilog

Question

Serilog has a convenient way of destructuring objects as shown in this example:

logger.Debug(exception, \"This is an {Exception} text\", exception);
logger.Debug         


        

Answer 1

Take a look at Serilog.Exceptions logs exception details and custom properties that are not output in Exception.ToString().

This library has custom code to deal with extra properties on most common exception types and only falls back to using reflection to get the extra information if the exception is not supported by Serilog.Exceptions internally.

Add the NuGet package and then add the enricher like so:

using Serilog;
using Serilog.Exceptions;

ILogger logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
    .Enrich.WithExceptionDetails()
    .WriteTo.Sink(new RollingFileSink(
        @"C:\logs",
        new JsonFormatter(renderMessage: true))
    .CreateLogger();

Your JSON logs will now be supplemented with detailed exception information and even custom exception properties. Here is an example of what happens when you log a DbEntityValidationException from EntityFramework (This exception is notorious for having deeply nested custom properties which are not included in the .ToString()).

try
{
    ...
}
catch (DbEntityValidationException exception)
{
    logger.Error(exception, "Hello World");
}

The code above logs the following:

{
  "Timestamp": "2015-12-07T12:26:24.0557671+00:00",
  "Level": "Error",
  "MessageTemplate": "Hello World",
  "RenderedMessage": "Hello World",
  "Exception": "System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbEntityValidationException: Message",
  "Properties": {
    "ExceptionDetail": {
      "EntityValidationErrors": [
        {
          "Entry": null,
          "ValidationErrors": [
            {
              "PropertyName": "PropertyName",
              "ErrorMessage": "PropertyName is Required.",
              "Type": "System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbValidationError"
            }
          ],
          "IsValid": false,
          "Type": "System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbEntityValidationResult"
        }
      ],
      "Message": "Validation failed for one or more entities. See 'EntityValidationErrors' property for more details.",
      "Data": {},
      "InnerException": null,
      "TargetSite": null,
      "StackTrace": null,
      "HelpLink": null,
      "Source": null,
      "HResult": -2146232032,
      "Type": "System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbEntityValidationException"
    },
    "Source": "418169ff-e65f-456e-8b0d-42a0973c3577"
  }
}

Serilog.Exceptions supports the .NET Standard and supports many common exception types without reflection but we'd like to add more, so please feel free to contribute.

Top Tip - Human Readable Stack Traces

You can use the Ben.Demystifier NuGet package to get human readable stack traces for your exceptions or the serilog-enrichers-demystify NuGet package if you are using Serilog.