What logging is good logging for your app?

Question

So we\'ve discussed logging in passing at my place of work and I was wondering if some of you guys here could give me some ideas of your approaches?

Typically our scenar

Answer 1

Being an admin, I really appreciate apps that log to the Event Log (preferably their own, otherwise the application log) for all logging but trace logs. By logging to the event log, you make it much more likely that warnings or errors can be found and addressed by the admin staff before they become a major problem (if it is a issue they can address), or allows them to get in contact with the devs, who can use the trace logs to further troubleshoot the issue.

My biggest pain point in supporting a custom .NET app right now is that there are 8 different applications (some console apps, some winforms, and some web) from the same vendor. None of them log to the event log, they all have their own custom log files. But for all the winforms and console apps, they keep the file open while they are running, so I can't monitor it for issues. Also, the logs are all written slightly differently, so I would have to parse them a bit differently to get useful information.

This forces me to monitor the appearance of an application (is it responding on the ports it is active on, is the process working set getting too high, etc..), rather than what the state of the application really is.

Please, please consider the folks who maintain your application after it is deployed and provide logging they can use. Thanks!