Logging in .NET – Elastic Search, Kibana and Serilog

I’ve been using log4net in the past and I found it quite useful as it is ready to use out of the box. In my last workplace, we are using SPLUNK and its amazing as I’m able to troubleshoot production issue by looking at the trend and activities. You can do query based and filtering the log and build a pretty dashboard. Downside of it is the cost for Splunk is expensive (i don’t think its for the mainstream user or small business)

So I’ve found another logging mechanism/storage/tool which is amazing!! It is called Elastic Search and its open source (well there are different subscriptions level for better supports). Pretty much Elastic Search is the engine for search and analytics

How about the GUI/Dashboard?Yes you can use Kibana. It is an open source data visualization platform that allows you to interact with data

Ok, so lets say if I have a .NET, how do I write my log to Elastic Search?You can use SeriLog. It will allow you to log structured event data to your log and you can use Serilog Elastic Search sink to integrate with Elastic Search

Serilog has different sink providers that allow you to store your log externally (beside file) including SPLUNK

I will talk more about Serilog separately in different post, stay tune!