.NET Logging in the microservices world

In this article I’ll take a deep dive into logging in the world of Microservices. Logging is one of the central aspects in a Microservices application. Through logging you understand how the application is behaving, which service is causing the others to go down, and what caused a specific error in one of the services. So in the next paragraphs, I’ll go through the lifecycle of adding logging to a microservices application. Starting with the simple solutions, to facing the real-world challenges.

This article is part of a series for Making .NET Core more friendly to Microservices.

Getting started with a .NET library for logging

This usually is the first thing that comes to your mind. Let’s get NLog or Serilog to do all the logging especially with all the different targets they support. They must be a future proof solution that will nail any situation we may encounter. But logging is one of the aspects that needs to be present in all services. And Microservices architecture encourage the use of multiple technologies in different services. For example, even if most of your development teams are using .NET or Node.JS, you probably will end up having a different technology in the mix. Like when you need to incorporate AI or Machine Learning which usually gets built using Python, or when you use one of the open source components/containers being NGINX, Istio or even Kubernetes itself, those being built using C++ or Go. Bottom line is that you will end up having a mix…