Unified logging/tracing documentation

[MichalPavlik]

Hi, I read very interesting discussion (#332) and I have the same feelings as @cwe1ss because there is another new project - Microsoft Diagnostics EventFlow. It's confusing to have more libraries with similar purpose.

The relevant articles about these libraries, principles, features and guidelines are fragmented on different places such as MS Docs, GitHub issues/wiki, blog posts etc. For example, we use EventSource because it's very powerful, fast, semantic and implements activities which is indispensable feature in distributed environment. Unfortunately you can find most useful EventSource/ETW articles on @vancem blog. Don't get me wrong, these articles are really great, but I would expect to read something like this on docs.microsoft.com (with another logging/tracing technologies).

I strongly believe that bring all information to one place (maybe here) would minimize the confusion. It could be described relation between instrumentation, logging, tracing and profiling concepts. It could also be described the standard pipeline: abstraction/interface -> event producer -> event transport (out-of-proc scenario) -> event listener -> sink. Then it could be described which libraries implements particular components in this pipeline (or introduce some feature matrix).

ILogger

• Introduction to Logging in ASP.NET Core
• Guidelines

EventSource

• Windows high speed logging: ETW in C#/.NET using System.Diagnostics.Tracing.EventSource
• Introduction Tutorial: Logging ETW events in C#: System.Diagnostics.Tracing.EventSource
• ETW in C#: Controlling which events get logged in an System.Diagnostics.Tracing.EventSource
• Why doesn’t my EventSource produce any events?
• Exploring EventSource Activity (correlation and causation) Features
• Rich Payload Data in EventSource V4.6
• Dynamically Defined Events in EventSource V4.6

EventSource (LTTng specific)

• .NET Cross-Plat Performance and Eventing Design
• Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core on Linux

DiagnosticSource

• Logging using DiagnosticSource in ASP.NET Core
• DiagnosticSource Users Guide

[muratg]

@Rick-Anderson @tdykstra @danroth27 What do you guys think?

[danroth27]

@glennc do you have a recommendation here?

[Vlaaaaaaad]

There is a very clear need for centralized information, especially for tracing( including OS and platform restrictions as some stuff only works on say Azure).

[veikkoeeva]

I noticed a great article I think could be of interest to those going through the useful list enumerate by @MichalPavlik. Windows Event Forwarding for Network Defense, and with it Use Windows Event Forwarding to help with intrusion detection.

[veikkoeeva]

I noticed some colleagues bumping in this and poking more into #708 and https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/18114, so I'll cross-reference as for a background story what could go into the documentation. I.e. why there are separate APIs and how to move in this space.

[MichalPavlik]

Thanks @veikkoeeva, it's really interesting. In the meantime I found another log storage - CLFS, so there are more possibilities than I thought :)

[veikkoeeva]

Adding here for the benefit of others: https://github.com/Microsoft/ApplicationInsights-dotnet-server/issues/913.

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