Windows service logging c#

Structured Logging became extremely popular for a reason. As applications grow in size, their logs are growing with it. We need more sophisticated tools to find logs, aggregate them according to context and analyze them. Structured logging gives us the means to do just that. That might include passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. But it also might include private information like preferences and usage patterns.

Although, according to your needs, perhaps this is exactly the kind of information you do want to log. You can then scrub the data , or avoid sending it altogether. My goal was for the reader to make sense of the abundance of available technologies and when to use which. Hopefully, this helped you to make sense of things and now you can research further on a more specific technology.

Tech to store logs, query logs and to visualize logs. The technologies described here are just to convey the types of solutions you can find. Want to become an expert problem solver? Check out a chapter from my book Practical Debugging for. NET Developers. I am novice programmer at. CreateLogger ;. It worked perfectly in debug; but in production there is no logs on my hosting.

You can use Asp. NET standard logger to log the current working directory. Something like log. Then, change the path to relative path. To see standard logger output in Asp. If you read the comments for that benchmark-article, then you will see that performance difference is because of a bug in LibLog. I have performed the performance test again with a LibLog version, where the bug has been fixed:.

If possible, then please update your article where the details about performance have been corrected. But yes Serilog is an awesome logging library, and been the inspiration for implementing support for message templates in NLog 4.

But using NLog myself because it performs less memory allocation than Serilog, which is important for my applications. There are other interesting differences between Serilog and NLog besides performance, and both perform very well. NLog has a really interesting, powerful, and extensible system of layout renderers, among many other useful things, while Serilog has all sorts of interesting structured data manipulation features not seen elsewhere, for example.

It would be cool to read more about these from a third-party perspective. Great article, Michael. Our team uses log4net with much success, however I agree that the configuration is pretty difficult — especially for customers.

Have you seen this library SteelToe from Microsoft. NET foundation. It handles tracing and logging with breeze for you. Yeah It is used mainly with cloud foundry but you can also use it equally well outside.

Good article, thank you. The process was very straight forward and writing custom enrichers and filters has extended the flexibility. The resulting Serilog extensions project had a fraction of the logic to achieve the same with Log4Net. We use a single configuration method that returns the Serilog.

Logger which is then setup with ILoggingBuilder. AddProvider, ultimately providing us DI loggers rather than reaching out to the Serilog singleton Log class.

Configure "myapplication. It was logging 15 times as much information as Log4Net was, which definitely was a performance slow down. This was resolved with targeted level overrides and filters. All of which are very easy to add. Logging, there are dedicated integrations that make it very easy to integrate it in your app. Thanks for the mention Bruno. Nice post! Just wanted to show you another way to compare the usage of the logging frameworks you mentioned.

We use the NuGet API to get the downloads of packages so we can display them in nice charts like that. Actually, Microsoft. Abstractions — , downloads per day System. TraceSource — 50, downloads per day. Being part of the framework, they are also used by the built in components, e. TraceSource, whilst newer like ASP. NET Core uses Extensions. This means if you want to include system logging and are using a custom framework you need to forward logs across. There is only one logging framework that dominates.

NET and that is Extensions. Abstractions, which has more downloads than all the others combined. Thanks for the tip. NET Core and the logging abstraction. Logging with Serilog as the backend. NET Core and integrates very well with the framework and extensions to it. But you can easily add Serilog which is far superior to MEL particularly because of the sinks to have it as the logging backend. Also worth noting the number of usages of MEL is much higher than what we can see on nugettrends.

NET Core runtime cache:. NET Core runtimes installed: Microsoft. All 2. All] … Microsoft. App 3. Specially now with. Skip to content Logging is a big part of software development for many years now. Logging Target Types When we say logging, we traditionally mean saving the message to a file. Here are some common logging targets to consider: A database. Logging to a database has many advantages You can retrieve the logs from anywhere, without access to the production machine.

You can easily search and extract statistics from the logs. This should be at the very end of our ExecuteAsync method. The stoppingToken is passed down to our ExecuteAsync method, and it is an instance of CancellationToken which will be cancelled when our service is requested to stop.

Remember that this code is headless no user interface at all , so we need a way to know what our code is executing, and that is done through logs. At the start of our method, we should load our WinML model, pretty much the same way we were doing before:. This creates a FileSystemWatcher instance that will hook up to some Windows events for us, and automatically raise the Created event whenever there is a new file created on the folder we are watching.

Notice that we are adding Filters to it, which are mapping to the extension filters coming from our new command line argument. We are waiting milliseconds 1 second , before we process the file. The FileSystemWatcher is attached to the Windows events, and is so fast that it will raise the Created event even before the file is closed by whichever process is still creating it.

We could have created a retry logic if we caught this specific exception but, again, this solution is a simplification, and will keep our code simple for this sample. The ProcessFileAsync method expects a full path to an image file and a confidence float, just like we had before. Notice that the folderName argument passed in our MoveFileToFolder method is the label with highest confidence, returned by our WinML classification model for that one specific image.

Therefore, we are moving that file inside a folder with its category name. The whole process is so fast that if you copy and paste an image file into the folder we are watching, it barely stays inside the folder, almost instantaneously being moved to a newly or existing folder. The next step is to 1 deploy this somewhere, 2 register our Windows Service, and 3 start it! The deployment step is very straight forward.

This will let you select where you want to publish it, and since this is a simple. NET5 console application, we can choose between a variety of places. Lets select a simple Folder. On the next step, just select Folder again and click Next.

On the last step, we need to select a path. Click on Finish to create the publish profile, and then on Publish to build our code and deploy it! You will see that all the files that we need are properly deployed in that folder, so we can now configure our service! Another way to publish your project is using the dotnet publish command. Windows Services are managed through a tool called Service Controller , a. Remember that you need admin privileges to create a service on Windows, so run an elevated command line to run these commands.

Notice that we are passing the binPath argument in quotes. We are passing our arguments to the executable right after the path, still inside the quotes, which will be handled by our implementation of the CommandLineParser. This means our service is created, but not yet running. To run it, lets call the SC command again, but now with different parameters:. If you never noticed, there is a Services tab:. Here is the folder before I do anything:. The instant I copy these files over to the Images folder, there will be an intentional one second delay, followed by a refresh of explorer showing all the images already classified:.

But how do we know how these files were classified? The answer is the Windows Events. When you open the Event Viewer you will see a tree view on the left side, that categorizes the events. In Solution Explorer , select Service1. Rename the file to MyNewService. A pop-up window appears asking whether you would like to rename all references to the code element Service1. In the Design tab, select Properties from the shortcut menu.

In this section, you add a custom event log to the Windows service. The EventLog component is an example of the type of component you can add to a Windows service. Define a custom event log.

Add a using statement to MyNewService. Diagnostics namespace:. In the code editor for MyNewService. Add code that writes an entry to the event log when the service starts:.

Because a service application is designed to be long-running, it usually polls or monitors the system, which you set up in the OnStart method. The OnStart method must return to the operating system after the service's operation has begun so that the system isn't blocked.

To set up a simple polling mechanism, use the System. Timer component. The timer raises an Elapsed event at regular intervals, at which time your service can do its monitoring.

You use the Timer component as follows:. Add the following code in the MyNewService. OnStart event to set up the polling mechanism:. Timers namespace:. Elapsed event:. In the MyNewService class, add a member variable. It contains the identifier of the next event to write into the event log:. Instead of running all your work on the main thread, you can run tasks by using background worker threads.

For more information, see System. Insert a line of code in the OnStop method that adds an entry to the event log when the service is stopped:. You can override the OnPause , OnContinue , and OnShutdown methods to define additional processing for your component.

Services report their status to the Service Control Manager so that a user can tell whether a service is functioning correctly. InteropServices namespace:.

Add the following code to MyNewService. Before you run a Windows service, you need to install it, which registers it with the Service Control Manager. Add installers to your project to handle the registration details. In the Design view, select the background area, then choose Add Installer from the shortcut menu. By default, Visual Studio adds a component class named ProjectInstaller , which contains two installers, to your project.

These installers are for your service and for the service's associated process. Add text to the Description property, such as A sample service. This text appears in the Description column of the Services window and describes the service to the user.

Add text to the DisplayName property. This text appears in the Display Name column of the Services window. This name can be different from the ServiceName property, which is the name the system uses for example, the name you use for the net start command to start your service.