cdmdotnet.Logging vs log4net

Log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. In case of problems with an application, it is helpful to enable logging so that the problem can be located. With log4net it is possible to enable logging at runtime without modifying the application binary. The log4net package is designed so that log statements can remain in shipped code without incurring a high performance cost. It follows that the speed of logging (or rather not logging) is crucial. At the same time, log output can be so voluminous that it quickly becomes overwhelming. One of the distinctive features of log4net is the notion of hierarchical loggers. Using these loggers it is possible to selectively control which log statements are output at arbitrary granularity. log4net is designed with two distinct goals in mind: speed and flexibility.

This logging library makes large use of enterprise correlation. In a lot of applications that incorporate various small and large services, it is often important to correlate events that happen across these services. It gives us a business workflow view of the various events that happen in the application, its components and services. This library provide operation and activity ID management and propagation. The main difference with this library over other is that you can configure each type of log separately. You can enable fatal, error, warning, debugging, informational, progress and sensitive data logging all independently of each other. This is more flexible than the concept of minimum level logging, such as that in log4net or serilog e.g. enabling one warning in this libraries will enable error and fatal logging as well. This library allows you to set those settings independently of each other. The SqlLogger maps AdditionalData to table columns, where the key of the dictionary entry is the column name and the value is serialised to JSON as the column value. MetaData is serialised to a single JSON value stored in the MetaData column. This means you can store data such as a User ID or Job ID in a separate column so you can filter more efficiently with indexes and partitions. TraceLogger and ConsoleLogger both seralise and format all information into a single string. The MultiLogger allows you to configure several different loggers to be used at once with different settings for each logger. Usage is in the form of: static void Main() {   ICorrelationIdHelper correlationIdHelper = new WebCorrelationIdHelper();   // This value will be set automatically to all logs within this thread... so long as System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Factory.StartNew is used.   correlationIdHelper.SetCorrelationId(Guid.NewGuid());   DoSyncWork();   DoAsyncWork(); } static void DoSyncWork() {   ILogger logger = new SqlLogger();   logger.LogDebug("Some technical debugging details."); } static void DoAsyncWork() {   System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Factory.StartNew(() => {     ILogger logger = new ConsoleLogger();     logger.LogInfo("An informative message.");   }); } This package installs cdmdotnet.Logging.dll with includes core logging functionality. Other packages depend on cdmdotnet.Logging for specific implementations.