#43 Logging Is Hot Again

If you think logging is boring, stop yawning and think again. Designed for the ages of monolithic synchronous applications running in data centers or on the desktop, traditional text-file-oriented logging frameworks such as log4net or nlog are becoming obsolete. New tools, best-practices and standards are emerging to make sense out of massively distributed and asynchronous applications that run in the cloud, in containers, or in mobile devices. Solutions for a world where storage and computing power are cheap and can be provisioned within minutes. Starting with the question “what do we want to log and why?”, this talk gives a bird’s eye overview of the new logging landscape. It introduces open-source solutions like Elasticsearch, Fluentd or OpenTracing, and commercial services like Application Insights. On a code level, it shows how PostSharp can help to generate highly detailed logs with minimal efforts. The key takeaway of this talk is a broad understanding of the business of logging and application instrumentation, so you’re ready to make choices on your own.