C# Logging with Serilog and Seq - Structured Logging Made Easy

Structured event logging is so much more than just writing a message to a file. Since .NET Core natively supports structured event logging, I wanted to introduce a logger that takes advantage of these additional features. Serilog is an easy to configure and easy to use logging system that you can plug into a .NET Core project within minutes. Today we are going to configure Serilog, see how to use it in a basic logging scenario, then take advantage of the structured logging by hooking up a visual event sink called Seq.

0:00 - Intro
1:29 - Getting started: ASP .NET Core application
4:18 - Built in logging system crash course
8:08 - Exceptions in log messages (built in)
10:27 - Additional information in log message: variables in the log message (built in)
13:42 - Setting up Serilog
17:33 - Serilog NuGet references and configuration
21:38 - Logging application start and crash with Serilog
24:35 - Use Serilog over default built in logging system
29:47 - Serilog Enrichers: settings and NuGet references
32:27 - Writing the log messages to Console
34:29 - Logging request messages
38:11 - Writing the log messages to text file
40:49 - Structured logging: writing the log messages to json file
46:42 - Seq
48:39 - Setting up Seq with docker: NuGet reference, configuration, docker setup
59:15 - Logging with Seq
1:02:34 - Summary and concluding remarks

[dustinbishop]

Tim Corey you are the man, there so much outdated info on serilog on the net

[marcturelles]

I used to watch TheNewBoston and his tutorials and what have you. Then I found you. I have recommend you to so many people who want to get into c#. Keep up the fantastic videos!

[aminebelbahar]

Thanks for this awesome tutorial. It helped me a lot with switching my project to Serilog

[jerrydsta]

fantastic intro into Serilog. thank you so much.

[jrandallsexton]

Fantastic tutorial - especially running Seq on Docker. Thank you.

[baris]

This is so valuable, thank you very much for this video i was able to adapt this and now have a centralized logging server for my Applications. i cant wait to try more things out with this and how Seq comes up comparing with Application Insights (much pricier, especially if you dont know exactly what are you doing).

[davidpccode]

What an amazing explanation!!! Thank you so much.. this is a Loggin master class

[wowDepressive]

Hi Tim really appreciate this video. Good job. Thanks.

[henryjao-ticv]

Awesome video, thanks for your contribution.

[saidakhmedagitaev]

really appreciate what you do, keep it up!
thank you!

[BabyGhost]

Loved the vid, good info! I did have a question thou, how about having multiple clients logging to Seq?

But after some research I connected the dots:
- Docker: you can mount multiple volumes (using the v: multiple times)
- Seq: creating API keys in the Settings-page (with Applied Property: ApplicationName) and consuming it in the clients
- Seq: in the overview you can use Signals > Application = 'ApplicationName' to filter on each client

Not that advanced but I guess not everyone will find it useful. But seeing web services are becoming very common now, it might be nice to know.

[numinaoneiron]

Great Video...I really appreciate your videos especially when you introduce new nuget packages that I didn't know before.

[talcon]

Another amazing video, you have made my learning so much easier!

[mgbaraka]

Amazing, informative video, thank you.

[yonatandaniyel]

Excellent course!! A great break-in to Serilog.

[samiboy]

This is a great video!!! I'm also concerned about how to maintain the logs so that they don't take a huge amount of space and then I run into trouble with my IT

[husam-ebish]

docker run -d --restart unless-stopped --name seq -e ACCEPT_EULA=Y -v D:\Demos\Logs:/data -p 8081:80 datalust/seq:latest

[fredywenger]

Great video (just like the last I have seen from you).
Questions:
- Does Serilog also catch internal kestrel exceptions?
- Does Serilog also add the machine name of the calling client and the processid to internal kestrel exceptions if running on an internet server?

[galaxiegalaxie]

Thanks, 😁Could you also do video about serilog with elastic search, kibana and your opinion etc

[tumim]

Lovely. I would like to know if I can have different logging files. For instance one for errors and the other for any other information. This means I would want to have a separate file for errors