Azure Cloud Services not logging ASP.NET errors

Question

Using cloud services and the Azure 2.0 SDK, I would like to have my ASP.NET errors get logged to the Azure Diagnostics service.

In Visual Studio, there's a section under Diagnostics Summary called "Windows Azure Application Logs" Also "Event Logs"

When I hit an error, I only see the standard 500 error page, but there is no log anywhere to show it.

I do not want to see the yellow screen of death (since this is a customer facing page)

I'd expect that I could either open one of those Azure Tables or Blobs, and see stack traces for my ASP.NET errors (such as Null Reference Exceptions, Entity Framework errors, etc)

How do I configure this to work with Azure SDK 2.0?

Edward Brey Edward Brey · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-09T12:26:44

In your Azure Cloud Services Web Role project, open the properties for the web role.
Turn on Enable Diagnostics and choose Custom plan, and click Edit.
From the Log directories tab select your desired transfer period and click OK.
In Solution Explorer, expand the tree node for your web role, and open diagnostics.wadcfg.

Add this line to the Directories element:

<FailedRequestLogs container="wad-frq" directoryQuotaInMB="512" />

In web.config, add the following under the system.webServer element:

<tracing>
  <traceFailedRequests>
    <add path="*">
      <traceAreas>
        <add provider="ASPNET" areas="Infrastructure,Module,Page,AppServices" verbosity="Verbose" />
        <add provider="WWW Server" areas="Authentication, Security, Filter, StaticFile, CGI, Compression, Cache, RequestNotifications, Module" verbosity="Verbose" />
      </traceAreas>
      <failureDefinitions statusCodes="400-599" />
    </add>
  </traceFailedRequests>
</tracing>

Changes to diagnostics.wadcfg in your local project don't get applied when redeploying to an existing web role instance. However, deploying to a new staging instance and then swapping works fine.

The documentation on this is fragmented:

How To Enable Diagnostics in a Cloud Service, in the section IIS Failed Request Trace Logs, describes the XML configurations.
Configuring Diagnostics for Azure Cloud Services describes the Azure SDK GUI that creates most of diagnostics.wadcfg for you, so you don't need to read everything in "How To Enable Diagnostics in a Cloud Service".

Azure Cloud Services not logging ASP.NET errors

2 Answers