Extra logging during debugging though multiple log levels

0
votes

Using NLog I know I can change the minLevel in the Nlog.config so I can exclude certain log messages. I think this is generally great when software is running in production. If a problem happens I can switch the minLevel and see more detail. This makes sense.

What I have problems with is during debugging the "Debug" level quite honestly seems a bit inadequate. This is mostly because "Debug" seems to be the catch all for everything a developer may care about and no one else.

For backend systems that do a lot I have seen this fill up a 25 MB log file in a few seconds. Sorting through this and trying to tie pieces together is a bit difficult.

Is it possible to have multiple levels of "Debug" so that I can limit the amount of information to actually make using the log file easier?

1
debuggingloggingnlog

1 Answers

1
votes

No sure if this solves your problem,

but it's common in NLog to use the following pattern:

  • use different loggers for each class or process (by using LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger() or LogManager.GetLogger("loggernameForFlow1"))
  • always write all the logs messages to the logger (e.g. logger.Trace(...), logger.Debug(...) etc

  • filter the logs in the config by level, but also by logger name. Because LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger() creates a logger with the current class name with namespace, you could easily filter per class. e.g

    filter on namespace:

     <logger name="myNamespace.*" minLevel=...  writeTo=... />

    filter on 1 class

     <logger name="myNamespace.MyClass.*" minLevel=...  writeTo=... />