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I am tasked with looking into providing a centralized place for logging. Then take those logs and provide a way to display them in a live viewer. We need a place to store the log history for audit reasons and reporting. We also want the ability to do live logging for critical systems. For the viewers mentioned in the question, how do they tie into NLog? Do you configure them to point to a database for pulling the logs or how does it work?

user1732364
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1 Answers1

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I'm speaking as one of the developers for ReflectInsight. Although, RI has a native client API for logging messages to their respective listeners (i.e. Live Viewer, SQL, Text, Binary Files, etc.), you can still use NLog as the base client API to log messages. The only disadvantage is that you won't be able to log rich detailed messages.

Now to fully answer you question and I assume that NLog is your choice from a client API, you can do the following:

  • Create an NLog target to log messages to SQL, or other targets
  • Install the RI NLog Extension Nuget, here: https://www.nuget.org/packages/ReflectSoftware.Insight.Extensions.NLog/5.6.0
  • Install RI's Router Service on the machines that will be submitting messages
  • Configure the RI for each client to send messages to the RI Router Service
  • Use the Live Viewer to Remote connect via TCP/IP to one or more Router services to receive Live messages.
  • By default the RI Liver Viewer is set to Auto Purge streamed messages for 100K, you can increase this size to 1M messages.

If you plan to go this route, please let me know and I can add more config details or point you to the right direction.

I hope this helps.

code

code5
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  • Thanks so much for the information, it does answer a lot of questions! I just want to make sure, for live viewing of logs stored in a centralized database, the router service is a windows service that is used for providing the live logs? – user1732364 May 16 '16 at 12:59
  • Actually, i should have asked, once the router service is installed and the extension is installed. Regarding NLog configuration, do we have to setup the RI target or any configuration? I would think so but if we are sending the logs to a DB and the router service feeds off the DB, not sure why configuration would be needed within the NLog config itself since NLog doesn't log directly to the RI target. – user1732364 May 16 '16 at 14:12