Log Viewer
Information on using the Umbraco log viewer in version 8
Umbraco ships with a built-in Log Viewer feature. This allows you to filter and view log entries and perform much more complex search queries. This helps you finding the log entries that you are interested in. You can find the log viewer in the settings section.
Benefits
Have you ever wanted to find all log entries which contains the same request ID? Or find all items in the log where a property called duration is greater than 1000ms?
With the power of structured logging and a query language we are able to search and find log items for specific scenarios. When debugging the site you should now have more power to see and find patterns in your log files and get rid of those errors.
Example queries
Here are a handful example queries to get you started, however the saved searches contain some further examples. For more details on the syntax head over to the https://github.com/serilog/serilog-filters-expressions project.
Find all logs that are from the namespace 'Umbraco.Core'
StartsWith(SourceContext, 'Umbraco.Core')
\
Find all logs that have the property 'Duration' and the duration is greater than 1000ms
Has(Duration) and Duration > 1000
\
Find all logs where the message has localhost in it with SQL like
@Message like '%localhost%'
\
Saved Searches
Sometimes you want to use a custom query more often. It is possible to save a query and use the dropdown to re-use your saved search. To add a new saved search, use the search box to type your query and click the star icon. In doing so you can give it a friendly name. The saved queries are saved in the database in the table umbracoLogViewerQuery
.
Implementing your own Log Viewer
With the flexibility of Umbraco, we give you the power to implement your own ILogViewer
. This makes it possible to fetch logs and the saved searched from a different location such as Azure table storage.
Create your own implementation
To do this we can implement a base class SerilogLogViewerSourceBase
from Umbraco.Cms.Core.Logging.Viewer
like so.
This uses the Azure.Data.Tables
NuGet package.
Keep in mind that we have to implement our own version of a LogEventEntity
. This is because the TableClient
needs whatever it is fetching to implement the ITableEntity
interface.
Register implementation
Umbraco needs to be made aware that there is a new implementation of an ILogViewer
to register. We also need to replace the default JSON LogViewer that we ship in the core of Umbraco.
Configure Umbraco to log to Azure Table Storage
Now with the above two classes, we have the plumbing in place to view logs from an Azure Table. However, we are not persisting our logs into the Azure table storage account. So we need to configure the Serilog logging pipeline to store our logs into Azure table storage.
Install Serilog.Sinks.AzureTableStorage from Nuget
Add a new sink to the appsettings with credentials (so logs persist to Azure)
The following sink needs to be added to the array Serilog:WriteTo
.
For more in depth information about logging and how to configure it, please read the logging documentation.
Compact Log Viewer - Desktop App
This is a desktop tool for viewing & querying JSON log files from disk in the same way as the built in logviewer dashboard of Umbraco.
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