Elastic.Extensions.Logging 8.12.3

Elasticsearch Logger Provider

Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana (ELK) stack logger provider for Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.

Writes direct to Elasticsearch using the Elastic Common Schema (ECS), with semantic logging of structured data from message and scope values. The results can be viewed and queried in the Kibana console.

The logger uses the Elasticsearch.Net low level client to manage the network connection to Elasticsearch.

Usage

Add a reference to the Elastic.Extensions.Logging package:

dotnet add package Elastic.Extensions.Logging

Then, add the provider to the loggingBuilder during host construction, using the provided extension method.

using Elastic.Extensions.Logging;

// ...

    .ConfigureLogging((hostContext, loggingBuilder) =>
    {
        loggingBuilder.AddElasticsearch();
    })

The default configuration will write to a local Elasticsearch running at http://localhost:9200/.

Once you have sent some log event, open Kibana (e.g. http://localhost:5601/) and define an index pattern for "dotnet-*" with the time filter "@timestamp".

You can then discover the log events for the index. Some useful columns to add are log.level, log.logger, event.code, message, tags, and process.thread.id.

If you are running multiple applications or on multiple servers, you might want to include service.type, service.version, and host.hostname.

Additional fields are defined below, and all individual message and scope values are logged as labels.* custom key/value pairs, e.g. labels.CustomerId.

Basic configuration

For deployment you will usually want to override the configuration with your actual server location(s). The other useful value to configure is a tag for the environment, e.g. Development/Staging/Production.

{
  "Logging": {
    "Elasticsearch": {
      "NodeUris": [ "https://elastic-staging.example.com:9200" ],
      "Tags": [ "Staging" ]
    }
  }
}

NOTE: You don't need any configuration to just use a local Elasticsearch instance, as it defaults to http://localhost:9200/.

Example program

• See Console with Extensions.Logging

Configuration settings

The logger provider will be automatically configured with any logging settings under the alias Elasticsearch.

The following default settings are used.

{
  "Logging": {
    "Elasticsearch": {
      "IncludeHost": true,
      "IncludeProcess": true,
      "IncludeScopes": true,
      "IncludeUser": true,
      "Index": "dotnet-{0:yyyy.MM.dd}",
      "IndexOffset": null,
      "IsEnabled": true,
      "ListSeparator": ", ",
      "MapCorrelationValues": true,
      "Tags": [],
      "ShipTo": {
        "NodePoolType": "SingleNode",
        "NodeUris": [ "http://localhost:9200" ]
      }
    }
  }
}

The ShipTo settings can have the following properties, depending on the type of connection pool.

If you want to configure from a different section, it can be configured manually:

    .ConfigureLogging((hostContext, loggingBuilder) =>
    {
        loggingBuilder.AddElasticsearch(options =>
            hostContext.Configuration.Bind("Logging:CustomElasticsearch", options));
    })

Configuration can, of course, also be done in code, e.g. to add the environment as a tag.

Elastic Cloud configuration

If CloudId is provided, the ConnectionPoolType defaults to Cloud:

{
  "Logging": {
    "Elasticsearch": {
      "ShipTo": {
        "CloudId": "12345",
        "ApiKey": "abcdef"
      }
    }
  }
}

Output - Elastic Common Schema (ECS)

Log messages sent to Elasticsearch follow the Elastic Common Schema (ECS).

Example document

The _source field is the message sent from the LoggerProvider, along with the _index and _id (a GUID).

{
  "_index": "dotnet-2020.04.12",
  "_type": "_doc",
  "_id": "563503a8-9d10-46ff-a09f-c6ccbf124db9",
  "_version": 1,
  "_score": null,
  "_source": {
    "MessageTemplate": "Unexpected error processing customer {CustomerId}.",
    "Scopes": [
      "IP address 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334",
      "PlainScope"
    ],
    "agent": {
      "version": "1.0.0+bd3ad6",
      "type": "Elastic.Extensions.Logging.LoggerProvider"
    },
    "ecs": {
      "version": "1.5.0"
    },
    "error": {
      "message": "Calculation error",
      "type": "System.Exception",
      "stack_trace": "System.Exception: Calculation error\n ---> System.DivideByZeroException: Attempted to divide by zero.\n   at HelloElasticsearch.Worker.ExecuteAsync(CancellationToken stoppingToken) in /home/sly/Code/essential-logging/examples/HelloElasticsearch/Worker.cs:line 80\n   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---\n   at HelloElasticsearch.Worker.ExecuteAsync(CancellationToken stoppingToken) in /home/sly/Code/essential-logging/examples/HelloElasticsearch/Worker.cs:line 84"
    },
    "event": {
      "code": "5000",
      "action": "ErrorProcessingCustomer",
      "severity": 3
    },
    "host": {
      "os": {
        "platform": "Unix",
        "full": "Linux 4.15.0-91-generic #92-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 28 11:09:48 UTC 2020",
        "version": "4.15.0.91"
      },
      "hostname": "VUB1804",
      "architecture": "X64"
    },
    "log": {
      "level": "Error",
      "logger": "HelloElasticsearch.Worker"
    },
    "process": {
      "thread": {
        "id": 10
      },
      "pid": 25982,
      "name": "HelloElasticsearch"
    },
    "service": {
      "type": "HelloElasticsearch",
      "version": "1.0.0"
    },
    "user": {
      "id": "sgryphon+es@live.com",
      "name": "sly",
      "domain": "VUB1804"
    },
    "@timestamp": "2020-04-13T21:25:22.3352989+10:00",
    "tags": [
      "Development"
    ],
    "labels": {
      "ip": "2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334",
      "CustomerId": "12345"
    },
    "message": "Unexpected error processing customer 12345.",
    "trace": {
      "id": "c20bde1071f7cf4e9a6f368c824e05f7"
    },
    "transaction": {
      "id": "92ba5ee64d963746"
    }
  },
  "fields": {
    "@timestamp": [
      "2020-04-13T11:25:22.335Z"
    ]
  },
  "sort": [
    1586777122335
  ]
}

Standard Fields

The event.severity field is numeric and can be used to order events by level, e.g. Kibana query event.severity <= 4 will get all messages that have log level Warning or worse.

Error fields

If the log message includes an exception, the details are reported in the error fields.

Custom fields

Following the ECS conventions, these use alternative Title casing, to identify them as non-standard fields.

Label values

Label values can be accessed by their key, for example if the message, or scope, includes a parameter CustomerId, then the value will be logged as labels.CustomerId can be searched in Kibana using "labels.CustomerId: 12345".

Example:

The following will generate two labels, labels.EndTime from the message and labels.CustomerId from the scope:

using (_logger.BeginScope("{CustomerId}", customerId))
{
  _logger.LogWarning("End of processing reached at {EndTime}.", end);
}

Labels are taken from the message (state) and any scope values (may be disabled via the configuration options). In Microsoft.Extensions.Logging an internal FormattedLogValues is used in the ILogger overloads for log levels and scopes; it implements the IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string,object>> interface that is used to extract the individual parameter values.

The labels property in ECS should not contain nested objects, so values are converted to keyword strings. For most objects this is just calling ToString(), with specific formats for some types, e.g. calling string on a list is usually not very useful, so the contents of the list is logged instead.

Labels value formatting

(1) See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/datetime/choosing-between-datetime

Agent fields

These identify the version of the logger provider being used.

Service fields

This identifies the application/service that is running and generating the logs.

The values are pulled from the entry assemb, Assembly.GetEntryAssembly(), using the Name and AssemblyInformationalVersionAttribute values (if informational version is not set it falls back to assembly Version).

Note: You should be using a build process that sets the assembly informational version correctly. e.g. If you have a dotnet project using git you can install the local tool GitVersion.Tool, and use it to automatically generate semantic version numbers from the git branch information.

To install the tool:

dotnet new tool-manifest
dotnet tool install GitVersion.Tool

Then use the tool to create a semantic version number that can be used in your build process:

dotnet tool restore
dotnet gitversion

You are welcome to use the build.ps1 script in this repository as an example.

Tracing fields

ASP.NET will automatically pass correlation identifiers between tiers; from 3.0 it also supports the W3C Trace Context standard (https://www.w3.org/TR/trace-context/).

The value of Activity.Current.RootId is used as the cross-service identifier (in W3C format this is the Trace ID), if in W3C format the Span ID portion of Activity.Current.Id is used for the transaction, otherwise the full value is used (this is consistent with the way ASP.NET works).

It is recommended to turn on W3C format, for compatibility with other systems:

Activity.DefaultIdFormat = ActivityIdFormat.W3C;

Host fields

NOTE: Can be disabled via configuration.

Process fields

NOTE: Can be disabled via configuration.

User fields

NOTE: Can be disabled via configuration.