A good friend of mine works for a large asp.net shop, with a web farm with many web servers (dozens). The application logs exceptions and messages to the event log on each box (not to a centralized location).
Does anyone know of a convenient way to perform unified reporting on event logs on a number of different boxes?
Or, which is better: - write tools that connect to each event log on each box? - change architecture to log events to the database? - some other mechanism I haven't considered?
I would use Log4Net (or something similar) for the logging, saving the files to disk, and rotating log file periodically. (I'm not a big fan of the Windows event log, personally.) Then have a background service on each box which uploads the log file into a database table - keeping track of which log entry came from which box.
This gives simple searching over the whole web farm while maintaining the information about which log entry came from where.
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