Using Azure Application Insights for centralized logging

A typical enterprise system usually runs on multiple servers behind a load balancer. The simplest logging option could be logging locally to a location on the server where the app runs. However, this setup makes triaging an issue using the logs difficult. The problem is more prominent if the system consists of multiple applications running on different servers, and the sessions are not sticky. When an error occurs, the developer has to go to the different servers and applications to gather the logs. Even when the developer has gathered all the logs, it may still be challenging to piece together the log events that belong to a same session in a chronological order to troubleshoot the issue.

Securely log to blob storage using NLog with connection string in key vault.

If you do a simple google search on how to log to blob storage using NLog, you can find examples from the project page as well as posts from other developers. However, in most of the examples I have found, the connection string for the blob storage are directly embedded in the nlog.config file, which is not ideal. In this post, I show you another example of using NLog to log to azure blob storage, with the connection string coming from an azure key vault.

Continue reading