Creating logs with WebApi on Azure - sql-server

Question

I'm currently working on new project with WebApi and SQL Server, but as every application we must to generate and save logs, the question is, how to create it and the proper way to storage, since I'm using Azure there's a Azure Blob Table, which sounds perfect to create logs, but I'm not a professional. So every user that has been logged, how to organize this, I need some help!

Answer 1

Azure Web App provide Application log feature, we can enable it in Azure portal.
After that, we can write log using following code and logs will be written in the blobs which I configured on Azure Portal.
Trace.TraceInformation("Hello Azure Log");
If you want to write your application log to Azure table storage, you could create a custom TraceListener. I just created a AzureTableStorageTraceListener which will write trace log to Azure Table, code below is for your reference.
public class AzureTableStorageTraceListener : System.Diagnostics.TraceListener
{
protected override string[] GetSupportedAttributes()
{
return new[] { "StorageConnectionString", "LogsTableName" };
}
public override void TraceEvent(TraceEventCache eventCache, string source, TraceEventType eventType, int id, string message)
{
Write(message, eventType.ToString());
}
public override void Write(string message, string category)
{
string stroageConnectionString = Attributes["StorageConnectionString"];
string tableName = Attributes["LogsTableName"];
// Retrieve the storage account from the connection string.
CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(stroageConnectionString);
// Create the table client.
CloudTableClient tableClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudTableClient();
// Create the CloudTable object that represents the "people" table.
CloudTable table = tableClient.GetTableReference(tableName);
// Create a new log entity.
LogEntity log = new LogEntity(category, message);
// Create the TableOperation object that inserts the log entity.
TableOperation insertOperation = TableOperation.Insert(log);
// Execute the insert operation.
table.Execute(insertOperation);
}
public override void WriteLine(string message, string category)
{
Write(message + "\n", category);
}
public override void Write(string message)
{
Write(message, null);
}
public override void WriteLine(string message)
{
Write(message + "\n");
}
}
public class LogEntity : TableEntity
{
public LogEntity(string category, string message)
{
category = category == null ? "Default" : category;
this.PartitionKey = category;
this.RowKey = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
this.Message = message;
this.CreatedDate = DateTime.Now;
}
public LogEntity() { }
public string Category { get; set; }
public string Message { get; set; }
public DateTime CreatedDate { get; set; }
}
To use this TraceListener, you need to add following configuration section to Web.config.
<system.diagnostics>
<trace autoflush="true">
<listeners>
<add name="AzureTableStorageListener"
type="{your namespace name}.AzureTableStorageTraceListener,{your assembly name which contains the custom trace listener}"
StorageConnectionString="{your storage connection string}"
LogsTableName="{azure storage table name}"/>
</listeners>
</trace>
</system.diagnostics>