This simple console application allow to test Serilog library in conjunction with Humio online service.

This simple project was developed in Visual Studio 2022 with versions for .NET Framework (4.7.2) and .NET Core (6.x). The underlying code is the same for both versions.

Serilog is a library that provides logging features. A key feature is the ability to manage complex structured data in addition to classical log messages.

At this scope Serilog manage concepts like context information and enrichment.

Humio is a log service management that offer a free community plan to work with, at the moment (June 2022) the free plan allow a single repository with 16GB daily data and a retention period of 7 days (all without the needs to add credit card information).

So is a very starting point to play with a very comprehensive logging platform.

The registration process require few information and in a couple of days you will receive an email with account information to play with.

To start playing with humio first create a repo from the (Humio home page)[https://cloud.community.humio.com/home]

Then in the new repo navigate to the Settings tab and select Ingest Tokens.

Create a new ingest Ingest Token using standard serilog-jsonformatter as parser.

All the sample code is in the Program.cs file.

The first part set up Humio sink configuration. In particular a Json formatter is assigned as a TextFormatter (see Humio docs)

var humioConfig = new HumioSinkConfiguration
{
    IngestToken = "{IngestToken}",
    TextFormatter = new JsonFormatter(renderMessage: true),
    Url = "https://cloud.community.humio.com"
};

In .NET 6 program the token is loaded from user secrets saved locally. You can use dotnet user-secrets init and dotnet user-secrets set "HumioIngestToken" "{tokenHere}" to save token in a safe place.

Regarding Serilog configuration it's important to include .Enrich.FromLogContext() to allow the Humio sink to receive context information in json formatted data, and therfore be able to process this data in the service.

// Serilog configuration
using var log = new LoggerConfiguration()
    .MinimumLevel.Information()
    .Enrich.FromLogContext()
    .WriteTo.Console()
    .WriteTo.HumioSink(humioConfig)
    .CreateLogger();

The next part simply set a default logger to use with static method of Log class.

Log.Logger = log;

For test purposes I simply use Log static methods. Obviously the use of static method versus dependency injection is an architectural decision that needs to be taken in account when starting a new project.

Then I add context information to be added to the log.
I also added args parameters of console application, so if you start the console application with some args that data will be added to the log.

using (LogContext.PushProperty("args", args))
using (LogContext.PushProperty("assembly", typeof(Program).Assembly.FullName))
using (LogContext.PushProperty("class", typeof(Program).FullName))

And finally I add a log message to be sent to the Humio service.

Log.Information("This is a message from a test Console Application that use Serilog with Humio");

I started learning about Serilog and its ecosystem thanks to the course Developing .NET Core 5 Apps with Docker by Erik Dahl. So thanks Erik for alle the usefull information that I got from your courses.