Question

I'm reading about the Logging application block in EntLib 5.0. This article proved useful to understanding the concepts but I still don't get the trace sources. I'm mainly a Java guy and more used to Log4j so can someone explain what trace sources are?

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Solution

A trace source helps you to specify what application (or part of it) was the source of the log entry.

A great way to use this is when your web application uses a web service that itself connects to a SQL Server. The different trace sources will help you to find out which part in this chain produced the log entry. For most of the time you don’t care what the SQL Server logs and therefore you can give this trace source a different threshold level. This enables you to get all debug messages from your code and only the warnings from the other parts.

By using the same “pipeline” for the processing of the log messages the trace source is a simple way to attach the different rules. For the basic usage this seems to be a big overhead. But as soon as you try to correlate the different parts in the chain you will appreciate this concept.

In log4j there is a similar concept about logging separation based on LoggerContext. You can use this to have multiple applications in one container and write to the same log file.

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