How to Log exceptions caught in WCF service deployed on Azure

Question

What is the best way to log the exceptions caught in WCF service hosted on cloud?

Answer 1

You can take advantage of System.Diagnostics and logging your exceptions with Trace.traceError(). You can then schedule these trace statements to be periodically uploaded to table storage (maybe once a minute?), where you can then retrieve and analyze the trace statements either with an on-premise app or one running in a worker role.

For example: in your worker role's OnStart(), customize the Diagnostic Manager to upload your trace data to table storage. In this example, it's uploading every minute, to the storage account specified in DiagnosticsConnectionString (this is, by default, set up to point to dev storage):

var diag = DiagnosticMonitor.GetDefaultInitialConfiguration();
diag.Logs.ScheduledTransferLogLevelFilter = LogLevel.Information;
diag.Logs.ScheduledTransferPeriod = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1.0);
DiagnosticMonitor.Start("DiagnosticsConnectionString", diag);

Then, whenever you encounter an exception in your WCF Service, log it:

System.Diagnostics.Trace.TraceError("WCF Error caught: ...");

Finally, either write some code to query the diagnostic data, or use something like the new built-in Visual Studio storage explorer to view and act on the errors.