Strategy for logging in production for Dynamics CRM plugins

Question

CRM 2011 on premise.

I have a plugin written in C#. It could throw exceptions or otherwise behave badly in production.

When this happens I want to capture information about the state and about recent code execution to help me analyse the problem.

Ideally I would like the following:

1. If the code decides I should know about a problem then I want it to be able to tell me that there was a problem asap, without me looking to see if a problem has occurred.

2. I want the information about the problem to be easily accessible to me. I don't want to have to RDP to another machine and search through files.

3. I don't want logging to have much impact on performance.

I guess I'm looking for something like this:

• Retention of last n lines of log in memory.
• A single function call to add a line to the log.
• A single function call to cause an error to be recorded.
• When there's an error, email to me saying there was a problem. This contains summary info.
• The email contains a link to a web page showing me full error details. Stack trace, error message, date, time, user etc, last n lines of log.
• It'd be nice if there was also a web page somewhere showing me all errors, with filtering, sorting and so on.

I'm fairly new to CRM but I've developed systems like this before. Since CRM has been around for many years I'd expect this to be available for it.

Answer 1

To support your wish list, I'd create these Entities:

PluginLog

• Contains what ever information you'd like to retain for plugin calls that completed successfully
• Is related to a Plugin Exception Class. This way you could look up what happened before an exception occurred

PluginException

• Contains any special information regarding the exception (user, context, stack trace)

Now let's go through your wish list:

• Retention of last n lines of log in memory.
  • Not sure if you want to log the particular plugin class, or all plugins classes defined in the DLL, I'll assume a particular plugin class:
  • Create a static ConcurrentQueue for the plugin
• A single function call to add a line to the log.
  • Create a single function that creates a PluginLog entity in memory (without creating it in the CRM database) and adds it to the queue.
  • If it's length > n, dequeue.
• A single function call to cause an error to be recorded.
  • Again, this is something that you'll need to create. Basically I'd create a PLuginException Entity in CRM, then dequeue all the items off of the Queue, populating the Plugin Exception Id, and saving it to CRM
• When there's an error, email to me saying there was a problem. This contains summary info.
  • As long as the App Domain context of the executing plugin has the rights needed (not sure if it does in CRM Online) this should be trivial.
• The email contains a link to a web page showing me full error details. Stack trace, error message, date, time, user etc, last n lines of log.
  • You can create a link to the PluginException Entity Created, and include it in the e-mail along with all other pertinent information.
• It'd be nice if there was also a web page somewhere showing me all errors, with filtering, sorting and so on.
  • Advanced Find to the rescue

Edit

To help get you started, this is what I currently use to retrieve all the information from the plugin context, and convert it into text that gets inserted into an Exception:

    #region GetPluginInfo

    private Exception GetPluginExecutionInfoForLog(IServiceProvider serviceProvider, Exception ex)
    {
        if(ex.GetType() == typeof(InvalidPluginExecutionException)){ return ex; }

        try
        {
            var context = serviceProvider.GetContext();

            ex = new InvalidPluginExecutionException(
                String.Format("Error During Plugin Execution: {0}**** Context Values ****{0}{1}", 
                    Environment.NewLine, GetPluginExecutionInfo(context)), ex);
        }
        catch (Exception childEx)
        {
            OnError(childEx);
        }
        return ex;
    }

    protected String GetPluginExecutionInfo(IPluginExecutionContext context)
    {
        var lines = new List<String>();
        var target = GetTarget<Entity>(context);

        lines.Add("MessageName: " + context.MessageName);
        lines.Add("PrimaryEntityName: " + context.PrimaryEntityName);
        lines.Add("PrimaryEntityId: " + context.PrimaryEntityId);
        lines.Add("BusinessUnitId: " + context.BusinessUnitId);
        lines.Add("CorrelationId: " + context.CorrelationId);
        lines.Add("Depth: " + context.Depth);
        lines.Add("Has Parent Context: " + (context.ParentContext != null));
        lines.Add("InitiatingUserId: " + context.InitiatingUserId);
        AddParameters(lines, context.InputParameters, "Input Parameters");
        lines.Add("IsInTransaction: " + context.IsInTransaction);
        lines.Add("IsolationMode: " + context.IsolationMode);
        lines.Add("Mode: " + context.Mode);
        lines.Add("OperationCreatedOn: " + context.OperationCreatedOn);
        lines.Add("OperationId: " + context.OperationId);
        lines.Add("Organization: " + context.OrganizationName + "(" + context.OrganizationId + ")");
        AddParameters(lines, context.OutputParameters, "Output Parameters");
        AddEntityReference(lines, context.OwningExtension, "OwningExtension");
        AddEntityImages(lines, context.PostEntityImages, "Post Entity Images");
        AddEntityImages(lines, context.PreEntityImages, "Pre Entity Images");
        lines.Add("SecondaryEntityName: " + context.SecondaryEntityName);
        AddParameters(lines, context.SharedVariables, "Shared Variables");
        lines.Add("Stage: " + context.Stage);
        lines.Add("UserId: " + context.UserId);

        if (target == null || target.Attributes.Count == 0)
        {
            lines.Add("Target: Empty ");
        }
        else
        {
            lines.Add("* Target " + target.ToEntityReference().GetNameId() + " *");
            foreach (var att in target.Attributes)
            {
                lines.Add("    Entity[" + att.Key + "]: " + GetAttributeValue(att.Value));
            }
        }

        lines.Add("* App Config Values *");
        foreach (var key in ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.AllKeys)
        {
            lines.Add("    [" + key + "]: " + ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[key]);
        }

        return String.Join(Environment.NewLine, lines);
    }

    private static string GetAttributeValue(object value)
    {
        if(value == null){
            return "Null";
        }
        var type = value.GetType();
        if (type == typeof(OptionSetValue))
        {
            return ((OptionSetValue)value).Value.ToString();
        }
        else if (type == typeof(EntityReference))
        {
            return ((EntityReference)value).GetNameId();
        }
        else
        {
            return value.ToString();
        }
    }

    private static void AddEntityReference(List<string> nameValuePairs, EntityReference entity, string name)
    {
        if (entity != null)
        {
            nameValuePairs.Add(name + ": " + entity.GetNameId());
        }
    }

    private static void AddEntityImages(List<string> nameValuePairs, EntityImageCollection images, string name)
    {
        if (images != null && images.Count > 0)
        {
            nameValuePairs.Add("** " + name + " **");
            foreach (var image in images)
            {
                if (image.Value == null || image.Value.Attributes.Count == 0)
                {
                    nameValuePairs.Add("    Image[" + image.Key + "] " + image.Value.ToEntityReference().GetNameId() + ": Empty");
                }
                else
                {
                    nameValuePairs.Add("*   Image[" + image.Key + "] " + image.Value.ToEntityReference().GetNameId() + "   *");
                    foreach (var att in image.Value.Attributes)
                    {
                        nameValuePairs.Add("        Entity[" + att.Key + "]: " + GetAttributeValue(att.Value));
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        else
        {
            nameValuePairs.Add(name + ": Empty");
        }
    }

    private static void AddParameters(List<string> nameValuePairs, ParameterCollection parameters, string name)
    {
        if (parameters != null && parameters.Count > 0)
        {
            nameValuePairs.Add("* " + name + " *");
            foreach (var param in parameters)
            {
                nameValuePairs.Add("    Param[" + param.Key + "]: " + param.Value);
            }
        }
        else
        {
            nameValuePairs.Add(name + ": Empty");
        }
    }

    #endregion // GetPluginInfo