Why would one use ELMAH if the application is using NLog

Question

I have to write a centralized logging framework.

Basic requirements are:

• Log exceptions as well as other details if needed to SQL Server DB.
• If DB is down i.e. a failover option is to log to a file and email

I had done some reading around and looks NLog is the best option being simple and most features I need. My plan is to write a wrapper class library around NLog and use my library in all my asp.net applications, web api as well as other library projects and some classic asp sites using COM+.

But I noticed some people mentioning using ELMAH for exception handling and NLog for diagnostics.

My Question(or I should say confusion): Why would I use ELMAH if I am using NLog?

Or when would one use ELMAH alongside NLog?

Or

Note I am not trying to compare the features-by-feature but want to understand: What would be the scenario when one would opt for one over other? Except the fact that ELMAH is for web applications.

Answer 1

Elmah is used for handling uncaught exceptions, and is generally a "last line of defense" to be able to identify when things go completely belly up. You can read what it provides on its github page: http://code.google.com/p/elmah/

NLog and others (I highly recommend Serilog) are used for runtime diagnostics and tracing... That is, to dump information which you are either tracing, or logging (which is, by definition, not uncaught exceptions).

NLog, as like log4net, nlog is getting quite long in the tooth and while there was a recent release... the previous release a year earlier, and I feel most of the "old guard" logging frameworks have not really grown with the times.

Serilog is a much better choice, as it provides "structured logging" which allows you to, for example, search on specific fields in the log files.