ELMAH - an Amazing asp.net error logging monitoring tool
24 04 09 - 14:35I saw this referenced on Jeff Atwood's blog a little while ago and meant to pass it along to a few folks, and now I see that Scott Hanselman has just blogged about it as well. Scott's article is probably the best place to start. for more detailed information (I guess other than the project's site)
Here's the blurb from ELMAH'S site:
ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) is an application-wide error logging facility that is completely pluggable. It can be dynamically added to a running ASP.NET web application, or even all ASP.NET web applications on a machine, without any need for re-compilation or re-deployment.
Once ELMAH has been dropped into a running web application and configured appropriately, you get the following facilites without changing a single line of your code
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- Logging of nearly all unhandled exceptions.
- A web page to remotely view the entire log of recoded exceptions.
- A web page to remotely view the full details of any one logged exception.
- In many cases, you can review the original yellow screen of death that ASP.NET generated for a given exception, even with customErrors mode turned off.
- An e-mail notification of each error at the time it occurs.
- An RSS feed of the last 15 errors from the log.
- A number of backing storage implementations for the log, including in-memory, Microsoft SQL Server and several contributed by the community.
I don't know about you, but this is very exciting for me - exactly the type of thing that I've been encouraging folks to somehow get onto their development schedules. Things like this help drive quality to the next level by not only giving you tools to diagnose problems better, they increase the visibility of problems by orders of magnitude. No longer are errors hidden away in some error log on the server which isn't easily accessed by the average dev. RSS feeds of the latest error reports to drop on your iGoogle homepage! That's the bomb!
As with anything like this, be careful what you ask for, because you could easily be innundated with error reports to the point where you may have a hard time absorbing the information. But its a SUPER motivator to fix those seemingly benign issues that wind up generating the bulk of your exceptions...
I'd love to hear about anyone's experience with this or similar tools, or if it inspires you to brew up something similar for your other (non .net) projects.