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Logs

Elastic .NET Agent provides Log correlation. The agent will automaticaly inject correlation IDs that allow navigation between logs, traces and services.

This features is part of {observability-guide}/application-logs.html[Application log ingestion strategies].

The {ecs-logging-dotnet-ref}/intro.html[ecs-logging-dotnet] library can also be used to use the {ecs-logging-ref}/intro.html[ECS logging] format without an APM agent. ECS .NET logging will always provide log correlation IDs through System.Diagnostics.Activity. When paired with the APM Agent it will pick up the appropriate service correlation features too.

Log correlation

The Elastic APM .NET agent provides integrations for popular logging frameworks, which take care of injecting trace ID fields into your application’s log records. Currently supported logging frameworks are:

If your favorite logging framework is not already supported, there are two other options:

  • Open a feature request, or contribute code, for additional support, as described in CONTRIBUTING.md.

  • Manually inject trace IDs into log records, as described in Manual log correlation.

Regardless of how you integrate APM with logging, you can use {filebeat-ref}[Filebeat] to send your logs to Elasticsearch, in order to correlate your traces and logs and link from APM to the {observability-guide}/monitor-logs.html[Logs app].

Serilog

We offer a Serilog Enricher that adds the trace id to every log line that is created during an active trace.

The enricher lives in the Elastic.Apm.SerilogEnricher NuGet package.

You can enable it when you configure your Serilog logger:

var logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
   .Enrich.WithElasticApmCorrelationInfo()
   .WriteTo.Console(outputTemplate: "[{ElasticApmTraceId} {ElasticApmTransactionId} {Message:lj} {NewLine}{Exception}")
   .CreateLogger();

In the code snippet above .Enrich.WithElasticApmCorrelationInfo() enables the enricher, which will set 2 properties for log lines that are created during a transaction:

  • ElasticApmTransactionId

  • ElasticApmTraceId

As you can see, in the outputTemplate of the Console sink these two properties are printed. Of course they can be used with any other sink.

If you want to send your logs directly to Elasticsearch you can use the Serilog.Sinks.ElasticSearch package. Furthermore, you can pass the EcsTextFormatter from the Elastic.CommonSchema.Serilog package to the Elasticsearch sink, which formats all your logs according to Elastic Common Schema (ECS) and it makes sure that the trace id ends up in the correct field.

Once you added the two packages mentioned above, you can configure your logger like this:

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
.Enrich.WithElasticApmCorrelationInfo()
.WriteTo.Elasticsearch(new ElasticsearchSinkOptions(new Uri("http://localhost:9200"))
{
  CustomFormatter = new EcsTextFormatter()
})
.CreateLogger();

With this setup the application will send all the logs automatically to Elasticsearch and you will be able to jump from traces to logs and from logs to traces.

NLog

For NLog, we offer two LayoutRenderers that inject the current trace and transaction id into logs.

In order to use them, you need to add the Elastic.Apm.NLog NuGet package to your application and load it in the <extensions> section of your NLog config file:

<nlog>
<extensions>
   <add assembly="Elastic.Apm.NLog"/>
</extensions>
<targets>
<target type="file" name="logfile" fileName="myfile.txt">
    <layout type="jsonlayout">
        <attribute name="traceid" layout="${ElasticApmTraceId}" />
        <attribute name="transactionid" layout="${ElasticApmTransactionId}" />
    </layout>
</target>
</targets>
<rules>
    <logger name="*" minLevel="Trace" writeTo="logfile" />
</rules>
</nlog>

As you can see in the sample file above, you can reference the current transaction id with ${ElasticApmTransactionId} and the trace id with ${ElasticApmTraceId}.

Manual log correlation

If the agent-provided logging integrations are not suitable or not available for your application, then you can use the agent’s API to inject trace IDs manually. There are two main approaches you can take, depending on whether you are using structured or unstructured logging.

Manual log correlation (structured)

For correlating structured logs with traces, the following fields should be added to your logs:

  • trace.id

  • transaction.id

Given a transaction object, you can obtain its trace id by using the Transaction.TraceId property and its transaction id by using the Transaction.Id property.

You can also use the Elastic.Apm.Agent.Tracer.CurrentTransaction property anywhere in the code to access the currently active transaction.

public (string traceId, string transactionId) GetTraceIds()
{
	if (!Agent.IsConfigured) return default;
	if (Agent.Tracer.CurrentTransaction == null) return default;
	return (Agent.Tracer.CurrentTransaction.TraceId, Agent.Tracer.CurrentTransaction.Id);
}

In case the agent is configured and there is an active transaction, the traceId and transactionId will always return the current trace and transaction ids that you can manually add to your logs. Make sure you store those in the fields trace.id and transaction.id when you send them to Elasticsearch.

Manual log correlation (unstructured)

For correlating unstructured logs (e.g. basic printf-style logging, like Console.WriteLine), you will need to include the trace ids in your log message, and then extract them using Filebeat.

If you already have a transaction object, then you can use the TraceId and Id properties. Both are of type string, so you can simply add them to the log.

var currentTransaction = //Get Current transaction, e.g.: Agent.Tracer.CurrentTransaction;

Console.WriteLine($"ERROR [trace.id={currentTransaction.TraceId} transaction.id={currentTransaction.Id}] an error occurred");

This would print a log message along the lines of:

    ERROR [trace.id=cd04f33b9c0c35ae8abe77e799f126b7 transaction.id=cd04f33b9c0c35ae] an error occurred

For log correlation to work, the trace ids must be extracted from the log message and stored in separate fields in the Elasticsearch document. This can be achieved by {filebeat-ref}/configuring-ingest-node.html[parsing the data by using ingest node], in particular by using {ref}/grok-processor.html[the grok processor].

{
  "description": "...",
  "processors": [
    {
      "grok": {
        "field": "message",
        "patterns": [%{LOGLEVEL:log.level} \\[trace.id=%{TRACE_ID:trace.id}(?: transaction.id=%{SPAN_ID:transaction.id})?\\] %{GREEDYDATA:message}"],
        "pattern_definitions": {
          "TRACE_ID": "[0-9A-Fa-f]{32}",
          "SPAN_ID": "[0-9A-Fa-f]{16}"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}