Logging Analytics

On my current project I have found an urgent need to improve the general instrumentation.

This started by adding a few useful trace statements that will show how long certain key operations will take.

Typically this will involve reading some logs (or in fact querying the WADLogsTable).

I have just realised that without some useful log reporting queries then I am just setting myself up for a lot of manual work.

Indeed on a large scale system there is no point in adding logging unless you have something that can read and display these in a useful form.

I am wonding about the analysis side. I have seen lots of articles about writing logging but very little on reading logging.

I am thinking of having a set of classes that act like reports to perform prebaked queries on WADLogs. These could expose this data as restful web services allowing other applications (powershell scripts, excel, reporting services…) to display the data.

Here is an article on logging analytics.