I was hoping on getting some replies to my last message as I'm trying to figure
out the best way to utilize the existing logging frameworks, log4j(2) and
log4net in our case, to log our business events and ensure the business events
flow to the correct destination.
I think the two main suggestions were to either use markers or a separate "well
known" logger.
As I mentioned in the previous message, I was about to write a sample which
used markers just to better understand how they work. The first road block I
ran into is that log4net does not support markers, as far as I can tell. Now
the implementation doesn't have to be the same on both windows and linux, but
that would certainly be a plus if it was. Also, it doesn't look like markers
have been heavily adopted by many logging frameworks. The one article I read
only listed log4j2 and logback.
In addition, while markers seem like they would be better at indicating the
type or category of event as opposed to using a level, you still have to define
a marker for each type I guess. I could either define a custom level or a
custom marker. Since markers are not available in log4net and custom levels
are, a custom level might work out better for us.
Using a "well known" logger to log business events seems like a reasonable
approach. And while I don't see any major downsides with going this route, it
seems that a piece of code which is logging using their own logger should be
able to log a business event with that same logger. It was stated previously
that the level indicates the importance of the event and the logger indicates
the types of events, or why someone might want to look at the events. The
example given was some market data code which used its own logger to log market
data information. That seems totally reasonable, however, it doesn't seem to
fit my example. In our case any component can emit a business event.
I then thought that maybe I could use the EventLogger, which I think someone
might have mentioned along the way. I was hoping to try that out also,
assuming that allowed me to pass a marker in whatever methods it exposed.
However, I only see a static marker property on the EventLogger class.
The other option which I'm considering is exposing a property on my event
object which indicates the category of event. At the moment I have a "type"
property which, of course, indicates the event type. However, this will be
different for every different business event and thus I need another property
which tells me that the event is a "business" event. Then I was thinking I
could write a filter which checks the message object to see if it's one of my
events and if so use the "category" to forward to the appropriate destination.
Am I missing any other viable solutions?
Thanks,
Nick
> From: nic...@msn.com
> To: log4j-user@logging.apache.org
> Subject: markers
> Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 22:25:37 -0400
>
>
>
>
> I was about to starting writing a sample to see how markers work and to see
> if they could be used for logging business events instead of using a custom
> level. While I might have mentioned log4net in passing, we're trying to
> capture these business events using existing logging frameworks. The
> thinking is that we'd use log4net on windows and log4j(2) on linux (no
> facade). Ideally the design would be similar across both platforms. That
> being said, I'm surprised at how different log4net is from log4j(2). It
> appears log4net doesn't support markers. While we don't have to have the
> same solution for both platforms, it would be nice if the solutions were the
> same or similar.
>
> I also looked at the EventLogger and that class doesn't have any overloads
> which take a marker, just a static marker property. I guess the EventLogger
> can be assigned only a single marker?
>
> Thanks,
> Nick
>
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