A previous generation application suite simply uses OutputDebugString( ) to achieve centralized logging for a multi-app suite running on a single host. The next generation replacement is in the design stage, and will be distributed. It is desired to maintain an efficient and reliable means of centralized logging.
One idea is some sort of publish-subscribe model, whereby each app writes to a publisher, with the publisher responsible for delivering the messages to each subscriber. Another idea is to have each app use a RollingFileAppender, and have a background process examine the time tags to assemble a centralized log from the individual files. Obviously time-syncing will be necessary between hosts, and a means to determine any offsets. Both of these approaches may involve more work than we would like to budget for, and may have inherent time-order ambiguity for messages that are close together due to OS context switching. Any comments on these approaches? Any other ideas on how better to do this? Thanks, -Mike
