Creating a solution with multiple small services is great of course. It provides you with a lot of flexibility and scalability.

There are however a couple of things you have to think about when designing and developing a solution with multiple services. One of the things you need to figure out is how to implement proper logging. For an actual production system you need to have this in place in order to monitor and debug the overall solution.

We, developers using Azure Functions, are already blessed with some logging mechanisms and tools provided out of the box! The out of the box stuff is pretty basic, but it gets the job done and will make your life much easier when the need arises to analyze a production issue.

Logging in your function

When first creating your Azure Function you will probably see a parameter being passed in your Run method called log.

public static class Function1
{
    [FunctionName("Function1")]
    public static async Task<HttpResponseMessage> Start(
        [HttpTrigger(AuthorizationLevel.Anonymous, "get", Route = null)]
        HttpRequestMessage req,
        TraceWriter log)
    {
        log.Info("C# HTTP trigger function processed a request.");
        // Logic
    }
}

This log-parameter can be used to do some simple logging inside your Azure Function. When invoking this function you’ll be able to see the specified log entry in your console.

[10-4-2018 19:12:12] Function started (Id=a669fc9a-b15b-44b9-a863-47a303aca6b6)
[10-4-2018 19:12:13] Executing 'Function1' (Reason='This function was programmatically called via the host APIs.', Id=a669fc9a-b15b-44b9-a863-47a303aca6b6)
[10-4-2018 19:12:13] C# HTTP trigger function processed a request.

All of the other common logging levels, like Error, Warning and Verbose, are also implemented in the TraceWriter. After having deployed the Azure Function to Azure you will also be able to see the log messages in the Portal.

2018-04-10T19:30:09.112 [Info] Function started (Id=71cead2b-3f90-4c04-8c82-42f6a885491a)
2018-04-10T19:30:09.127 [Info] C# HTTP trigger function processed a request.
2018-04-10T19:30:09.205 [Info] Function completed (Success, Id=71cead2b-3f90-4c04-8c82-42f6a885491a, Duration=87ms)

Checking out the log messages inside the log monitor is nice and all, but the best thing over here is the (automatic) integration with Application Insights! If you have activated this feature you will be able to see all logs in the Application Insights Search blade.

I totally recommend using Application Insights to monitor your application, along with all of the logging, as it’s an awesome piece of technology with endless possibilities for your DevOps teams. I’ll share more of my experience with Application Insights in a later post, because it’s too much to share in a single post.

Using the TraceWriter is a nice way to get you started with logging, but it’s probably not something you want to use in an actual application.

Introducing the ILogger

A different way to start logging is by using the ILogger from the Microsoft.Extensions.Logging namespace. You can just replace the earlier mentioned TraceWriter with the ILogger, change the logging methods and be done with it. The Azure Functions runtime will make sure some concrete implementation is being injected which will act similarly to the TraceWriter.

The main benefit will be the improved testability of your Azure Function as this parameter is much easier to mock.

One thing I did notice though is the ILogger doesn’t output any logging to the Azure Functions console application when running locally. There appears to be an (now open) issue on GitHub which mentions this bug. But don’t worry, you can see all the expected logging in the available tooling of the Azure Portal.

As mentioned, the ILogger is a better solution if you want to use Azure Functions in your actual project, because it offers better testability. However, the functionality is quite limited and you can’t extend much on the ILogger at this time. If you already have some kind of logging mechanism or framework elsewhere in your solution your probably don’t want to introduce this new logging implementation. My go-to logging framework is log4net and I’d like to use it for the logging inside my Azure Functions also. In order to do so you need to configure a thing or two when setting up log4net. It isn’t very complicated, but something to keep in mind when setting up the Azure Functions.

I’ll describe the necessary steps in a later post.

For now my main advice is just to use the ILogger instead of the TraceWriter. Both work very well, but ILogger offers some advantages compared to the TraceWriter.