Logging and Monitoring in .NET: Serilog and Application Insights

8 min read•February 9, 2026
.NET loggingSerilog .NETStructured logging C#Application Insights.NET monitoringILogger .NETLog correlation.NET observability

# Logging and Monitoring in .NET

Observability is critical for running .NET systems in production. Logging alone is not enough; you need logs, metrics, and traces that connect into a coherent debugging story.

Logging Strategy

Structured Logging

  • Use named properties, not plain text blobs
  • Keep event templates consistent across services
  • Enrich logs with environment, service, and correlation metadata

    • Serilog in Practice

  • Route logs to multiple sinks (console, file, centralized store)
  • Use enrichers for tenant/user/request context
  • Apply async sinks carefully to avoid backpressure issues

    • Monitoring and Tracing

  • Capture request latency and error rates
  • Track dependency calls (DB, HTTP, queue)
  • Use distributed tracing for cross-service diagnosis
  • Define SLO-aligned alerts, not noisy threshold spam

    • Security and Compliance

  • Never log secrets or sensitive personal data
  • Set retention policies by compliance requirements
  • Use log access controls and audit trails

    • Conclusion

    High-quality observability reduces MTTR dramatically and turns incident response from guesswork into a repeatable engineering process.

    I can help design a practical observability baseline for your .NET platform.

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