News and information in the Seq ecosystem No Images? Click here The Seq NewsletterHello everyone! It's been a little while since we wrote; the holiday season (at least here in the Southern Hemisphere) is now thoroughly behind us, and 2017 is in full swing. This month we have an update on our plans for Seq in 2017, and we've got a lot of interesting news and community content to share. — Nick Seq 4 PlansSeq has been steadily growing and improving since the recent 3.4 release, but we've had a couple of course corrections around the pillars and overall direction for Seq 4. At this point in a product's life, it's probably not surprising to hear that features need to be added and integrated in to Seq very carefully. We've built a rich, broad, and useful diagnostics and monitoring product over the past four years: there's a lot of functionality in there! New features need to not only work alongside existing functionality, but keep the product moving towards a cohesive whole that feels consistent and well-integrated. Of the two main features initially slated for Seq 4, Projects and Charting on the dashboard, we've decided that charting provides a better opportunity to make broad improvements to Seq. This is because charting is very closely related to monitoring and alerting, both in the way the feature is used (charts are a way to visualize the measurement driving an alert), and in the implementation (the same aggregations drive both charting and alerts).
This means:
Actually, our goal is to surprise you with just how powerful monitoring and alerting with Seq can be. All our energy is going into making this a significant milestone. The fundamentals required for this work run deep; we're well and truly on our way, but we don't expect to ship a preview or more public details for another month or so. In the meantime, we'll continue previewing various elements of the work, such as the time slice caching and time range constraint support that are now available in the latest pre-release build on getseq.net/Download. Structured Logging and NLog 4.5 AlphaIf you're using Seq today, you're probably (though not necessarily) also using Serilog. Why is structured logging support in NLog such big news then? First, it means that the .NET ecosystem is on its way to incorporating "Message {Templates}" across the board. We've seen how Serilog Analyzer brings IntelliSense to Serilog message templates. With ASP.NET Core's Microsoft.Extensions.Logging and the very-popular NLog also supporting message templates, we're a step closer to getting this kind of tooling in other IDEs and editors. The NLog.StructuredEvents library joins MessageTemplates as a non-Serilog option for parsing and rendering structured log events. The future is really bright! Second, as wonderful as Serilog is, many teams already have an investment in NLog or would like to use it for other reasons. Having structured logging support in NLog means the full power of Seq is still available - our new NLog target can send events complete with a message template (for useful @EventTypes) and named properties. More choice is a good thing for everyone. On the WebLast month, Microsoft MVP Ryan Bijkerk published a detailed guide to Centralized logging hosted in Docker using Seq. Tommy Long wrote an amazing Logging Tips and Tricks article that covers a lot of ground. There's definitely something for everyone. Ali Özgür published a suite of high-quality Seq apps that publish events to Rocket.Chat, UDP broadcast, and the Jira, GitHub or GitLab issue trackers. Hats off to you, Ali! If you're using ASP.NET Core, you should check out our recent blog post on improving the quality of HTTP request logging, Smart Logging Middleware for ASP.NET Core. Library authors will enjoy Tony Morris's post Logging with Serilog, LibLog, and Seq. This is well worth checking out if you're wondering how best to write log events from a provider-neutral library. .NET Core and Linux UpdateLast up this month, an update on support for running Seq on Linux. Seq already has great support for Linux clients, through .NET Core and Serilog, Node.js and other libraries. We realize that some of our customers would find it convenient to run the Seq server on Linux infrastructure. With an appreciation for Linux ourselves, we're right on board with this. The most reliable way, long-term, for us to provide Seq on Linux is through .NET Core. Although the .NET Core runtime has reached 1.0, we're waiting for the associated tooling to also hit RTM status before we begin the considerable task of porting the codebase and Seq's build/packaging infrastructure. This should coincide with the Visual Studio 2017 release. If you're among those customers who would like to run Seq on Linux, and you're interested in helping to shape our support for this platform, we'd appreciate hearing from you. Please drop us a line via support@getseq.net. That's all for this month. Keep in touch, and happy logging!
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