The Seq Newsletter

Hello! We hope 2021 is treating you well. Plenty has happened in the world of Seq since our last newsletter in November: we even sneaked out a release on December 24th (we're sorry!), so there's quite a bit to catch up on 😊.

New cheat sheets 🎉

Seq's query language is designed to stretch from very simple to rather more complicated searching and analysis. If you only occasionally reach for the more advanced features, the Seq 2021.1 cheat sheet will be handy to keep by your desk.

Seq 2021 Cheat Sheet

The cheat sheet is published in various formats through the https://github.com/datalust/seq-cheat-sheets repository. If you spot any issues, or think there's something we should add or clarify, we'd love for you to get in touch and raise an issue over there.

Seq 2020.5 and 2021.1 ✨

In case you missed them, Seq 2020.5 and 2021.1 both shipped on their planned six-weekly release dates 🙌. We rolled up the highlights from both releases into a combined release announcement.

This pair of releases include a lot of behind-the-scenes changes to keep Seq stable and healthy, including migration onto .NET 5, reworked support for base paths and canonical URIs (important behind reverse proxies like K8s ingress!), and an overhaul of how the ci modifier is handled in the query engine.

Updates to Seq.Extensions.Logging, Serilog.Sinks.Seq, and bunyan-seq

Several Seq client libraries have received updates:

Version 5.0.0 of Serilog.Sinks.Seq adds targets for netstandard2.0 and net5.0, helping to trim back the package dependency graph
Version 6.0.0 of Seq.Extensions.Logging now supports ASP.NET 5's activity tracing options, adds targets for netstandard2.0 and net5.0, and supports configuration of "ServerUrl" and "ApiKey" in the "Logging"/"Seq" appsettings.json configuration section
Version 0.6.0 of bunyan-seq includes a fix for an issue that could cause application-level crashes

Seq Discussions have moved 💬

We're slowly migrating away from the question-and-answer forum under docs.datalust.co, and towards GitHub Discussions. The conversation management features in GitHub discussions will make it easier to find relevant threads through upvotes and filtering.

In conjunction with turning on GitHub Discussions, we've also started migrating long-running enhancement requests from our issue tracker to discussion threads. Going forward, so that it's clearer where our effort is being focused, we're using the issue tracker for scheduled enhancements only, with ideas, suggestions, and potential future work tracked in discussion threads.

What are we working on?

There are quite a few active threads running at Datalust right now. The ones getting the most cycles are:

Clustering — If you've been subscribed to this newsletter for a while, you'll know that clustering has been in the works for multiple years. Now in 2021, we're finally seeing the light at the end of the clustering tunnel, and although we plan to start small (with only basic HA configurations initially supported), we're expecting to have some of the first pieces of multi-node Seq in your hands later this year.
Top-level alerts — Seq has a great little alerting feature, but it's tucked away under Dashboards, isn't as easy to use or manage as it could be, and sits uneasily beside some of the related functionality provided by app instances. In a near-future release, we'll have a new alerting implementation to unveil, with easier management, and some unification of the alerting-related concepts across the Seq UI. Stay tuned!
Template imports and exports with seqcli — Sharing Seq signals, dashboards, and queries between servers (or between organizations) is tricky today. The first pieces of a unified templating system just landed in seqcli (they form the basis of a new template loader, coming alongside 2021.2), and we'll be extending this and opening it up to user-created templates in the near future.

Blog posts and community content

A couple of posts you might enjoy:

Structured Logging and Logs Management. A case study using ASP.NET Core, Serilog & Seq by Stav Sofer on Medium
Setting an initial password when deploying Seq to Docker on the Seq blog

Since we're now shipping product updates on a six week cycle, we've synchronized the Seq newsletter with this schedule. The next upcoming release is 2021.2, on March 23rd, so we'll be in touch around that date.

Until then, happy logging!

What did you think of this month's newsletter? Have suggestions for content you'd like to see? We'd love to hear from you — please reply to this email and let us know.