Do any tools exist that allow cross platform error logging and tracking for multiple applications?

Question

Our development team hosts many different applications both .Net and Java based. Currently, we handle our error logging with Log4J and use emails to alert the development team when problems arise. Currently, we get thousands of alerts a day and it's becoming a little tedious to maintain.

We've been discussing creating a central dashboard for all our apps. The ideal tool would track errors, warnings, info etc. over the life of an application (it doesn't necessarily need to be db driven). The idea is that the data can be viewed on a dashboard, drillable to specific errors with the capability of alerting via emal when triggers and or thresholds are met.

Elmah is good for .Net but we need a tool that could also work for Java EE? What is the best way to go about this? Should we:

• Just use Elmah for the .Net apps and find something similar for Java and build our own dashboard to create a united look & feel?

OR

• Is there a tool that already exists that we can leverage to do this cross platform?

I've tried looking in Sourceforge but it's difficult to describe what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

I don't think you have a logging problem, I think that you have an integration problem, no matter if it is logging, or any other area your root issue is the same... How do I make my completely different components talk to each other?

There is a lot of approaches, but probably the easiest to implement for different technologies is Web services or REST... You will probably need to have a central logger that you need to implement independently, and then build a Web service/REST interface to which you are going to have to connect to...

Maybe a different line of investigation for you is to see if there is a logging product out in the market that takes web service calls... If that's the case, you only need to change your components to make a service call every time.

Something else that you need to consider is that your remote logging should never superseed your local logging, that's it do both, the reason is very simple, remote calls can fail, so code as if they will fail.

Answer 2

We have been using http://www.exceptional.io/ for error tracking for some time now: it's cheap and extremely simple.

To report errors you just post a json document to its endpoint.