NLog is a free logging platform for .NET, Silverlight and Windows Phone with rich log routing and management capabilities. It makes it easy to produce and manage high-quality logs for your application regardless of its size or complexity.

NLog is open source software, distributed under the terms of BSD license and source is available on GitHub.

Packages are also available via NuGet.

Recent News

• 2011-07-17 NLog 2.0 has been released!
• 2011-06-17 NLog 2.0 Release Candidate is now available
• 2011-04-20 Exception logging enhancements
• 2011-04-14 Simplifying NLog.Extended.dll usage
• 2011-01-09 NLog for Windows Phone 7

Go to News Archive.

Features

NLog can process diagnostic messages emitted from any .NET language (such as C# or Visual Basic), augment them with contextual information (such as date/time, severity, thread, process, environment enviroment), format them according to your preference and send them to one or more targets such as file or database.

.NET, C/C++ and COM interop APIs are supported so that all your application components including legacy modules written in C++/COM can route their log messages through a common engine.

Supported targets include:

• Files – single file or multiple, with automatic file naming and archival
• Event Log – local or remote
• Database – store your logs in databases supported by .NET
• Network – using TCP, UDP, SOAP, MSMQ protocols
• Command-line console – including color coding of messages
• E-mail – you can receive emails whenever application errors occur
• ASP.NET trace
• … and many more

Other key features:

• very easy to configure, both through configuration file and programmatically
• easy-to-use logger pattern known from log4xxx
• advanced routing using buffering, asynchronous logging, load balancing, failover, and more
• cross-platform support: .NET Framework, .NET Compact Framework and Mono (on Windows and Unix)