The router is the central part of the logging system. All log messages are sent to the router, which can distribute the messages from there to listeners such as viewers, text files, binary files, event logs, and databases. You would typically have the router installed on a separate machine from the rest of your logging system, but you do not have to. Once installed and configured (the configuration out of the box is usually suitable for most situations), the router runs as a Windows service and has no user interface:

The Log Viewer is designed to view historical log files that have been saved either manually or from the router/viewer configuration. If you are streaming a high number of messages through the system, you will no doubt collect a lot of log files that may need to be viewed. I wrote an enterprise-grade microservice system for a client that used ReflectInsight at the center of its system, and streamed messages to and through a RabbitMQ system. On average, we streamed roughly one million messages a day (it is still used in production), and, when problems arose, the Log Viewer's historical logging capabilities were invaluable:

The Live Viewer is what you will use most of the time to view your real-time logging. The capabilities of the Live Viewer are extensive to say the least. Briefly, the high-performance logging allows us to monitor instrumented applications in real time by displaying log messages in the Live Viewer. We can log incredibly rich details such as Exceptions, Objects, Datasets, Images, Process and Thread Information, and Well-Formatted XML. We can also quickly and easily navigate and trace through our applications to find the information we need. The Message Details panel displays the extended details of the selected message. The details could be as simple as the message itself, or complex data such as an object, dataset, binary blob, image, process and thread information, and the content of a collection. Syntax highlighting is available for select message, types such as SQL...

ReflectInsight supports many ways in which to navigate through your logged messages.

You can navigate by using one of the following methods:

• Find a matching Enter/Exit method block
• Jump to a parent Enter/Exit method block
• Jump from any message in a User Defined view to the All Messages view
• Go to a message by Line Number
• Advanced Search
• Quick Search (active view only)
• Message Type browse navigator
• Bookmarks

This panel allows us to further inspect a selected message. We can view various Date Time values, Time Zone, Process Id, Thread Id, Request Id, Category, Machine Name, and so on. We can also extend the message Properties panel by attaching user-defined properties to single or multiple...

Here is what the Advanced Search dialog looks like. As you can see, you can select the message types as well as many other options that you wish to view:

The viewer provides two ways to search messages by criteria.

This is mainly used for simple and quick text-based searching.

This is primarily used to search messages where a more complex search criterion is needed. Search criteria can include a combination of the following:

• Message Contents
• Message Type
• Message Contents AND Type
• Message Contents OR Type
• In addition to Regular...

We can display our time details in either Standard or Military time formats. Select the Time Zone Type that best suits your location, such as Source, Local, UTC, or Custom by choosing from one of the available system time zones:

This is what the Auto Save/Purge section looks like:

Apart from the library's ability to Auto Save rolling log files, the Live Viewer has similar capabilities in addition to Auto Purge the top portion of a rolling log file. You can configure the Live Viewer to either Auto Save or Auto Purge by applying one of the following methods.

This method forces the Live Viewer to save files once a specific criterion has been met (that is on a new day and/or message limit).

This method forces the Live Viewer to purge the top portion of the...

In this section, we will cover the things that you need to know about the configuration editor.

We can use the XML-based configuration file with our applications to make the ReflectInsight viewer behave the way we want it to. There are a few configuration categories, including auto save, filtering, and message coloring.

ReflectInsight is configured using an XML configuration file. The configuration information can be embedded within other XML configuration files such as the application or web .config file, or in a separate...

In this chapter, we learned about ReflectInsight and the incredible benefits it can provide you with . We saw how it can help a machine learning developer see exactly what is going on inside their algorithm. I encourage you to download your copy and try it out. You will never look at logging the same way again.

1. Configure the Live Viewer to meet your specific needs