Welcome to NLog!

NLog is a flexible and free logging platform for various .NET platforms, including .NET standard. NLog makes it easy to write to several targets. (database, file, console) and change the logging configuration on-the-fly.

NLog has support for structured and traditional logging.

The focus for NLog: high performance, easy-to-use, easy to extend and flexible to configure.

Features

Easy to configure

NLog is very easy to configure, both through configuration file and programmatically. Even without restarting the application, the configuration can be changed.

Templatable

Every log message can be templated with various layout renders

Extensible

Even though NLog has targets and pre-defined layouts, you can write custom targets or pass custom values

Structured logging

Fully support for structured logging

Targets

Targets are used to display, store or pass log messages to another destination. NLog can dynamically write to one of multiple targets for each log message.

There are more than 30 targets provided out-of-the-box, including:

Files

Write logs to any number of files, with automatic file naming and archival. NLog won't lock your files by default.

Event Log

Write to event log local or remote

Database

Store your logs in databases supported by .NET

Console

Write real-time to the command-line console including color coding of messages

E-mail

You can send emails whenever application errors occur

ASP.NET core Logging

Write log messages to the ASP.NET Core Logging

There are also wrapper targets which provide buffering, load balancing, failover situations, asynchronous writing and many more scenarios. The full list of targets is available on the config options page. If you didn't find the target to fit your needs, you can easily write a custom one.

Support

NLog supports the following platforms:
  • .NET 5
  • .NET Framework 3.5, 4, 4.5 - 4.8
  • .NET Framework 4 client profile
  • Xamarin Android
  • Xamarin iOs
  • Windows Phone 8
  • Silverlight 4 and 5
  • Mono 4
  • ASP.NET 4 (NLog.Web package)
  • ASP.NET Core (NLog.Web.AspNetCore package)
  • .NET Core (NLog.Extensions.Logging package)
  • .NET Standard 1.x - NLog 4.5
  • .NET Standard 2.x - NLog 4.5
  • UWP - NLog 4.5

License

The source code is available under the terms of BSD license.