How Do I Monitor and Log My .NET Applications Effectively?

Monitoring and logging .NET applications isn’t just about catching bugs—it’s about visibility, performance awareness, and long-term maintainability. Whether you're running microservices or a traditional web app, understanding what your application is doing at runtime is critical for stability and continuous improvement. And yet, it’s surprisingly common to find production systems with logs that either say too little or say far too much. In this post, we’ll walk through what effective monitoring and logging look like in the .NET ecosystem today, especially with .NET 8 and beyond. Why Does Logging Still Matter? If you've ever tried to debug a customer-reported issue without useful logs, you already know the answer. Logging isn’t for decoration—it’s the trail of breadcrumbs that tells you what your code did, not just what you think it should have done. More importantly, good logging helps answer questions like: What happened right before the application crashed? How often are use...