Azure Diagnostics vs ELMAH use cases?

Question

I've used ELMAH on standalone (non-Azure) projects. For Azure related projects, I came across the Windows Azure Diagnostics (WAD) library.

At face value they appear to do the same things (with Azure Diagnostics doing more low level stuff too) so I wanted to ask if, from a technical perspective, one is more suited towards a particular type of workload/design than the other? Or are they fairly similar in use cases and it's just a vanilla-vs-chocolate (i.e. personal preference) thing?

Answer 1

Hi Sid.S,

I personally like using ELMAH for the way you can easily set it up on your Web Apps to start logging those Unhandled exceptions that might occur and the fact that you can easily configure it to log these exceptions on your database(s) or sending it via Email or even put it on Twitter. So, for these reasons it is not really fair to compare it to WAD, although WAD has many advantages as well.

One other cool tip on ELMAH: http://nuget.org/packages/WindowsAzure.ELMAH.Tables

Hope this helps!

---

Best Regards,
Carlos Sardo

Answer 2

Hi,

ELMAH and Windows Azure Diagnostics (WAD) have different purposes and can perfectly be used together. ELMAH captures unhandled exceptions, which you wouldn't know about if you were only using WAD. While WAD, on the other hand, gives you information about the OS and Application performance (through performance counters), IIS logs, Custom logs, trace logs.

So I really think you need both.

---

With regards,

Patriek

onwindowsazure.com

---

If this reply is of help to you, please don't forget to mark it as an answer.