As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a new project the last month or so. In fact I teamed up with my buddy @jesperkc early on, which turned out as a very awarding and great experience. It has always bugged me, that the native UI of ELMAH were a bit limited and provided no ways of searching your logs. I’ve worked on multiple projects using ELMAH and even though ELMAH is probably the best logging package for .NET web applications, I’ve always found myself exporting the errors to some other format or querying the database directly. With that piece of history, I’m ready to introduce elmah.io!

So what’s elmah.io? In its basic form, elmah.io is an ErrorLog implementation for ELMAH. Like most error loggers, this one logs to external storage, in this case http://elmah.io. All errors are stored in ElasticSearch, which is a great search engine. Having website errors in ElasticSearch makes it possible to do all sorts of funky searches on top of your errors. This leads me to the second part of elmah.io: the UI.

The elmah.io UI is available on http://elmah.io, by logging in using your favorite social provider and creating a new error log from the dashboard:

When created, you will be send to the settings page of your new log:

The install description guides you through the process of installing elmah.io in your website project. Actually it’s quite easy. Install the elmah.io NuGet package and copy paste the xml in step 2 to your web.config. That’s it, dudes! You now log all your website errors to elmah.io. Pretty sweet, right?

If you generate some 404’s on your website, navigate to the search page of your log by clicking on the error log row on the dashboard:

The search page shows you the recent errors as well as a graph showing the number of errors from the last 14 days. The most exiting part is the search filters, where you can do wildcard searches, filter by date and more. I won’t go into more detail about all of the features, but instead let you try it yourself. The service is free and located on http://elmah.io.

If you feel up to it, please help us by sending comments and follow the elmah.io twitter account. I also want to spend a little time thanking the people who helped us doing elmah.io: Jesper of course for teaming up with me on the project, Atif for the feedback and pull requests (yeah the client is open source!) as well as letting me loose on the ELMAH code base, the always helpful Martijn for reviewing the first implementation of the NEST code, Dennis, Rasmus and Rasmus for helping testing and for great input.