Accurate logging is an important requirement for any server environment. To make centralized administration easier, applications typically prefer to log to the host operating system's central logging system. For Windows-based systems this means Event Viewer, while Linux/UNIX based systems have relied on Syslog for decades. The difference in systems can make heterogeneous environments more difficult to support. The aptly named syslog4net provides .NET applications with an easy way to log directly to a Syslog daemon.

Syslog4net is an addition to log4net that brings the ability to create messages that are compliant with the RFC5424 standard. While log4net currently allows messages to be written to a syslog server, they are not in the standards compliant format that syslog4net provides. The usage of the RFC5424 standard provides several more fields, including message priority, application name, and hostname among several others. The team notes that in addition to these fields, syslog4net can be used to log exceptions. Information about the exception is routed to syslog, while the the full details of the exception (message, stack trace, etc) are logged locally. This provides awareness of when exceptions occur without overfilling logs. Finally syslog4net allows the logging of any (key,value) data desired.

Syslog4net has been written by Dominic Lachowicz and Joe Polino with the copyright held by Merchant Warehouse LLC. The project is open source and available under the Apache License. Project files are available on GitHub and are written in C#.