Best way to do logging in WCF application

Hi Experts, Please provide your inputs.

I think you can enable Message Logging and Tracking for your services, by default it is not turned ON, we need to configure it to turn it ON. Also it has option to enable it on client as well as server side of WCF component.
you can refer below links which give step by step introduction to configure this messaging and tracing.
1> WCF Logging for SOAP services
2> WCF Messaging and Tracing
When a message is recorded, the trace type depends on whether it is being traced at the client or the server. For example, an "Add" message that is sent to a client is traced under the "TransportWrite" category at the client, whereas the same message is traced under the "TransportRead" category at the service.
3> You can also download the samples from below link and in that refer samples at <InstallDrive>:\WF_WCF_Samples\WCF\Basic\Management\TracingAndLogging

Samples

Thanks Karrtik.

Is there a way to limit the logging just to ensure volume of  log files not take too much server memory if I go with the the first link provided above ?

if so than how could I customize the logging as it appears to me the in the default logging it would log everything which might not good from memory management perspective.

For tracing and messaging, you can set the level of logging/tracing to limit the log size, by setting the switchValue in the XML file something like below.

<source name="System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging" switchValue="Verbose">

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Or

 <source name="UserTraceSource" switchValue="Warning, ActivityTracing" >

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Please find below the recommended settings for production environment.
Recommended Settings

Also Microsoft recommends below to reduce performance cost.
Lessening Performance Cost

Setting ActivityTracing to off in the System.ServiceModel trace source generates a trace file that contains only user-defined activity traces, without any of the ServiceModel activity traces included. This results in a log file of much smaller size. However, the opportunity to correlate WCF processing traces is lost.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa354511%28v=vs.110%29.aspx

Hi Karrtik,

My apologies for delay in response.

One last thing in this, which approach is better suggested one i.e. in *.svc file or database approach where we can keep our logging information.

Nishant.

We have used file based approach thus far. Only reason I could think of storing log data in database is when I would want to perform some kind of analytics or heavy querying on this log data.

Thanks Karrtik. Happy you to have on expert exchange. Thanks for your suggestion and again apologies for my delay response.

Thanks you so much.

No problems, you are welcome nishant :)