Seq: Log Notification Via Slack

We've been using Seq with Serilog for a while now to centralize our logs and to present in a nice and structured way. Seq is awesome and we love it, it helped us solve a lot of production issues in half the time we would with any of the previous logging systems.

But now we want to tackle issues in a more proactive way instead of reactive. So we've been having some discussions with the operations team to improve the whole DevOps story and we want to monitor a bunch of stuff, but a very quick win to start with would be to be notified about any unhandled exceptions in the systems.

Then I googled "Seq notification" and couldn't find any useful information, I found a post about New Event Notification, but no lead on that. I should've just gone straight to the Seq website and I'd be luckier, but I kind of went a different path and started thinking about sending logs to Slack via Serilog with Serilog.Sinks.SlackClient. It got me through as a POC, but it would be quite painful to setup for every project and a new deployment would need to happen for any sort of change to the notification.

Alright, so after some discussions with my team, I went back to our Seq instance to see if I could find anything about notifications and voilà! I found out about Seq Apps.

There are quite a few integration options and you can find them here. In our case, we wanted to integrate with Slack, so that's the one we've used: Seq.App.Slack. You can find some more information about how to install a Seq App here.

After installing the Slack app for Seq, that's what I get:

Initially I thought "Oh! They don't have any option to notify about errors only" or something like that, but then I realized that the fact that you can select a Signal is so much more powerful. You can create a query as you want and turn into a signal like below and at any point in time if some type of error is not relevant enough to be a notification you can come back and update the Signal to tune it down as necessary.

Seq, you're always impressing me, I'm sure I'll find out about some awesome feature that I haven't used before.

Thank you and keep going with the great work.