How to turn off Serilog?

Question

We are using Serilog to log items into a db with a Windows service, and the users wanted to be able to do a manual run, so we made a button (on a web page) to make a call to the same code (as a module, not the service itself).

When we added in the code to initialize the log so the code will continue adding to the db log table, it also logs all the http traffic after that as well. So after this code runs we want to 'turn off' the Logger running on the Webserver. Is there an easy way to do that?

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
       .WriteTo.MSSqlServer(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ConnString"].ConnectionString,
                "LOGS")
       .CreateLogger();

Answer 1

Log levels can be modified at runtime with LoggingLevelSwitch:

var ls = new LoggingLevelSwitch();

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
   .MinimumLevel.ControlledBy(ls)
   .WriteTo.MSSqlServer(...)
   .CreateLogger();

Logging will initially be at the Information level, you can change this via the switch.

Serilog doesn't define an Off level, but you can approximate it with:

ls.MinimumLevel = ((LogEventLevel) 1 + (int) LogEventLevel.Fatal);

...to turn logging off.

Answer 2

according to Microsoft documentation for logging if you set the log level to None, all logs will be suppressed.

To suppress all logs, specify LogLevel.None. LogLevel.None has a value of 6, which is higher than LogLevel.Critical (5).

Any logs below the minimum level are not: Passed to the provider. Logged or displayed.

you can refer to this documentation under Configure logging section. logging for asp.net core

for Serilog you can set

"Serilog": {
"MinimumLevel": {
  "Default": "6"
}}

this configuration will turn off Serilog, I try it at run time and it worked.

Answer 3

This question is a couple of years old, but I happen to be facing a similar problem right now.

The easiest way to turn Serilog's logging off is by creating a new logger without any sinks. From Serilog's documentation, Configuration Basics:

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration().CreateLogger();
Log.Information("No one listens to me!");

Edit (08/05/2017)

The solution above is not correct. After some more research, I've found that this can be done by setting a filter when configuring the logger:

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
    .Filter.ByExcluding(_ => !IsLoggingEnabled)
    .WriteTo.MSSqlServer(...)
    .CreateLogger();

, where IsLoggingEnabled is just a boolean flag.