CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellexceptionloggingserilog
Blair Paine
Blair Paine

Reputation: 31

Sending PowerShell exceptions to Serilog

This questions is in regards to how to log a PowerShell exception in Serilog so that it's interpreted as a fist-class property and not a large string.

I have a few issues:

There are some good details on how to log a .NET exception in Serilog on the following page and I would like to achieve something similar from PowerShell: http://nblumhardt.com/2014/09/how-not-to-parameterize-serilog-events/

In PowerShell exceptions have additional information. PowerShell has Error records. To look at an Error record in Powershell, first create an error in a new PowerShell console. For example:

ip[config

Now have a look at the error in the console but it won't show you all of the properties.

$error[0]

We can see what makes up an error record object and there are a number of properties.

 $error[0] | Get-Member

To get this to Serilog from PowerShell I could do something like the following:

$er = ($error[0] | Select * | Out-String)

That will expand the System.Management.Automation.ErrorRecord object, convert it into a single string ($er) so I can then add it to my log message.

$Log.Error({Exception}, $er)

It's not possible to send the full error record to Serilog because I have to expand all the properties first and that would end up as a PSCustomObject of base type System.Object.

What would be best practice here? Is there a better way than passing it in as a string? Can Serilog translate a System.Object which has the properties from a ErrorRecord?

Happy to provide further code examples if required.

Many thanks, Blair.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 501

Answers (1)

Blair Paine
Blair Paine

Reputation: 31

Thank-you Patrick. Your example worked for me. The issue was I was not putting the System.Exception property as the first property. I didn't realise I could pass the exception and the deconstructed ErrorRecord together in the same event.

Upvotes: 2

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