Command-line importer for JSON log files

Last month, we took the wraps off of Seq Forwarder, a Windows service that collects and forwards events for occasionally (or unreliably) connected machines.

Sometimes it's necessary to go even further, and deal with machines that are never connected to Seq at all.

It's not a great place to be - lugging around log files manually - but this arises for a few reasons: it's necessary to analyze logs from a customer's environment without direct network access; from a security-critical server in an isolated network zone; or, from a user of a shrink-wrapped product that's mass-downloaded from the internet.

That's where seq-import.exe comes into the picture.

choco install seq-import

seq-import myapp.json https://seq-server --apikey=1234567890

This command-line tool accepts a file of newline-separated events from Serilog's canonical JSON formatter and uploads these to Seq via the HTTP API.

A log file importer is our second-ranked UserVoice item so we hope this will bring some joy to those of you who have been waiting :-)

The tool is ready to try - please watch its GitHub repository to follow along as it grows and improves, and please send issue reports or pull requests for changes you'd like to see.

Happy (offline) logging!

Nicholas Blumhardt

Read more posts by this author.