title: What's the best practice for centralised logging?
body: <p>My team has inherited support for 100+ applications. The applications don't have any kind of common architecture, so the ones that do logging usually do it with custom code to local files or a local database, and it's all unmanaged. We want to change that.</p>
  
  <p>We're slowly migrating the applications over to using log4net and standardising the types of things that are logged. The next question becomes: where should we send the logs?</p>
  
  <p>I was thinking that it would be good to use a central SQL Server dedicated to receiving all the logs, which would provide easy maintenance (one place for backups/archiving) and provide the future possibility of some data mining and trend analysis.</p>
  
  <p>Is that the best practice for this kind of thing, or is there some dedicated application logging server we should be looking at instead?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update:</strong> I should have been more clear than just casually mentioning log4net and SQL Server: we're a Microsoft house, with most things written in .NET. UNIX solutions are no good for us.</p>