Section 2 of 6 Business case
Project effort
The real burden of logging is almost never the tooling itself. It is engineer time, delayed releases, and hours of downtime while nobody can see what the code did.
People effort — the line that actually moves the plan
Hand-written ILogger or Serilog calls look free until you count the work: decide what to log, keep it in sync with the method, review it, and hunt the gaps during an incident.
- Coverage work: every new feature needs log lines or it ships dark. ArgusLogs covers the method when you mark it — not when someone remembers a string.
- Incident work: missing logs turn a 20-minute fix into a four-hour archaeology session. That is overtime, lost orders, and a support queue.
- Onboarding work: a new developer should not need a tour of “where we log.” One convention — [LogMethod] — is cheaper than folklore.
Free license vs platform fees
Enterprise APM is priced for traffic. The month you debug a production issue is the month the bill jumps. ArgusLogs is free — you only need a license key. It is not a meter on every JSON line.
- No ingest tax when you turn logging up to find a bug.
- No extra cluster of agents, collectors, and dashboards to keep alive.
- You still own the files. There is no mandatory cloud to send customer data to.
Where the effort goes
| Effort driver | With ArgusLogs | With other tools |
|---|---|---|
| Writing and updating log statements | Near zero after the attribute is on the type or method. | Continuous. Every method, every refactor, every new service. |
| Tool / platform fees | Free product. License key only. No usage meter. | APM: ingest and hosts. Loggers: cheap software, expensive people. |
| Incident hours (MTTR) | Entry, parameters, return, SQL, and duration are already there. | Hours reconstructing a path that was never logged. |
| Big-bang rewrite “so we can observe it” | Not required. Weave the assemblies you already run. | Often proposed. Rarely finished. Always expensive. |
| Vendor lock-in of production data | Logs stay in your files, your disk, your SIEM if you choose. | APM: data lives in their cloud. Leaving is another project. |