serilog-aspnetcore VS serilog-extensions-logging

This article really doesn't provide anything the Serilog documentation doesn't cover. Additionally, the log examples are pretty poor. For instance, there's never a good reason to explicitly throw a NullReferenceException.

Just a simple example I found on web https://github.com/serilog/serilog-aspnetcore/blob/dev/samples/Sample/Program.cs Remove line 21-22 and you have a plain usage of serilog without asp.net

What do you mean by "Microsoft Logger"? If this is Microsoft.Extensions.Logging, then you can just plug in Serilog and continue using standard ILogger interface.

Serilog is a structural logging library for.NET applications that can be used for adding some cool diagnostic features to your application. This library provides a huge collection of new logging related features that are not available in the .NET built-in logging framework. It allows developers to log their messages to hundreds of different destinations including files, the console, on-premises, and cloud-based log servers, databases, and message queues. It also has native support of producing log output in plain text and JSON formats. It supports rich integration with .NET Core including ASP.NET Core. You can read the full list of features available here.

You probably want to use a logging framework to configure where you logs end up. I recommend taking a look at serilog.

Logging is built-in and you get access to structured logs from the ASP.NET Core host itself to your application. With tools like Serilog, you can extend your logging easily and save your logs to file, Azure, Amazon or any other output provider. You can configure verbosity and log levels via configuration (appsettings.json by default), and you can configure log levels by different categories.

ILogger is an abstraction provided by Microsoft. It is not a logging framework, it's a way to standardize code to work on any logging framework. In your actual program you need to actually put the logging provider under that abstraction - Microsoft provides some defaults like a console logger, but generally you want to configure Serilog/NLog/whatever. See: https://github.com/serilog/serilog-extensions-logging

Microsoft.Extensions.Logging is a pipeline that uses Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Abstractions as its structure. It doesn't actually write logs to anywhere or anything, for that you need a provider. Microsoft offers several providers include Console Output, Windows Events, et al. Serilog is just another provider.

You may need to enable logging, otherwise Activity will be null as described here. Regarding your exception message, you're not doing anything with the exceptionHandlerPathFeature object. The documentation you linked to shows some type checking with the is operator to produce an error.