When Serilog is not behaving as you expect, this may be caused by an internal exception or configuration issue. Here are a couple of ways to sort things out.

SelfLog

First, Serilog will write simple diagnostic messages to user-specified output if provided. Call *SelfLog.Enable()* at program start-up:

*Serilog.Debugging.SelfLog.Enable(msg => Debug.WriteLine(msg));*

The system console, a file or an in-memory *StringWriter* can all be used to collect Serilog's output by providing a *TextWriter* instead of a delegate:

*Serilog.Debugging.SelfLog.Enable(Console.Error);*

Serilog never writes its own events to user-defined sinks.

Warning: *SelfLog* does not perform any synchronization over the provided *TextWriter*. For most implementations you should use the *TextWriter.Synchronized()* method to ensure the object being passed in can be written from multiple threads:

**var file = File.CreateText(...);**

*Serilog.Debugging.SelfLog.Enable(TextWriter.Synchronized(file));*