How to write and configure a custom provider for ASP.Net Healthmonitoring?

I'm looking for a walkthrough on how to create and use a custom provider for ASP.Net Healthmonitoring.

So far I've only worked with the e-mail provider that generates e-mails on errors. Basically I want to do the same, but with more flexibility:

I want to use the HealthMonitoring features (I don't want to use the Application_OnError event in the global.asax) in a way that allows me have access to an event, that gets thrown like "OnNewHealthMonitoringEntry" with all the information provided in the e-mail, to run custom code.

Edit:

Based on the source code provided here http://www.asp.net/general/videos/how-do-i-create-a-custom-provider-for-logging-health-monitoring-events I was able to build my own custom provider and implement it. Now I want to add some new attributes to configure my custom provider. Here is what the web.config looks lik开发者_开发百科e:

<healthMonitoring>
    <bufferModes>
        <add name="Log Notification" maxBufferSize="1" maxFlushSize="1" urgentFlushThreshold="1" regularFlushInterval="Infinite" urgentFlushInterval="00:00:10"/>
    </bufferModes>
    <providers>
        <add name="FileEventProvider" buffer="true" bufferMode="Log Notification" type="healthmonitoringtest.FileHealthMonitorEventProvider"/>
    </providers>
    <profiles>
        <add name="Custom" minInstances="1" maxLimit="Infinite" minInterval="00:00:00"/>
    </profiles>
    <rules>
        <add name="File Event Provider" eventName="All Errors" provider="FileEventProvider" profile="Custom"/>
    </rules>
</healthMonitoring>

If I attempt to add an attribute to the provider, like this

<providers>
    <add name="FileEventProvider" buffer="true" bufferMode="Log Notification" foo="bar"  type="healthmonitoringtest.FileHealthMonitorEventProvider"/>
</providers>

I'll get an error saying:

An exception of type 'System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException' occurred in System.Web.dll but was not handled in user code Additional information: Unexpected attribute foo in the configuration of the FileEventProvider.

Is it possible to store configuration necessary for custom provider close to the healthMonitoring section? I guess I could include the settings into the appSettings node, but I'd like to configure it somehow with attributes (inside the healthMonitoring node). Is that possible?

Edit2: You might take a look at this article: http://www.tomot.de/en-us/article/6/asp.net/how-to-create-a-custom-healthmonitoring-provider-that-sends-e-mails

The following series of articles will take you through the basics of using the Health Monitoring System upto creating Custom Events.

Then the following 26 minute video will take you through creating a custom provider that records events to a text-based log file.

UPDATE Based on Comment

Looking at your update and using Reflector to look at the source for the BufferedWebEventProvider class that you base your custom provider on, I have found that the Initialize method in BufferedWebEventProvider does a check at the end to see if there are any attributes that it doesn't recognize. This is done by removing values from the config NameValueCollection parameter as soon as they are assigned to the properties or fields of the BufferedWebEventProvider. Then a check is done to see if the config parameter is empty and if not that means that there are extra attributes added, which causes an exception to be thrown.

As to how to fix this problem, one option is to:

1. Move the call to base.Initialize to the end of the method
2. Remove the additional attributes as soon as you assign them to variables just like the provider does.

Something like the following would work:

public override void Initialize(string name, System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection config)
    {
        foo = config["foo"];
        if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(foo))
        {
            // You can set a default value for foo
        }

        //remove foo from the config just like BufferedWebEventProvider with the other
        //attributes. Note that it doesn't matter if someone didn't proivde a foo attribute
        //because the NameValueCollection remains unchanged if you call its Remove method
        //and the name doesn't exist.
        config.Remove("foo");

        base.Initialize(name, config);
    }

Hopefully this works out for you.