To set up the target in the configuration file, use the following syntax:

<nlog xmlns="http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" 
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> 
  <targets> 
    <target name="network" xsi:type="Network" address="tcp://localhost:5555" 
            layout="${level} ${logger} ${message}${newline}"/> 
  </targets> 
  <rules> 
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="network"/> 
  </rules> 
</nlog> 

This assumes just one target and a single rule. More configuration options are described here.

To set up the log target programmatically use code like this:

using NLog; 
using NLog.Targets; 
 
class Example 
{ 
    static void Main(string[] args) 
    { 
        NetworkTarget target = new NetworkTarget(); 
        target.Layout = "${level} ${logger} ${message}${newline}"; 
        target.Address = "tcp://localhost:5555"; 
 
        NLog.Config.SimpleConfigurator.ConfigureForTargetLogging(target, LogLevel.Debug); 
 
        Logger logger = LogManager.GetLogger("Example"); 
        logger.Trace("log message 1"); 
        logger.Debug("log message 2"); 
        logger.Info("log message 3"); 
        logger.Warn("log message 4"); 
        logger.Error("log message 5"); 
        logger.Fatal("log message 6"); 
    } 
}

To print the results, use any application that's able to receive messages over TCP or UDP. NetCat is a simple but very powerful command-line tool that can be used for that. This image demonstrates the NetCat tool receiving log messages from Network target.

NOTE: If your receiver application is ever likely to be off-line, don't use TCP protocol or you'll get TCP timeouts and your application will crawl. Either switch to UDP transport or use AsyncWrapper target so that your application threads will not be blocked by the timing-out connection attempts.

There are two specialized versions of the Network target: Chainsaw and NLogViewer which write to instances of Chainsaw log4j viewer or NLogViewer application respectively.