Serilog renders plain text logs in a simple format with each event’s timestamp, level and message:

2016-07-18 08:53:53.691 +10:00 [Information] Starting up at 07/18/2016 08:53:53
2016-07-18 08:54:23.716 +10:00 [Error] Timeout reached while waiting for input

If you find the full-width level names like Information and Error awkward to read, you can instruct Serilog 2.0 to write fixed-width names instead:

2016-07-18 08:53:53.691 +10:00 [INF] Starting up at 07/18/2016 08:53:53
2016-07-18 08:54:23.716 +10:00 [ERR] Timeout reached while waiting for input

This is done by overriding the sink’s outputTemplate and specifying a format like u3 for the Level property:

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
  .WriteTo.File("log.txt",
    outputTemplate: "{Timestamp:yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff zzz} [{Level:u3}] {Message}{NewLine}{Exception}")
  .CreateLogger();

Level formats consist of either u (for uppercase) or w (lowercase) and a number of characters. The level names are abbreviated so that Warning is shortened to WRN rather than WAR for example.

All plain text sinks support this option, including Console, File, RollingFile, and Trace. Thanks are due to Antony Koch for driving this feature.