Azure DevOps Release changing appsettings.json Logging section - azure-devops

Question

I have a problem regarding Azure DevOps and release management. First a little background - we use visualstudio.com along with build agents, release agents (running on different environment VMs) to manage our CI, builds, and releases. I am trying to troubleshoot logging on my non-development servers and have traced the problem back to missing elements in my appsettings.json file. When I log into my production VMs and look at the appsetings.json file, I found that my Logging section looked like this:
"Logging": {
"IncludeScopes": false,
"LogLevel": {
"Default": "Information"
}
},
While within my appsettings.json file within my build artifacts (the website .zip file) looks like this:
"Logging": {
"IncludeScopes": false,
"LogLevel": {
"Default": "Debug",
"System": "Information",
"Microsoft": "Information"
}
},
My logging issues are fixed when I go on the server and change the appsettings.json Logging section to match what is should be according to the appsettings in the build .zip.
My question is - what is it within the Azure DevOps release pipeline (formerly VSTS) that is changing the appsettings.json Logging section? I have verified that my release definition has no variable substitutions for the logging section.

Answer 1

This looks very much like your build is taking the wrong sources. Is it possible that the wrong appsettings.json that you're seeing reflects an outdated version? I don't know why this happens, but I've seen this a couple of times in the past both with Git and TFVC.
If this is the issue, then cleanup your agent working folders or select (once or permanantly) cleanup in the build definition:

Answer 2

Found the problem (and its a silly one). The problem ended being multiple declarations of the Logging section in the appsettings.json file. The declaration at the bottom of the file has:
"Logging": {
"IncludeScopes": false,
"LogLevel": {
"Default": "Information"
}
},
which would match whats getting deployed.