Switching default log4j threshold

Joseph Marques jmarques at redhat.com
Thu Jan 21 06:32:46 UTC 2010


On 01/21/2010 01:00 AM, Mike McCune wrote:
> I spent 30 minutes being frustrated that I couldn't see any changes
> affected by adding DEBUG packages to our log4j config file.  No mater
> what I did, my console wouldn't show the additional output.
>
> I realized it was the Threshold setting in our config file.
>
> Anyone object if I bump this to DEBUG?  Why would we permanently want to
> hide DEBUG from the console output.  Seems pointless
>    
In a production environment where each individual RHQ Server is 
communicating with a few dozen (or a few hundred) agents, the amount of 
debug logging goes through the roof.  I wouldn't mind parameterizing 
this and having "-Pdev,container" replace the token with DEBUG for our 
daily development, but we should leave it at INFO for the prod builds so 
as not to create hundreds of megs of logs at client sights, which would 
(considering the default log file retention policy) overwrite any 
meaningful data that would have been useful attachments for customer 
support cases.

In the most abstract sense, the DEBUG level should really only be 
necessary if something needs to be debugged.  If you are finding that 
some subsystem logger is not being "chatty" enough, then we should 
discuss moving more messages to INFO level.  The best example of this 
occurred about 6 months ago, right before the RHQ 1.3.0 release.  During 
large-scale tests, we found the INFO-level logging for the measurement 
subsystem to be woefully inadequate.  In particular, we had little sense 
as to whether the hourly background jobs that govern compression/purging 
of metric data were making consistent progress, especially in cases 
where the management infrastructure had an outage (planned or otherwise) 
and the system was processing large amount of backlogged data.  Take a 
look at what we log at INFO level today in the DataPurgeJob and 
MeasurementCompressionManagerBean classes to see what I mean.


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