Websphere All Logs Are Going to Systemout.Log

Websphere all logs are going to SystemOut.log

The problem might be that WebSphere 6.1 uses Jakarta Commons Logging (JCL) internally, and if any of your code or 3rd-party libraries also use JCL, WebSphere's configuration conflicts with your application trying to use log4j. If this is happening, you'll see exactly what you're seeing.

There are multiple references and blog posts that describe ways to address this. We've found the simplest to be creating a file named org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory in the META-INF/services directory of your web application (in the root of the WAR archive). This file must contain the line:

org.apache.commons.logging.impl.Log4jFactory

(At least with newer versions of WebSphere...) Another key is that the JCL jar must be loaded from the same location as the log4j jar. e.g. either both from WEB-INF/lib or both from a shared library. Thus, you can't fall back on loading JCL from WebSphere's own provided copy. If they're loaded by different classloaders, they can't properly see each other.

Logging Stopped in Websphere

You might want to cross check the configuration in WAS admin console whether if it is mapped to the proper location as expected. Because the scenario of yours works fine with my environment.

Console -> Troubleshooting->Logs and Trace

Websphere with Logback logging to system out - formatting issue

I don't think you're going to be able to change the format. And if you could, it might break the current monitoring anyway.

I wonder if anyone would mind if you log to two loggers at the same time, SystemOut for the existing monitoring, and your own for a more readable format.

WebSphere logging to customized files

You have several options, which more or less can help you in archiving desired result.

1) WebSphere is using JUL and Jakarta Commons internally, so you can customize it but its a bit complex. See Adding logging and tracing to your application

2) Use external logger like log4j - see some more basic info here - WAS Logging - Java Util Logging and Log4j

3) Use new HPEL logging available since WAS 8.0. Although it doesn't create logs for each application, you can any time query log messages for the given application using logViewer, like this (you can also use tail like behavior using -monitor flag):

logViewer -includeExtensions appName=PlantsByWebSphere

It also allows you to do some more nice things like for example display only messages from given thread, etc. And is fully integrated in the admin console.

I'd recommend at least trying it, maybe it will fulfill your needs.

Some more details here:

• High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL)
• LogViewer command-line tool usage and options
• Log viewer in the console

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