Application.log not logging all errors since upgrade to Railo 4.2

[Zoe]

Hi all

Has the logging functionality for the application.log changed in Railo 4.2?

I have upgraded from railo v4.1.2.005 to v4.2.1.008 and since then system errors are being logged to the exception.log file but not the application.log file. The application.log file for my application hasn't got any new entries since the upgrade.

Before the upgrade all errors would be logged to both the exception.log and application.log which was perfect. The exception log would contain the error message and detail and the stack trace whereas the application log would be a smaller version with just the error message and detail (which is good for quickly scanning errors that occurred and then we can refer to the exception log when we need more info from the stack trace).

Log file location for application: C:\PATH_TO_APPLICATION_CODEBASE\WEB-INF\railo\logs

The types of errors I'm referring to here are when variables are missing or files are not found etc. These are some examples of what used to be shown in the application.log but are now only logged in exception.log:
* "ERROR","web-0","11/15/2015","10:44:59","","; Invalid column name 'MADE_UP_FIELD_NAME'."
* "ERROR","web-0","11/16/2015","09:34:35","","Page /member_logos/CDC4AF85-442B-4F4F-8D42633DDB34D9F8.gif not found"

I've checked the settings in the new Railo Web Admin 'Logging' menu and the application & exception logs are both set to logging level INFO and the filenames/locations are all correct.

I've located where these settings are stored in the railo config (C:\PATH_TO_APPLICATION_CODEBASE\WEB-INF\railo\railo-web.xml.cfm) and the values in the <logging> section are updated correctly when I make changes in the Web Admin > Logging interface.

The other logs are working as they used to (mail, scheduler, exception), just not application.

I'm wondering if the purpose of the application.log file has changed or if there is a new setting that needs to be turned on to tell railo to log all errors to the application log too (or maybe I need to log it manually now).

Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Jean Moniatte]

You might want to check http://www.lucee.org

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[Peter Boughton]

The changes between those versions are listed on the History page:
  http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/download/history/

One of those issues highlights that Railo 4.2 switched to log4j which I would guess is at least part of the issue.

It may or not be something you can address yourself (by changing log levels or looking for whether there's a log4j.properties with relevant settings in), but since there are no developers currently working on Railo, this is very unlikely to be fixed at a Railo level. You should look at upgrading to Lucee 4.5 (a fork which the Railo community has moved to). More info at http://lucee.org


Also, rather than scanning the log files, you might want to use software like Buglog to index and aggregate all exceptions that occur, so you can get simple summaries, drill down into detail, look at errors chronologically, by most frequent, across multiple servers, etc. http://bugloghq.com

[Zoe]

Thanks for the responses Jean and Peter

We're looking to move to Lucee but this isn't a quick process for a corporate system but we'll get there soon.

We are using Splunk for reporting on the logs so scanning through the 1-liner errors in the application log is a lot easier to read than the full error with stack trace from the exception logs.

Thanks for the suggestion on checking the log4j configuration, I was trying to find something like that yesterday but couldn't find anything but will delve further.

I might just have to suffer through using the exception logs for now and prioritise the upgrade to Lucee.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.