I looked over that stackoverflow post and I'm still not seeing a good match as
a way for us to log our business events.
A business event I guess is an event which extends whatever schema we come up
with for a business event. While an instance of this schema could be logged at
any level, that really doesn't make sense in our scenario, regardless of
whether some marker was supplied. If we had some way to know an event is a
business event we wouldn't need level. We could of course add some property to
our schema which indicates the 'category' of the event, 'business' being one
such category. Instead we were thinking we could just use level to indicate
that an event is a business event.
As I mentioned, we're looking to capture 'trace' level events to one store,
'info' - 'fatal' level events to another store, and 'business' events to yet
another store. For 'trace' and 'info' - 'fatal' it seems reasonable to filter
on level within the appender to get those events to the appropriate location.
It seemed reasonable to do something similar for 'business'.
I also looked into the EventLogger but not sure that's appropriate. For one we
lose the granularity to control a specific piece of code from generating
business events. This is most likely a non-issue as I have mentioned that we
don't want to turn business logging off. The other is that we lose the name of
the logger as it would be the same for everyone. Not sure this is that big a
deal either as I guess you might be able to capture component name, though I
would rather distinguish using logger name.
Thanks,
Nick
> From: ralph.go...@dslextreme.com
> Subject: Re: approach for defining loggers
> Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2015 20:39:11 -0700
> To: log4j-user@logging.apache.org
>
> I still don’t understand why you don’t want to use Markers. They were
> designed exactly for the use case you are describing.
>
> You might set retention policies for debug vs info, error and fatal, but a
> BUSINESS marker could cross-cut them all. That is exactly why it is NOT a
> level. IOW, it gives you a second dimension for filtering. Ceki invented
> Markers when he created SLF4J. For his point of view see
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16813032/what-is-markers-in-java-logging-frameworks-and-that-is-a-reason-to-use-them
>
> <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16813032/what-is-markers-in-java-logging-frameworks-and-that-is-a-reason-to-use-them>.
>
> Ralph
>
>
>
>
> > On Sep 7, 2015, at 5:54 PM, Nicholas Duane <nic...@msn.com> wrote:
> >
> > If I'm attempting to control all the logging from the configuration and I
> > don't know the complete set of loggers in my application as there could be
> > 100's or 1000's, wouldn't it be hard to separate events based on loggers?
> > It would seem much easier to separate events based on level. In addition,
> > level might be a more reasonable approach for separating. For example, if
> > I want to send all events to some big-data backend I might want to separate
> > out traces and debug from info to fatal as traces and debug are most likely
> > less important from a systems management aspect. My retention period for
> > traces and debug might be just a couple days. The retention period for
> > info to fatal could be 30 days. Business level might be 2 years. Any
> > system management notifications would probably be driven off of info to
> > fatal events and not trace and debug events, which is another reason you
> > might want to separate by level.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Nick
> >
> >> Subject: Re: approach for defining loggers
> >> From: ralph.go...@dslextreme.com
> >> Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2015 08:50:58 -0700
> >> To: log4j-user@logging.apache.org
> >>
> >> A logging “Level” is a level of importance. That is why there is a
> >> hierarchy. If you want informational messages then you also would want
> >> warnings and errors.
> >>
> >> “BUSINESS” does not convey the same meaning. Rather, it is some sort of
> >> category, which is what Markers are for.
> >>
> >> Using the class name as the logger name is a convention. If you really
> >> want the class name, method name or line number then you should be
> >> specifying that you want those from the logging event, rather than the
> >> logger name. Unless location information is disabled you always have
> >> access to that information.
> >>
> >> In short, different loggers are used primarily as a way of grouping sets
> >> of messages - for example all org.hibernate events can be routed to a
> >> specific appender or turned off en masse. Levels are used to filter out
> >> noise across a set of logging events. Markers are used to categorize
> >> logging events by arbitrary attributes.
> >>
> >> Ralph
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Aug 31, 2015, at 8:10 AM, Nicholas Duane <nic...@msn.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Thanks for the feedback. I will look into Markers and MDC.
> >>>
> >>> With respect to using a separate logger, it would seem I would lose the
> >>> information about what application code, eg. the class logger, is
> >>> sourcing the event. We would like to have this information. On top of
> >>> that, it seems odd, maybe to me only, that for this new level we have our
> >>> own logger. It seemed reasonable to me that this new event we want to
> >>> capture is just a new level. Just like a DEBUG event is different from
> >>> an INFO event. If I define a BUSINESS level why would that not follow
> >>> the same design as the current levels? You wouldn't suggest having
> >>> different loggers for TRACE DEBUG INFO WARN ERROR FATAL, would you? I
> >>> think one of the reasons someone on our side is suggesting I have
> >>> separate loggers is that they think the overhead of filtering at the
> >>> appender is going to have a noticeable impact. Our plan, at least the
> >>> one I have now in my head, is that we'll have some number of appenders in
> >>> the root. We'll then filter x < INFO events to a tracing appender, INFO
> >>> <= x <= FATAL to a logging appender, and our custom level will go to
> >>> another appender. Thoughts?
> >>>
> >>> Thanks,
> >>> Nick
> >>>
> >>>> Subject: Re: approach for defining loggers
> >>>> From: ralph.go...@dslextreme.com
> >>>> Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 20:59:36 -0700
> >>>> To: log4j-user@logging.apache.org
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> On Aug 29, 2015, at 7:44 PM, Nicholas Duane <nic...@msn.com> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I'm curious if there is a prescribed approach to defining loggers. Let
> >>>>> me state what my assumption is. I assume that normally if some piece
> >>>>> of code wants to log events/messages that it should create a logger for
> >>>>> itself. I guess a reasonable name to use is the class name itself. In
> >>>>> terms of logger configuration I would expect that no loggers are
> >>>>> specified in the log4j configuration UNLESS is needs settings other
> >>>>> than the default. The root logger would specify the default settings,
> >>>>> eg. level and appenders. If some piece of code tied to a logger needs
> >>>>> to enable tracing in order to debug an issue then you would add that
> >>>>> logger to the configuration and set the level less specific for that
> >>>>> logger. Is this a typical and reasonable approach?
> >>>>
> >>>> What you describe here is the common convention. It is a reasonable
> >>>> approach.
> >>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I asked because we have the need for a new type of event. To have this
> >>>>> event flow to where we want it to flow the plan is to have a custom
> >>>>> level and have all events at that level captured by a specific
> >>>>> appender. My assumption was that for existing applications we'd just
> >>>>> need to add our appender to the root and add our custom level. The app
> >>>>> would need to be modified to log our new event at the custom level.
> >>>>> However, someone suggested that we could also create a separate logger
> >>>>> for this event. My thinking is that while we don't ever want to turn
> >>>>> off logging of this event, loggers represent "event sources", e.g the
> >>>>> code raising the events and thus having multiple different pieces of
> >>>>> code use the same logger wouldn't allow you to turn on/off logging from
> >>>>> those different sections of code independently. I think the current
> >>>>> configuration includes all the loggers. Normally I would expect there
> >>>>> to be many, on the order of 10's or 100's, loggers within an
> >>>>> application. However, in the case I was given there were only a
> >>>>> handful because I think this handful is shared. So as I mentioned,
> >>>>> this doesn't sound like an ideal design as you have less granularity on
> >>>>> what you can turn on/off.
> >>>>
> >>>> You have a few options. Using a CustomLevel would not be the option I
> >>>> would choose. Creating a custom Logger will certainly work and makes
> >>>> routing the message to the appropriate appender rather easy. Another
> >>>> approach is to use Markers. Markers are somewhat hierarchical so you
> >>>> can use them for a variety of purposes. If you look at how Log4j
> >>>> handles event logging it actually does both - it specifies EventLogger
> >>>> as the name of the logger to use and it uses Markers to identify the
> >>>> kind of event.
> >>>>
> >>>> A third option is to use the MDC or Logger properties. If you do that
> >>>> then you can have information included in the actual logging event that
> >>>> can affect how it is routed. I also built a system that uses the RFC5424
> >>>> format so that the event could have lots of key/value pairs to identify
> >>>> the events.
> >>>>
> >>>> Unfortunately, without knowing more details I don’t know that I can give
> >>>> you a better idea on how I would implement it.
> >>>>
> >>>> Ralph
> >>>>
> >>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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> >>>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
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> >>
> >
>
