Comments on: Using log4j to monitor web application errors

By: Mariano Ruiz

Mariano Ruiz — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:41:55 +0000

If you want monitor at runtime the log4j log file with a browser, can use my open source tool: Log4j Web Tracker.
It is a small module (.jar) that integrates in your application, and allow you to change at runtime the level of appenders, or view the log content in the browser.
The site to download an read the documentation is http://www.log4jwebtracker.com

By: JF Gauthier

JF Gauthier — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 12:44:44 +0000

For your information, there is an other way to monitor web application errors.
Download and install XLog-Solution. It’s available for many platform and it’s also available as a VM Appliance (trouble free).
All your logs will be stored in the same database and accessible from your browser.
You will get email alerts to scheduled people.
If you use Java with log4j, you can use XLog4j appender to forward all (and I mean ALL) application logs to the server and control filters from the XLog-Dashboard live (without having to restart your application). So, if you get an error message you can go back to XLog-Dashboard, change logger filters and see what is going on inside all connected application.
This product fetch logs from Apache HTTP service, syslog and many others.

By: Hervé Boutemy

Hervé Boutemy — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 14:06:54 +0000

Mail appender is great if there are not much errors : but in general, things are worst than expected…
Then you have to check logs and review them, day after day. I know that this is an exceptionnaly boring task, but it has to be done.

But you can ease your life with tools : I wrote LogDistiller (http://logdistiller.sf.net/) exactly for this sort of need, because I was in this exact situation. Just take a look and see if it might help you too…