Atlassian (Jira and Confluence) uses a powerful logging module called Log4j 2 for runtime logging.

The default logging levels can be changed either

• temporarily — your change to the logging level will not persist after you next restart Jira, or

• permanently — your change to the logging level will persist, even after you restart Jira.

Logging levels

• There are five logging levels available in log4j: 'DEBUG', 'INFO', 'WARN', 'ERROR' and 'FATAL'. Each logging level provides more logging information than the level before it:

• 'DEBUG'

  • 'INFO'

  • 'WARN'

  • 'ERROR'

  • 'FATAL'

• 'DEBUG' provides the most verbose logging and 'FATAL' provides the least verbose logging. The default level is 'WARN', meaning warnings and errors are displayed. Sometimes it is useful to adjust this level to see more detail.

The 'DEBUG' setting may cause user passwords to be logged.

Temporarily

Jira

1. From the top navigation bar, select Administration  > System. 

2. Select System support > Logging & Profiling to open the Logging page, which lists all defined log4j categories (as package names) and their current logging levels.

To set the logging level for another package that isn't listed, select Configure logging level for another package. That will prompt you to specify the package and logging level.

Permanently changing the logging level

Jira

• Edit the log4j2.xml file (located in the Jira application installation directory).

• All examples are using the filelog appender without additivity (meaning their logs won't propagate to the root logger)

If your application server configures logging itself, you may need to remove the log4j.properties file. You may also need to remove the entire log4j.jar file to get logging to work.

The log42j.xml file that ships with Jira has the default logging levels specified. For more information about Log4j 2 (for example, how to define new logging categories), and about the format of the log4j2.xml file, see Log4j — Apache Log4j 2.