Is there a robust java.util.logging handler implem

Question

I'm looking into hooking up a 3rd party Java application to our log aggregation/analysis solution (probably Splunk, we haven't finalized our selection yet though). It seems to be easiest to hook the Splunk agent to syslog, so I'm looking for a way to redirect the application logs to a local syslog daemon on the server.

The Java application uses java.util.logging, which unfortunately does not feature a syslog handler out of the box (I believe log4j does, though). Are there any proven libraries to do this? The log load isn't huge (probably 10-20 messages per minute from each process, up to 6 processes per host) but I'm concerned with reliability and durability (e.g. what happens when the daemon is down?...).

Any help would be appreciated...

Answer 1

Our project is also using java.util.Logging mechanism, so, after spending some time to find the ready Handler implementation for syslog protocol, I ended up by reading RFC 3164 and creating my own implementation http://code.google.com/p/agafua-syslog/

We using it in production, both with UDP and TCP transports. In our case flow of log messages is approximately 1-2 msg per second, so I guess it is probably applicable for your needs.

Answer 2

SLF4J has a bridge for passing java.util.logging events to SLF4J (and hence to log4j or logback) that you could use. It has a performance cost (see the link) but given your load, this shouldn't be a big deal. So you could then use Log4J's SyslogAppender (or better its successor, logback, which also has a SyslogAppender). I do not have any experience with this appender (so this might require some testing) but logback is definitely a reliable library and I know that it can be configured to not print stack traces using the "nopexception" or "nopex" conversion word (in case sending messages when the daemon is down would generate some exception). Coupling this appender with another one (e.g. file based) would allow to not loose any message.