Logging activities in multithreaded applications

Question

I have a layered application in Java which has a multi thread data access layer which is invoked from different points. A single call to this layer is likely to spawn several threads to parallelize requests to the DB.

What I'm looking for is a logging tool that would allow me to define "activities" that are composed by various threads. Therefore, the same method in the data access layer should log different outputs depending on its caller. The ability to group different outputs to summarize the total cost of an operation is also important.

Although the application is in Java, language is not a restriction; what I need are the design guidelines so to eventually implement it. We are currently using log4j, but can't get this behaviour from it.

Answer 1

In Java5 (and later) you can call

StackTraceElement[] stackTrace = Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();

Inspect the stack trace to whatever depth you want and log accordingly.

In Java 1.4 you can get the same info with

StackTraceElement[] stackTrace = new Exception().getStackTrace();