PingFederate 8.2 logging changes

The differences

1. In PingFederate 8.1 and prior, the logging that went to the server.log file was also displayed on the console when running PingFederate directly (from the command line, not as a service). This was helpful for development environments.
2. The level of logging has been reduced out of the box in PingFederate 8.2. This does reduce the “noise” in the log file, but it can also make troubleshooting a new configuration a little more difficult.

Restoring console logging

The first difference (no logging to the console) is a result of the following differences between the PingFederate 8.1 and and PingFederate 8.2 log4j2.xml files. In the 8.1 environment, we can see the following lines in the AsyncRoot logger toward the end of the file.

In the 8.2 environment, we can see that this line is, by default, commented out.

When you uncomment this line and restart the PingFederate server (from an interactive console), you will again see the log data written to your screen once again. However, you may notice that not all of the same logging goodness that you’ve come to expect will be written to the screen as it was in 8.1. The reason for this is that many of the logs that defaulted to DEBUG are now configured as INFO.

Restoring higher level of logging

Let’s take a look at what has changed from 8.1 to 8.2 in terms of logging that has been moved from DEBUG to INFO. We’ll look at these changes by running a “diff” between the files (NB: there are changes other than the ones I will discuss here, but they will not fundamentally change this conversation and so will be omitted, perhaps for another discussion).

The full list of items which have been changed between 8.1 and 8.2 is below. Switching all of the these Loggers back to DEBUG along with fixing console logging essentially restores your PingFederate 8.2 logging configuration to what it was in 8.1.

• Logger org.sourceid has moved from DEBUG to INFO
• Logger org.sourceid.saml20.util.SystemUtil has moved from DEBUG to INFO
• Logger com.pingidentity has moved from DEBUG to INFO
• Logger com.pingidentity.common.util.ErrorHandler has moved from DEBUG to INFO

There are plenty of reasons to keep the PingFederate 8.2 logging the way it is out of the box. But if you relied on the Logger the way it was in 8.1, then follow the steps above and you’ll be back in business. You should note that this applies *only* to the logging to the log files, not to a database.

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