Deprecation notice

This project has been deprecated as of 2018-01-16 and will not be maintained anymore.

If you're looking for a GELF appender for Log4j 2, we recommend using logstash-gelf by Mark Paluch.

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GELF Appender for Apache Log4j 2

This appender for Apache Log4j 2 logs messages to a GELF server like Graylog or logstash.

It's using the official GELF Java client to connect to a remote server.

You can specify the following parameters for the GELF appender in the log4j2.xml configuration file:

• name
  • The reference name of the Appender
• server (default: localhost)
  • The host name or IP address of the GELF server
• port (default: 12201)
  • The port the GELF server is listening on
• hostName (default: the local host name or localhost if it couldn't be detected)
  • The host name of the machine generating the logs
• protocol (default: UDP)
  • The transport protocol to use
• tlsEnabled (default: false)
  • Whether TLS should be enabled
• tlsEnableCertificateVerification (default: true)
  • Whether the TLS certificate chain should be checked
• tlsTrustCertChainFilename (default: empty)
  • A X.509 certificate chain file in PEM format for certificate verification
• includeSource (default: true)
  • Whether the source of the log message should be included
• includeThreadContext (default: true)
  • Whether the contents of the ThreadContext should be included
• includeStackTrace (default: true)
  • Whether a full stack trace should be included
• includeExceptionCause (default: false)
  • Whether the included stack trace should contain causing exceptions
• queueSize (default: 512)
  • The size of the internally used queue
• connectTimeout (default: 1000)
  • The connection timeout for TCP connections in milliseconds
• reconnectDelay (default: 500)
  • The time to wait between reconnects in milliseconds
• sendBufferSize (default: -1)
  • The size of the socket send buffer in bytes. A size of -1 deactivates the send buffer
• tcpNoDelay (default: false)
  • Whether Nagle's algorithm should be used for TCP connections
• tcpKeepAlive (default: false)
  • Whether to try keeping alive TCP connections.
• Filter elements
  • A Filter to determine if the event should be handled by this Appender
• Layout element (default: none)
  • The Layout used to format the LogEvent
• ignoreExceptions
  • The default is true, causing exceptions encountered while appending events to be internally logged and then ignored. When set to false exceptions will be propagated to the caller, instead. Must be set to false when wrapping this Appender in a FailoverAppender.
• Additional Fields
  • Additional fields can be added with KeyValuePair elements inside the GELF element.

log4j2.xml example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Configuration status="OFF" packages="org.graylog2.log4j2">
    <Appenders>
        <GELF name="gelfAppender" server="graylog2.example.com" port="12201" hostName="appserver01.example.com">
            <PatternLayout pattern="%logger{36} - %msg%n"/>
            <Filters>
                <Filter type="MarkerFilter" marker="FLOW" onMatch="DENY" onMismatch="NEUTRAL"/>
                <Filter type="MarkerFilter" marker="EXCEPTION" onMatch="DENY" onMismatch="ACCEPT"/>
            </Filters>
            <!-- Additional fields -->
            <KeyValuePair key="foo" value="bar"/>
            <KeyValuePair key="jvm" value="${java:vm}"/>                
        </GELF>
    </Appenders>
    <Loggers>
        <Root level="info">
            <AppenderRef ref="gelfAppender"/>
        </Root>
    </Loggers>
</Configuration>

Java code example

Logger logger = LogManager.getLogger("test");
ThreadContext.put("userId", "testUser");
logger.info("Hello World");

Using variables in the additional fields

The additional fields (KeyValuePair elements) can contain references to variables.

In order for Log4j 2.x to resolve the variable's value, the variable name must have a certain prefix depending on how the variable is provided.

Internally we're making use of Log4j's StrSubstitutor to resolve the variable's value.

This in turn is utilizing the following Log4j Lookups with the prefixes in the following list:

Prefix	Documentation
ctx	ContextMapLookup
bundle	ResourceBundleLookup
date	DateLookup
env	EnvironmentLookup
java	JavaLookup
jndi	JndiLookup
jvmrunargs	JmxRuntimeInputArgumentsLookup
map	MapLookup
sd	StructuredDataLookup
sys	SystemPropertiesLookup

Please read up on the different variable handling in the linked Javadocs.

Example configuration with variables

<GELF name="gelfAppender" server="graylog2.example.com" port="12201" hostName="appserver01.example.com">
    <KeyValuePair key="user" value="${env:USER}"/>
    <KeyValuePair key="CLIargument" value="${sys:cliargument}"/>
    <KeyValuePair key="jvm" value="${java:vm}"/>
    <KeyValuePair key="fileEncoding" value="${sys:file.encoding}"/>
</GELF>

Versions

GELF Appender for Apache Log4j 2	Release date
1.0.0	29-Sep-2014
1.0.1	21-Oct-2014
1.0.2	09-Feb-2015
1.0.3	11-Feb-2015
1.1.0	16-Jul-2015
1.2.0	18-Jul-2016
1.2.1	11-Aug-2016
1.3.0	24-Aug-2016
1.3.1	22-Oct-2016

This appender uses GELF Java client 1.4.1.

Installation

Maven coordinates

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.graylog2.log4j2</groupId>
        <artifactId>log4j2-gelf</artifactId>
        <version>1.3.1</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

License

GELF Appender for Apache Log4j 2

Copyright (C) 2014 TORCH GmbH; 2015-2018 Graylog, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.