Overview of messages and trace

Applications often need to provide information about their internal operations to users, system administrators, programmers, and other interested parties. This information is typically provided as text that can be sent to a console or terminal, written to a log file, directed to a standard output or error device, or all three. The JRas toolkit divides informational text into the following two categories:

The JRas packages implement objects called loggers, handlers, formatters, and managers to provide messaging and trace capabilities. These objects are described in the following list.

To view message and trace text, you must read the appropriate log files. WebSphere currently logs all messages to single-level log files; that is, application messages and run-time messages are written to the same log file. It is recommended that you monitor the size of the log files and increase the allowable size of the files depending on the number of messages written to the log. WebSphere also logs all trace events, whether application trace or run-time trace, to the same trace log file. All editions of WebSphere Application Server provide facilities to view message and trace logs; see the documentation for your edition of WebSphere for more information.