Having the relevant information available

If, or rather when, you start to encounter problems in your production environment, it is vital that you have as much relevant information available in order to be able to resolve the problem.

Should the information not be available, chances are often slim that you can figure out what went wrong and how it can be fixed. A bad but common scenario is when a serious problem occurs and no relevant information is available in logs or elsewhere. In these cases, you will most likely need to make adjustments in code and configuration that will allow you to gather interesting information and let the problem occur (at least) one more time. Recreating serious problems in a production environment is naturally something that should be avoided at all costs.

Logging lots of various types of information for different purposes (such as security, business, and even performance) is often required in an application and its application server. As logging can be a source...