I was working on a spring boot project in conjunction with rolling it out to Websphere 8.5.5 and upon deployment we noticed that the System.out.log didn’t display application start up messages like:
[5/29/14 14:27:22:222 CDT] 000000e2 UninstallSche I ADMA5106I: Application ABCY started successfullyIn addition we had some application error configuration with ErrorMvcAutoConfiguration that wasn’t quite right which was due to the need to change servlet mapping on the dispatch servlet. This would in turn cause hung threads and while looking for a message they couldn’t be found. Of course, the server admins said it was an application logging issue and they were afraid to start digging into all the complex logging spring has :).
Come to find out there is an issue within IBM Websphere 8.5.5 when implementing SLF4J logging mechanism in applications which causes general administration messages to be lost. As we found out it created challenges when we were trying to trouble shoot applications. If you are stuck on websphere 8.5.5, a temporary solution would be to exclude any slf4j implementations on all applications in your clusters. This has been fixed in 8.5.5.2 per PM86653: AFTER IMPLEMENTING SLF4J LOGGING, GENERAL ADMINISTRATIVE MESSAGES IN SYSTEMOUT.LOG ARE LOST