Enabling logging in Jira Data Center affects all nodes

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Summary

Changing a logging level in JIRA Data Center will affect all nodes regardless of what node you're accessing at the time of the change.

Therefore if you access logging and profiling on any node and enable HTTP Access Logging (for example), it will affect all the nodes in the cluster.

This is accomplished through the clustermessage table:

select * from clustermessage where message like 'Log Level:%' order by message_time desc;

1 2 3 4 5 id | source_node | destination_node | claimed_by_node | message | message_time -------+-------------+------------------+-----------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------------- 10101 | node1 | ALL | | Log Level:-com.atlassian.jira.web.filters.accesslog.AccessLogFilter-INFO | 2021-05-24 20:40:49.265-03 10100 | node1 | ALL | | Log Level:-a.b.c.d-WARN | 2021-05-24 20:24:14.646-03 10003 | node1 | ALL | | Log Level:-webwork.util.ServletValueStack-ERROR | 2021-05-24 20:23:30.555-03

If you restart one node out of the cluster after these changes, this one node will have the default logging again (from it's own log4j.properties file). 

Solution

Adding logging for only one node

If your goal is to be more specific and you're investigating an issue on just one node and don't want the logging changes to affect all nodes you can utilize log4j

see our logging and profiling documentation for more information.

Updated on April 8, 2025

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