I would like to consolidate all log messages from several nodes into a central database. At first I tried using the JMSAppender, but quickly ran into problems during startup. As the Appender is initiallised pretty early on in the startup sequence the Topic has not yet been created which result in nothing being logged.

Since I am only really interested in the log messages originating from my application I though about packaging log4j together with my application. I tried added the log4j.jar file to the ear and modify the manifest of the EAR as well as the JAR.

In the end I could not get this working either. It seems to me that I would have to implement my own buffered appender to store messages until a connection to the database (or the topic) is available. This feels a bit like re-inventing the wheel. Please let me know if there is a better (more generic) solution.