---
title: Logging
description: This section explains the logging practices of PingFederate and discusses minimizing the system's overall performance impact.
component: pingfederate
version: 13.1
page_id: pingfederate:performance_tuning_guide:pf_logging
canonical_url: https://docs.pingidentity.com/pingfederate/13.1/performance_tuning_guide/pf_logging.html
llms_txt: https://docs.pingidentity.com/pingfederate/llms.txt
docs_for_agents: https://developer.pingidentity.com/build-with-ai/docs-for-agents.md
revdate: July 5, 2022
section_ids:
  related-links: Related links
---

# Logging

This section explains the logging practices of PingFederate and discusses minimizing the system's overall performance impact.

Logging tracks various aspects of the system's overall performance and requires a certain amount of system resources, which affects the system's overall performance. In particular, writing to the log files takes the greatest amount of resources. To minimize the performance impact, PingFederate uses the high-performance asynchronous logger from Log4j 2 for logging runtime and administrative events, including status and error messages used for troubleshooting. To preserve transactional integrity, audit information logs synchronously.

Although the bulk of logging is executed asynchronously, decreasing the amount of information written to log files always provides the best possible performance.

PingFederate only records messages tagged with log level `INFO`, `WARN`, `ERROR`, and `FATAL` to the server log and the provisioner log. Messages with `DEBUG`, or `TRACE` tags, are not recorded to optimize performance. Console logging is also disabled for the same reason.

For troubleshooting purposes, you can enable console logging or [verbose messages](../administrators_reference_guide/help_logsettingstasklet_logsettingsstate.html).

|   |                                                                                                                                                                                                    |
| - | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
|   | When you no longer require console logging or verbose messages, turn them off. On Windows, never highlight the console output because it might slow or stop PingFederate from processing requests. |

## Related links

* [Enabling console logging](../administrators_reference_guide/pf_enabling_debug_message_and_console_logging.html)