Logging is a feature for tracking various aspects of the system’s operation. It requires a certain amount of system resources, which affects the system’s overall performance. Of particular expense is the actual writing to the log files. PingFederate 8.x uses the high-performance asynchronous logger from Log4j 2 to minimize the performance impact of logging runtime and administrative events, including status and error messages that can be used for troubleshooting. Audit information is logged synchronously to preserve transactional integrity.

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

Starting with version 8.2, PingFederate only records messages that are tagged with log level INFO, WARN, ERROR, and FATAL to the server log (and the provisioner log). Messages that are tagged DEBUG (or TRACE) are not recorded to optimize performance. Console logging is also disabled for the same reason.

For troubleshooting purpose, you may adjust the log level to DEBUG in the log4j2.xml file and optionally re-enable console logging.
Important:

When debug messages and console logging are no longer required, ensure they are turned off.