After upgrading to Bamboo 6.10 or later catalina.out no longer contains Bamboo application logs

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

Prior to Bamboo 6.10 all messages written to the standard output of the tomcat process were written to <Bamboo-install>/logs/catalina.out. This meant that the Bamboo application logs were written to both the catalina.out and the <Bamboo-install>/log/atlassian-bamboo.log files, resulting in very large catalina.out files. As of Bamboo 6.10 the default behaviour was changed to exclude the Bamboo application logs from the catalina.out.

This document describes how to revert the change back to the previous behaviour and make Bamboo log application logs to <Bamboo-install>/logs/catalina.out again.

Environment

Linux

Solution

The old behaviour of writing everything to the catalina.out can be achieved by commenting out the line in the <Bamboo-install>/atlassian-bamboo/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties file. As below.

1 #log4j.appender.console.threshold = OFF

After changing the file Bamboo would need to be restarted for the change to take effect.

⚠️ Any new install of Bamboo, such as for an upgrade would reset the behaviour. If the old behaviour was needed then the change would need to be reapplied.

Updated on April 2, 2025

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