How to add a JMS appender to the Pax Logging Service in JBoss Fuse?

Ever wondered if its possible to publish JBoss Fuse container logging messages to the embedded ActiveMQ broker?

Well,.... it is.

This solution has been verified on JBoss Fuse 6.3.0. The Pax Logging Service in JBoss Fuse is configured to use Log4J Logging internally.
Technically it should be possible to configure the Log4J JMSAppender but that may be difficult to configure due to class loading issues.

The Apache ServiceMix project offers a JMS Appender for Pax Logging that is easier to use and that is used in this solution.

As this solution utilizes two bundle provided by Apache ServiceMix which we don't ship, these bundle are not supported by Red Hat (since they are not shipped out of the box and hence are not certified). As a consequence we cannot fully support this solution.

Instructions

• In your JBoss Fuse installation edit etc/system.properties and append these two lines at the end, replacing the values with your admin
  username and password defined in etc/users.properties
  

  activemq.jms.user=admin
  activemq.jms.password=admin
  



• Next, edit etc/org.ops4j.pax.logging.cfg and replace
  

  log4j.rootLogger = INFO, out, osgi:VmLogAppender

  with

  log4j.rootLogger = INFO, out, osgi:VmLogAppender, osgi:JMSLogAppender



• Start JBoss Fuse and use the Karaf shell for the remaining commands
  


• The default broker name in JBoss Fuse is called amq, so lets create a configuration needed by the Apache ServiceMix bundle where we set this broker name
  

  config:edit org.apache.servicemix.activemq.service
  config:propset broker-name amq
  config:update
  

  This configuration will be used by a bundle to be deployed later. If you assign a different broker name in
  etc/io.fabric8.mq.fabric.server-broker.cfg, then you need to assign the same broker name in above config:propset Karaf command.
  


• Uninstall the JMS 2.0 API and install JMS 1.1 API.
  There should be a more elegant way to do this but I have not found one yet.
  

  osgi:list -l -t 0 | grep jms-api/2.0.1

  and note the bundle id (199 typically)
  

  osgi:uninstall 199
  features:install jms-spec
  features:uninstall jms-spec
  features:install jms-spec/1.1
  packages:exports | grep javax.jms
  

  The last command should only output the JMS 1.1 API, e.g.
  294 javax.jms; version=1.1.0
  


• While the previous sequence of Karaf commands correctly installs the JMS 1.1 API, all JMS related bundles are stopped.
  You could manually restart them but the quickest way is to simply restart the JBoss Fuse container. This is only needed due to the sequence of Karaf commands in previous step, its not needed any more later.
  


• Install the Pax Logging bundles
  

  osgi:install -s mvn:org.apache.servicemix.logging/jms-appender/6.1.3
  osgi:install -s mvn:org.apache.servicemix.activemq/org.apache.servicemix.activemq.service/6.1.3
  



• check the broker statistics using
  activemq:dstat
  It should show a topic called Logging.Events with a number of messages enqueued. You can attach a topic subscriber to this topic to receive logging events.
  

If you further want to configure the JMS Topic name used by this Logger, you can run

config:edit org.apache.servicemix.logging.jms
config:propset destinationName LogEvents
config:update

Any new logging events will be directed to the new topic destination.
There is currently no way to specify a JMS queue as the destination.

This solution is based on SMX4-1205 but it was difficult to chase down all the details as I also ran into SM-2183.

The source code of this appender can be found at
https://github.com/apache/servicemix/tree/master/logging/jms-appender.