Question

By default, the FATAL level in log4j will map to emergency in Syslog. Because of IT syslog usage requirements in our corporation, I need FATAL to map to syslog alert instead.

Does anyone know of a simple way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

There is guidance here on how to do this by overriding the append method in the SyslogAppender class. afai can see the mappings in log4j are hard-coded.

If you use logger.fatal(), the
standard log4j syslog appender will
log this message with the highest
syslog severity, which is level 0,
“emerg”. This level is usually
reserved for the most urgent operating
system related messages and on most
Unix systems will print the message on
the terminal session of every logged
in user. For most applications, this
is probably not what you want. If an
application encounters a fatal error,
it should log the message as a lower
level like “critical”, level 2. You
can do this by implementing an
appender which overrides the “append”
method.