TeamCity Server Logs
Last modified: 20 April 2023TeamCity Server keeps a log of internal activities that can be examined to investigate an issue with the server behavior or get internal error details.
The logs are stored in plain text files in a disk directory on TeamCity server machine (usually <TeamCity Server home>\logs). The files are appended with messages when TeamCity is running.
tip
In web UI Go to Administration | Diagnostics page and choose logging preset, view logs under Server Logs subsection. If it is not possible to enable debug logging mode from the TeamCity web UI, refer to log4jConfiguration section to learn how to adjust logging options manually.
General Logging Description
TeamCity uses log4j library for the logging and its settings can be log4jConfiguration.
By default, log files are located under <TeamCity Server home>/logs directory.
The most important default log files are:
| General server log |
|---|---|
| Log of user-initiated and main build-related events |
| Log of VCS-related activity |
| Notificaitons-related log |
| (off by default) Cloud-integration (Amazon EC2) -related log |
| (off by default) Log of SQL queries, see Reporting Issues |
| (off by default) Log with messages related to NTLM and other authentication for HTML requests |
| (off by default) Log of messages sent by the server to agents and IDE plugins via XML-RPC |
| (off by default) Log related to individual file content requests from VCS |
| (off by default) REST-API related logging |
| (off by default) Notification templates processing-related logging |
| (off by default) Logging related to agent push operations |
| (off by default) Logging related to personal builds processing on the server |
| (off by default) SVN integration log |
| (off by default) TFS integration log |
| (off by default) StarTeam integration log |
| (off by default) ClearCase integration log |
| LDAP-related log |
Other files can also be created on changing logging configuration.
Some of the files can have ".N" extensions - that are files with previous logging messages copied on main file rotation. See maxBackupIndex for preserving more files.
Logging-related Diagnostics UIviewLogs
Users with System Administrator role can view and download server logs right from TeamCity web UI under Administration | Diagnostics | Server Logs.
Also, users with System Administrator role can change active logging preset for the server logs for the server logs under Administration | Diagnostics page, Troubleshooting, Debug logging subsection. Choosing a preset will change logging configuration until the server is restarted (see TW-14313). New presets can also be uploaded via Diagnostics | Logging Presets.
The available presets are configured by the files available under <TeamCity Data Directory>/config/_logging directory with .xml extension. New files can be added into the directory and existing files can be modified (using TeamCity Data Directory).
Changing Logging Configuration
While TeamCity is running, logging configuration for the server can be switched to a loggingPreset.
If it is not possible to enable debug logging mode via logging presets (e.g. to get the logging during server initialization), you can backup the conf/teamcity-server-log4j.xml file and copy/rename <TeamCity Data Directory>\config_logging\debug-general.xml file over conf/teamcity-server-log4j.xml before the server start.
General Logging Configuration
By default TeamCity searches for log4j configuration in ../conf/teamcity-server-log4j.xml file (this resolves to <TeamCity Server home>/conf/teamcity-server-log4j.xml for TeamCity .exe and .tar.gz distributions when run from "bin"). If no such file is present, default log4j configuration is used. The logs are saved to ../logs directory by default.
These values can be changed via corresponding "log4j.configuration" and "teamcity_logs" JVM options or Configuring TeamCity Server Startup Properties. e.g. log4j.configuration= file:../conf/teamcity-server-log4j.xml and teamcity_logs=../logs/
If you start TeamCity by other means then bundled teamcity-server or runAll scripts or the Windows service installed using TeamCity means, please make sure to specify the above-mentioned options. See also the Installing and Configuring the TeamCity Server on installing TeamCity into not bundled web server.
Changing Logging Settings
If you want to fine-tune log4j configuration, you can edit teamcity-server-log4j.xml. If the server is running it will be reloaded automatically and the logging configuration will be changed on the fly (some log4j restrictions still apply, so for a massive change consider restarting the server).
The logs are rotated by default. When debug is enabled it makes sense to maxBackupIndex of rotating log files. While doing so please ensure there is sufficient free disk space available.
Most useful settings of log4j configuration: To change the minimum log level to save in the file, tweak "value" attribute of "priority" element:
<category ...> <priority value="INFO"/> ...
To save more rolling files, tweak "value" attribute of "maxBackupIndex" element:
<appender ...> <param name="maxBackupIndex" value="10"/> ...
For maxBackupIndex and other supported attributes, see http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/apidocs/org/apache/log4j/RollingFileAppender.html.
Reading Logs
Each message has a timestamp and level (ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG).
e.g.:
[2010-11-19 23:22:35,657] INFO - s.buildServer.SERVER - Agent vmWin2k3-3 has been registered with id 19, not running a build
ERROR means an operation failed and some data was lost or action not performed. Generally, there should be no ERRORs in the log.
WARNs generally means that an operation failed, but will be retried or the operation is considered not important. Some amount of WARNs is OK. But you can review log for such warnings to better understand what is going OK and what is not.
INFO is an informational message that just reports on the current activities.
DEBUG is only useful for issue investigation. e.g. to be analyzed by TeamCity developers.
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