How to log as much information as possible for an exception in Java?

Solution 1:

The java.util.logging package is standard in Java SE. Its Logger includes an overloaded log method that accepts Throwable objects. It will log stacktraces of exceptions and their cause for you.

For example:

import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;

[...]

Logger logger = Logger.getAnonymousLogger();
Exception e1 = new Exception();
Exception e2 = new Exception(e1);
logger.log(Level.SEVERE, "an exception was thrown", e2);

Will log:

SEVERE: an exception was thrown
java.lang.Exception: java.lang.Exception
    at LogStacktrace.main(LogStacktrace.java:21)
Caused by: java.lang.Exception
    at LogStacktrace.main(LogStacktrace.java:20)

Internally, this does exactly what @philipp-wendler suggests, by the way. See the source code for SimpleFormatter.java. This is just a higher level interface.

Solution 2:

What's wrong with the printStacktrace() method provided by Throwable (and thus every exception)? It shows all the info you requested, including the type, message, and stack trace of the root exception and all (nested) causes. In Java 7, it even shows you the information about "supressed" exceptions that might occur in a try-with-resources statement.

Of course you wouldn't want to write to System.err, which the no-argument version of the method does, so instead use one of the available overloads.

In particular, if you just want to get a String:

  Exception e = ...
  StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
  e.printStackTrace(new PrintWriter(sw));
  String exceptionDetails = sw.toString();

If you happen to use the great Guava library, it provides a utility method doing this: com.google.common.base.Throwables#getStackTraceAsString(Throwable).