JUL to SLF4J Bridge

I'm currently observing that a 3rd party library (namely restfb) is using java.util.logging and I'm seeing those logs end up in STDOUT even though I don't have an SLF4J console appender configured in my logback.xml. I also have the jul-to-slf4j bridge in my classpath. Does the jul-to-slf4j bridge only log to the appenders configured by logback when the bridge is installed or does it also log to stdout?

You need to call SLF4JBridgeHandler.install(). You also need to enable all log levels at the root logger (reason in excerpt below) in java.util.logging and remove the default console appender.

This handler will redirect jul logging to SLF4J. However, only logs enabled in j.u.l. will be redirected. For example, if a log statement invoking a j.u.l. logger disabled that statement, by definition, will not reach any SLF4JBridgeHandler instance and cannot be redirected.

The whole process can be accomplished like so

import java.util.logging.Logger;
import org.slf4j.bridge.SLF4JBridgeHandler;

SLF4JBridgeHandler.removeHandlersForRootLogger();
SLF4JBridgeHandler.install();
Logger.getLogger("").setLevel(Level.FINEST); // Root logger, for example.

You can set the level to something higher than finest for performance reasons, but you won't be able to turn those logs on without enabling them in java.util.logging first (for the reason mentioned above in the excerpt).

As mentioned in the javadocs for SLF4JBridgeHandler, you get either install SLF4JBridgeHandler programmatically by invoking:

 // Optionally remove existing handlers attached to j.u.l root logger
 SLF4JBridgeHandler.removeHandlersForRootLogger();  // (since SLF4J 1.6.5)

 // add SLF4JBridgeHandler to j.u.l's root logger, should be done once during
 // the initialization phase of your application
 SLF4JBridgeHandler.install();

or via logging.properties

 // register SLF4JBridgeHandler as handler for the j.u.l. root logger
 handlers = org.slf4j.bridge.SLF4JBridgeHandler

As for performance, the section on jul-to-slf4j bridge discusses this issue. In essence, since you are already using logback, enabling the LevelChangePropagator should yield good performance regardless of the load.