Where to find logs older than atlassian-jira.log.5 in JIRA?

[Karthik Bhat]

Our JIRA 5.2 instance have logs at /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/log. The oldest atlassian-jira.log is atlassian-jira.log.5. But I want to get an older log than that. Where can I find it?

archive.tgz is present in the same location. But it contains just one atlassian-jira.log and this log contains data between the months of March and April of last year. So where can I find the logs for the rest of the year?

[Mirek · Accepted solution]

Hi Karthik,

JIRA rotates the logs every 20MB. That is way you see files with numbers. The last one is by default 5. I am afraid that you will not be able to see older logs here however you can also check catalina.out (<install>/log) that should be a bigger file and contain all entries that were also in atlassian-jira.log files. (depends on your Log4j configuration)

-Mirek

[Karthik Bhat]

Thank you Mirek. I will backup my logfiles through a script then.

[Steve Thornhill]

The logs are rotated so that will be the oldest you will generally have on the system.

You would need to check that you have a alternate backup method in place that retains older files to be able to search further back.

[Karthik Bhat]

Thanks Steve!

Is there a customizable setting in JIRA that will allow me to archive older logs to some known location? OR Should I back them up manually using crontab?