Patent ID: 7606893

Claim:
A method employed within a system that includes a network comprising: defining a class hierarchy comprising a controller class, a tracing sub-class, and a logging sub-class, wherein the controller class is a parent class to the tracing sub-class and the logging sub-class; creating an instance of the tracing sub-class that is associated with specified program code locations of an application, the tracing sub-class instance to receive and process tracing method calls generated by the application when the specified program code locations are executed, the instance of the tracing sub-class to send tracing messages in response to the tracing method calls to a same trace file even though the tracing method calls originate from different locations within the application, the instance of the tracing sub-class having an associated hierarchy of locations within the application, the hierarchy including a plurality of more specific location nodes that reside below a less specific location node, each one of the more specific location nodes corresponding to one of the different location within the application that is capable of providing to the instance of the tracing sub class at least some of the tracing method calls that are to be forward to the same trace file, the less specific location node representing the same trace file; creating an instance of the logging sub-class that is associated with specified categories of the system, the logging instance to receive and process logging method calls from components associated with the categories, the instance of the logging sub-class to send logging messages in response to the logging method calls to a same log file even though the logging method calls originate from different categories within the system, the instance of the logging sub-class having an associated hierarchy of categories within the system, the hierarchy including a plurality of more specific category nodes that reside below a less specific category node, each one of the more specific category nodes corresponding to one of the different categories within the system that is capable of providing to the instance of the logging sub class at least some of the logging method calls that are to be forwarded to the same log file, the less specific category node representing the same log file; and, filtering the tracing messages and the logging messages according to a specified trace message filtering policy and logging message filtering policy, respectively, the filtering preventing at least a portion of the tracing messages and the logging message from respectively reaching the trace file and the log file.