How to remove DEBUG logging from the Amazon EC2 client

Question

I have the following simple code

AmazonEC2 ec2 = AmazonEC2ClientBuilder.standard().withRegion(Regions.US_EAST_1).build();
DescribeInstancesRequest request = new DescribeInstancesRequest();
DescribeInstancesResult response = ec2.describeInstances(request);

While running this code I see the multiline debug output. I show only the beginning below. How to remove this output?

14:03:29.877 [main] DEBUG com.amazonaws.AmazonWebServiceClient - Internal logging successfully configured to commons logger: true
14:03:38.129 [main] DEBUG com.amazonaws.metrics.AwsSdkMetrics - Admin mbean registered under com.amazonaws.management:type=AwsSdkMetrics
14:03:38.480 [main] DEBUG com.amazonaws.auth.AWSCredentialsProviderChain - Unable to load credentials from EnvironmentVariableCredentialsProvider: Unable to load AWS credentials from environment variables (AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID (or AWS_ACCESS_KEY) and AWS_SECRET_KEY (or AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY))
14:03:38.482 [main] DEBUG com.amazonaws.auth.AWSCredentialsProviderChain - Unable to load credentials from SystemPropertiesCredentialsProvider: Unable to load AWS credentials from Java system properties (aws.accessKeyId and aws.secretKey)
14:03:38.580 [main] DEBUG com.amazonaws.auth.AWSCredentialsProviderChain - Loading credentials from com.amazonaws.auth.profile.ProfileCredentialsProvider@7fb9f71f
14:03:38.786 [main] DEBUG com.amazonaws.request - Sending Request: POST https://ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com / Parameters: ({"Action":["DescribeInstances"],"Version":["2016-11-15"]}Headers: (User-Agent: aws-sdk-java/1.11.135 Mac_OS_X/10.12.6 Java_HotSpot(TM)_64-Bit_Server_VM/25.144-b01/1.8.0_144, amz-sdk-invocation-id: 0a1303b3-16c0-b140-8d9b-b2e22dc685b1, ) 
14:03:40.160 [main] DEBUG com.amazonaws.auth.AWS4Signer - AWS4 Canonical Request: '"POST /

 amz-sdk-invocation-id:0a1303b3-16c0-b140-8d9b-b2e22dc685b1
 amz-sdk-retry:0/0/500
 host:ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
 user-agent:aws-sdk-java/1.11.135 Mac_OS_X/10.12.6 Java_HotSpot(TM)_64-Bit_Server_VM/25.144-b01/1.8.0_144
 x-amz-date:20171113T190338Z

Answer 1

Log4j Assumption

Under the assumption your application's logging system is configured via a property file like log4j.properties present at the base of your Java classpath, you can reduce verbosity of the loggers by including the line

log4j.logger.com.amazonaws=WARN

WARN or ERROR will guarantee you get the least amount of logs for the loggers inside the AWS SDK.

Should you wish to keep a more granular level of logging for a specific component of the AWS SDK, you can always override the level on a restricted scope (ie a subpackage of the com.amazonaws ), eg

log4j.logger.com.amazonaws.request=INFO

Logging frameworks supported by AWS Java SDK

The AWS SDK documentation states " Supported logging systems include the Java Logging Framework and Apache Log4j, among others ". I refer you to Logging AWS SDK for Java Calls for further reference.

Checking which logging framework is used by the test

The Apache Commons logging library referenced from Gradle is an abstraction layer on top of logging libraries which provide actual implementations of loggers. It is not, in itself, the logging implementation used by your test. In the statement you provided, you are using the Java logging framework ( java.util.Logger aka JUL). But is it really the logging implementation your test uses?

A quick check you could do to verify if log4j is on your test's classpath is to add the VM argument -Dlog4j.debug=true and launch your test. If log4j is on your classpath you will see some output from the library printed on the console.

You could also check the runtime classpath of your test, because there may be transitive dependencies (as opposed to direct) to logging libraries, which may not be visible from the list of compile-time dependencies.

One last resort possibility could be to put a breakpoint there and debug to see which logger is used from the SDK itself (this code is called in your test because it is shown in the logs you provided).