It seems that jboss defines the CONSOLE (std out) in the log4j.xml file and your program cannot also define or change an appender to the std out. It will ignore your definition. In fact it ignored anything I did to use the CONSOLE appender. The short answer is to let jboss do the logging to the console. As long as you do not try and override the jboss console appender, or try to define your own in you own log4j properties file, jboss will take care of sending JSP, or any other errors, to the console.