Log Levels As mentioned in the logging documentation, log messages are logged at different log levels (also known as log priorities), and with different facilities (i.e. the component generating the log message).
The following table lists the supported log levels, in descending priority order. Thus the DEBUG level has the lowest priority, and the EMERG level has the highest priority.
DEBUG
EMERG
ALERT
CRIT
ERR
WARNING
NOTICE
INFO
The proftpd daemon can use any or all of the above log levels for its emitted log messages, depending on the situation. You might find that you only want proftpd to log messages above a certain level; for example, you might not be interested in INFO and DEBUG level messages. ProFTPD logs all levels by default. To tell proftpd to silently ignore all log messages below a certain level, use the SyslogLevel directive. Thus to ignore INFO/DEBUG messages, you would use:
proftpd
SyslogLevel
SyslogLevel notice
Note that additional log filtering is also done by the syslogd daemon, to which proftpd logs by default. You will need to consult your syslogd configuration (typically found in /etc/syslog.conf) to see whether it is capturing log messages from the facility used by proftpd (default is "daemon"), and whether it is filtering out messages below a certain level/priority.
syslogd
/etc/syslog.conf
If you need to tell proftpd to use a different facility, so that it matches your /etc/syslog.conf settings for example, you can use the SyslogFacility directive like so:
SyslogFacility
# Tell proftpd to log using the "ftp" facility, rather than "daemon" SyslogFacility ftp
The DEBUG Level ProFTPD treats the DEBUG log level a little differently. There are so many conditions which are relevant only when triaging a specific issue (such as figuring out why a user cannot log in, or why a file cannot be uploaded) that the DEBUG level would become cluttered. Additional filtering of these debug messages is needed. Thus ProFTPD imposes its own notion of debug levels within the DEBUG logging level/priority. The DebugLevel directive is used to control the granularity/verbosity of the DEBUG level messages; the default level is 0, and goes to 10 (inclusive). In general, the higher the DebugLevel, the more debug messages will be emitted by proftpd to the DEBUG logging level/priority. Additional Logging Note that ProFTPD also supports even finer-grained logging of internals via its trace logging. Trace logging, however, is completely unrelated to syslogd, and thus the syslog facility and level concepts/filtering do not apply to trace logging. © Copyright 2013-2019 The ProFTPD Project All Rights Reserved
The DebugLevel directive is used to control the granularity/verbosity of the DEBUG level messages; the default level is 0, and goes to 10 (inclusive). In general, the higher the DebugLevel, the more debug messages will be emitted by proftpd to the DEBUG logging level/priority.
DebugLevel
Additional Logging Note that ProFTPD also supports even finer-grained logging of internals via its trace logging. Trace logging, however, is completely unrelated to syslogd, and thus the syslog facility and level concepts/filtering do not apply to trace logging.