ohofrichter - this is a common strategic question for Talend. While it's quite easy to log information in jobs, the question usually, how to best achieve this option?
The tStatCatcher, tLogCatcher and tFlowmeterCatcher all have predefined schemas. In your job settings, you can chose to write these logs to console, file or database - or all 3 at the same time. The stats they gather are great because they give you an end-to-end view of your job run. In there, you'll see when each child job started and ended etc... without having to do any extra work. Just check all your components to spit out logs.
Now, I have the habit of writing log statements using tJava all over my job to tell me where I am. This is more of the flow the job. These usually print on the console. When the job is executed from a shell script of batch file, I can redirect standard out to a file by using >> myTalendlog.txt.
Alternatively, for the entire job run, you can chose to redirect the standard out to a file in Talend using the following. At the beginning of your job, place a tJava, and use the following code:
????????-
java.io.File file = new java.io.File(?C:/temp/myTalendLog.txt?);
java.io.PrintStream ps = new java.io.PrintStream(new java.io.FileOutputStream(file));
System.setOut(ps);
????????-
Doing this will redirect all console output to file, including all your custom logging using tJava.
If these are not sufficient (using standard Talend logging to tStatCatcher, tLogCatcher, tFlowmeterCatcher + StdOut in a file), you can also consider log4j to achieve even more granular control of how you generate your log info. Whereas you can redirect standard out to a file, with log4j you can do even more things like inject standard identifiers into the log lines to be able to segregate and find information quicker. You can find an implementation of log4j for Talend as a component on Exchange -
http://www.talendforge.org/exchange/index.php?eid=214&product=tos&action=view&nav=1,1,1