The first blush of JTL has arrived: LOG4J2-2961 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LOG4J2-2961>. Event template additional fields of JTL are not readable due to missing @PluginBuilderAttribute annotations. Ralph has actually fixed this on master, but I forgot to port it to release-2.x.
Given it is in broken state, I took the liberty and simplified it from <JsonTemplateLayout> <EventTemplateAdditionalFields> <EventTemplateAdditionalField key="host" value="www.apache.org"/> <EventTemplateAdditionalFields> </JsonTemplateLayout> to <JsonTemplateLayout> <EventTemplateAdditionalField key="host" value="www.apache.org"/> </JsonTemplateLayout> I added tests and applied the changes to both master and release-2.x. I will appreciate it if somebody can take them a look. Note that this is not a show stopper for the layout. People can still add custom fields by providing them in the event template.