How can I get the current stack trace in Java?

You can use Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace().

That returns an array of StackTraceElements that represent the current stack trace of a program.

StackTraceElement[] st = Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();

is fine if you don't care what the first element of the stack is.

StackTraceElement[] st = new Throwable().getStackTrace();

will have a defined position for your current method, if that matters.

Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();

is available since JDK1.5.

For an older version, you can redirect exception.printStackTrace() to a StringWriter() :

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
new Throwable("").printStackTrace(new PrintWriter(sw));
String stackTrace = sw.toString();

To get the stack trace of all threads you can either use the jstack utility, JConsole or send a kill -quit signal (on a Posix operating system).

However, if you want to do this programmatically you could try using ThreadMXBean:

ThreadMXBean bean = ManagementFactory.getThreadMXBean();
ThreadInfo[] infos = bean.dumpAllThreads(true, true);

for (ThreadInfo info : infos) {
  StackTraceElement[] elems = info.getStackTrace();
  // Print out elements, etc.
}

As mentioned, if you only want the stack trace of the current thread it's a lot easier - Just use Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();

Silly me, it's Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();

Getting stacktrace:

StackTraceElement[] ste = Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();

Printing stacktrace (JAVA 8+):

Arrays.asList(ste).forEach(System.out::println);

Printing stacktrage (JAVA 7):

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

for (StackTraceElement st : ste) {
    sb.append(st.toString() + System.lineSeparator());
}
System.out.println(sb);

try {
}
catch(Exception e) {
    StackTraceElement[] traceElements = e.getStackTrace();
    //...
}

or

Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace()

For people, who just want to get the current stacktrace to their logs, I would go with:

getLogger().debug("Message", new Throwable());

Cheers