Benefits of Log4j singleton wrapper?

Question

I have recently inherited some Java code and need to integrate it into a project that I am working on. My project is a service agent that processes and transforms XML messages. While looking through the new code, I discovered the following logging class:

import org.apache.log4j.BasicConfigurator;
import org.apache.log4j.Level;
import org.apache.log4j.Logger;

public class MyLogger {

    private static MyLogger instance = null;
    protected final static Logger log = Logger.getLogger(MyLogger.class);

    private MyLogger() {
        super();
    }

    public static MyLogger getInstance(){
        if(instance  == null){
            instance  = new MyLogger();
            BasicConfigurator.configure();
            log.setLevel(Level.ALL);
        }
        return instance;
    }

    public void info(String myclass, String msg) {
        log.info("[" + myclass + "] " + msg);

    }

    public void error(String myclass, String msg, Exception ce) {               
        log.error("[" + myclass + "] " + msg, ce);      
    }

    public void warning(String myclass, String msg) {
        log.warn("[" + myclass + "] " + msg);
    }    
}

This class basically wraps log4j with (another) singleton. All of the logging in the classes that I need to integrate look something like this:

public class MyClass {
   private final static MyLogger log = MyLogger.getInstance();
   private final static String myclass = MyClass.class.getName();

   ...

   log.info(myclass, "Information message...");   
}

I do not see any obvious benefit to using an extra class for logging, thus I am considering refactoring this code to remove the MyLogger class and log in the following fashion:

import org.apache.log4j.Logger;

public class MyClass {
   private static Logger log = Logger.getLogger(MyClass.class);

   ...

   log.info("Information Message...");     
}

This would make the logging mechanism consistent across the project. Before I do this, I would like to know if there are any benefits to wrapping Log4j with a singleton class that I may be missing. Thanks!

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the helpful answers - I pickup up several new insights from each. Accepted Nathan Hughes' answer for pointing out lost functionality by leaving the class intact - I had been assuming that the biggest downside to leaving the singleton alone was simply code bloat. I will trash the class.

Benefits of Log4j singleton wrapper?

4 Answers