It's true that you can aggreate logs to hdfs when the job is still running, however, the minimun log uploading interval (yarn.nodemanager.log-aggregation.roll-monitoring-interval-seconds) you can set is 3600 seconds which is 1 hour. The design is trying to protect namenode from being spamed.   You may have to use an external service to do the log aggregation. Either write your own or find other tools.   Below is the proof from yarn-default.xml in hadoop-common source code (cdh5-2.6.0_5.7.1).    <property> <description>Defines how often NMs wake up to upload log files. The default value is -1. By default, the logs will be uploaded when the application is finished. By setting this configure, logs can be uploaded periodically when the application is running. The minimum rolling-interval-seconds can be set is 3600. </description> <name>yarn.nodemanager.log-aggregation.roll-monitoring-interval-seconds</name> <value>-1</value> </property>   ... View more