There are some classes of exceptions which have their own stack of causes which can't be accessed via the getCause() method. For example, for SQLException one should call the getNextException() method instead.But Logback uses only getCause() method (see https://github.com/qos-ch/logback/blob/master/logback-classic/src/main/java/ch/qos/logback/classic/spi/ThrowableProxy.java#l58).

It would be nice to use special methods for such exceptions, like Apache's ExceptionUtils does (see http://commons.apache.org/lang/api-2.4/org/apache/commons/lang/exception/ExceptionUtils.html).