Logfile Visualization

Posted by attriel February 2nd, 2010

One thing I’ve been looking for, on and off, is some way to view a representation of the server logs in realtime.  Basically something I can take a look at and see what’s happening.  Also, playback at a later date to see what happened at a given time.

One of the only things I found that really did that was glTail.rb, a Ruby program.  I don’t have a lot of Ruby knowledge, so I didn’t go very far with it to see how it ticks and what I could modify.

It runs the log and streams bubbles from one side representing the server traffic.  Size is determined by request/response size.  I never quite figured out what the other set of streaming bubbles really represented, since Ruby isn’t in the environment I was playing in.  As a general use tool, it seems like it would be interesting if you had all the pre-reqs installed already.  As an industry tool, I wasn’t convinced that I saw enough benefit to justify installing the prereqs.

But I don’t think “industry level” even wants a tool like this, so !

I think the most telling video is the one discussed on the slashdotting page.

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