Introduction

This project aims to provide a different approach to traditional log tailers. Amongst other features:

• Multitailing capability. It can tail multiple logs at a time
• Colors for every level: warn, info, debug, error and fatal
• Emphasize multiple targets (log traces) given regular expressions
• Follow log upon truncation by default
• User defined colors for each level
• Silent (daemonized) mode
• Throttling mode. Slow down the information being printed in the terminal
• Inactivity log monitoring
• mail notification
• Pause Modes freezes output for a limited period of time depending on level found.
• Analytics. Makes a report of each level found in logs when finished.
• Different color schemes for each log
• Tailing logs over SSH

Why yet another tailer?

Most people use tail -F to tail the logs these days. When debugging enterprise class applications you cannot just follow (in many situations) what is going on unless you go to the log, less it and check if something was wrong, or just Ctrl-C tail program and scroll back. Human eye cannot distinguish or grab a line out of thousands when that information is showed incredibly fast in the screen. By providing colors, the human eye will discern and quickly identify specific levels or lines.

log4tailer 2.0 release

In this new version, SSH Tailing capability is provided, so it will be possible to tail hundreds of logs scattered across multiple servers from a single terminal in a multicolored way. In order to do that, you must provide the information in a config file like follows:

 sshhostnames = hostname0, hostname1, hostnameN-1
 hostname0 = username0, /var/log/log0, /var/log/log1, /var/log/logN-1
 hostname1 = username1, /var/log/log0, /var/log/log1, /var/log/logN-1
 hostnameN-1 = usernameN-1, /var/log/log0, /var/log/log1, /var/log/logN-1

Example:

sshhostnames = 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.2
192.168.1.1 = johndoe, /var/log/messages
192.168.1.2 = root, /var/log/mail.log

And run log4tailer like follows:

 ./log4tail -r -c yourconfig.txt

And it will request the password dynamically and ask if that password is the same for all hostnames.

Refer to the section 12 of the User Guide provided for more information.