GUI for watching logs (tail and grep)

Question

Could you recommend a GUI application with powerful log watching capabilities?

Generally it would work as tail -f in GUI, but on top of that following features would be very useful:

• filtering out some lines based on (regular) expressions
• coloring some lines based on (regular) expressions
• interactive search
• saveable configuration easily applicable to different files
• notifications based on (regular) expressions

A similar tool on Windows is BareTail and its paid version - BareTailPro

Solution 1

Multitail is what you searching for:

it has tons of features. look here for some screenshots.

Also have a look at this question over there at serverfault.com

Solution 2

I've discovered glogg, which describes itself as:

glogg is a multi-platform GUI application to browse and search through long or complex log files. It is designed with programmers and system administrators in mind. glogg can be seen as a graphical, interactive combination of grep and less.

It will also tail files if you enable the Follow File option.

Just search Ubuntu's Software Center!

Installation through command line:

sudo apt-get install glogg

Solution 3

Some options are: Swatch and KSystemLog

There's a log viewer built into Ubuntu, which can also open any log file, called System Log.

Solution 4

and there is lnav with colored logs and search from terminal. https://github.com/tstack/lnav

Solution 5

There is also opentail: http://qt-apps.org/content/show.php?content=161456

This is a really nice tailer with a lot of functions

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Comments

[dotnetrocks]

I like this one. I am giving it a try.

[dotnetrocks]

Update: this is definetely the tool I've been searching for.

[Mariano Cavallo]

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks man.

[Didier L]

I chose this one over Multitail as the latter is actually an ncurses GUI running inside a terminal, while glogg is a true GUI (Qt).

[Nadir]

this one is very good: simple, fast and highlight supports.

[Amir Uval]

It's a great tool unless you need Unicode characters

[wojci]

This tool works nicely for parsing/coloring different logs produced by software. I just wish that it would have support for plug-ins.

[Ayberk Özgür]

Having tried both, I find ksystemlog is highly superior to glogg.

[RufusVS]

Excel is quite useful and many of us using Windows at work already have it, so it is good for log file analysis, but does this also tail the log file, adding new data as it is logged?

[dz902]

@RufusVS I believe that will require some macro or scripting, if possible at all.

[RufusVS]

That's what I thought. The original question was for a log "watcher" not log "analyzer", so Excel on its own is not sufficient.

[dz902]

Yeah I realize that. Landed on this question when searching for an easy-to-use log visualizer / analyzer and all of a sudden found Excel could do the job so might as well post it here just in case :)