Log viewer on Windows

Question

I'm a developer, and I generate big log files. I've tried several log viewer applications (free or not), so far mtail I like the most. But, it lacks features.

I would like from my log viewer to:

• handle files > than 10MB
• filtering
• highlight search queries
• behave like a log viewer - do all of these in real time, and fast

The question is:

Which log viewer would you recommend on Windows?

Solution 1

BareTail, which has a free version, works pretty well for us for years.

Solution 2

My new favorite log viewer is glogg. It makes finding stuff in noisy log files very easy. It could use a few more features but does 95% of everything I need it to do, it is open source, written in C++ using Qt and runs on Linux/Windows/Mac. Give it a try.

From the glogg description page:

glogg enables you to use regular expressions to search for interesting events in your log files. It presents a results window which, together with complex regular expressions allows easy isolation of the meaningful lines amongst the noise.

glogg has been primarily developed to help spot and understand problems in huge logs generated by embedded systems. It can be equally useful to a sysadmin digging through logs from databases or web servers.

The main design goals for glogg are:

• it should be fast
• it does not have any limit on the size of files it can handle
• it provides a clear view of the matches even in heavily cluttered files.

If you think it does not do that, it is a bug and it should be fixed!

Solution 3

Log Expert http://logexpert.codeplex.com/

Features:

• highlighting (regex, etc.)
• filtering (regex, etc.)
• custom columnizer (columnizer parses lines into columns)
• multi-file support
• + some common features

Solution 4

Take a look a logview4net it's free and has a different take on viewing log files.

A free (open source) log monitor / log viewer for:

* Files and folders
* Incomming UDP traffic
* EventLogs
* SQL- Server tables
* Atom and RSS feeds
* StdOut and StdErr

Solution 5

Installing MSYS gives you a close version to a Unix environment on Windows, you get all the main binaries. Using these tools you can achieve all the functionality you request using standard commands like tail, grep, less, etc.

View more solutions

Comments

[Mercer Traieste]

I've seen this tool used in many places.

[pavsaund]

BareTail is awesome. We use this all the time

[C-son]

Found this answer by a search. Very cool product to recommend.

[maxlego]

I also use this too, but running it on server 2008 R2 causes somekind of memory-leak with wmiprvse.exe

[Yuri Astrakhan]

No UNICODE / UTF8 support

[payala]

It crashes all the time on my machine (Windows 7 x64)

[John]

I can live without Unicode/UTF-8 support in a log viewer but Glogg does not (at as August 23rd, 2015) auto-reload automatically (you have to manually press F5) though it's find option is EXCELLENT. Almost ideal for viewing Apache access and MySQL query logs...almost and no dumb taskbar context menu like BareTail.

[John]

Positive: it opens logs VERY fast. Negative: the taskbar context menu is obnoxious.

[John]

Way too slow to load SQL queries log (266MB).

[John]

Way too slow to load SQL queries log (266MB).

[John]

Wanted money before doing anything useful.

[idstam]

There's a big download button on the page and NO money needed to use it. The source code is available from here: sourceforge.net/projects/logview4net

[raychi]

Like it, but wish it had line wrapping. It's a pain to view logs with long lines, which happens frequently with automated systems.

[rustyx]

glogg unfortunately misses log file updates sometimes (never refreshes).

[rustyx]

+1. tail -f mylogfile.log (and you won't have to 'unlearn' it once you move past Windows ;)

[Jack Miller]

The free version does not even have a search feature!

[Jack Miller]

UTF8 supported since version 1.1.1 (November 2016)

[Ploni]

According to Virustotal.com the free version was flagged by 2 anti-viruses as being malware. The Pro version comes out clean, though.

[idstam]

... and now the source is here: github.com/idstam/logview4net

[Zero3]

For what it is worth: I've been evaluating glogg for a while, and have run into a number of somewhat serious issues such as 1) Locking the log file during loading so that the owning application is unable to write to the log file. 2) Freezing with 100% CPU usage when autorefreshing with the latest content. 3) Distribution of unsigned binaries over HTTP. 4) Auto-update notifications that cannot be disabled. ...

[ScottN]

This is amazing. I've been using Baretail for years and been waiting for something that competes. I've played around with it on a few folder listeners and memory is steady at 30MB and CPU never spikes. Very happy and also open-source so I can modify little things if I want and use my own build... perfect replacement... for just Windows though.

[gap]

It's basic, but it works. A bit like baretail but on Mac.

[Henrik]

Is there no portable version of logview4net out there?

[idstam]

@henrik I'll make one and link to it from the readme.

[MikeJansen]

I love glogg except that it keeps files open. So if you forget to close glogg and your server goes to roll log files... This alone is causing me to look for another log viewer. Which is too bad. It's simple and does everything I need.

[Adrian]

2021 and I'm still using Baretail... lags some useful features, but basically still the best tool

[fav]

If you like glogg, try more actively maintained fork -- klogg. Klogg has an option to keep file closed and it is generally a lot faster than glogg.