Java Log Viewer [closed]

Question

Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to debug a program is by going through its long log files.

I searched for a decent log viewer for a while now, and haven't found a real solution. The only program that seemed to be most appropriate was Chainsaw with its Socket connector but after a few short uses the program proved to be buggy and unresponsive at best.

For my purposes, a log viewer should at least be able to mark log levels (for example with different colors) and perform easy filtering based on packages and free-text.

Is there any other (free) log viewer? I'm looking for anything that could work well with log4j.

Answer 1

I am using Notepad++ with my custom log file highlighting UDL. Looks like this:

Answer 2

Just published a node module for color highlighting log output log-color-highlight.

echo "this string" | lch -red.bold this -blue string

Works well on unix/linux/windows and supports config file for complex logging scenarios.

For windows I use it in combination with file-tail

Answer 3

You can try logFaces, it has fantastic real-time log viewer based on eclipse-like design.

Disclosure: I am the author of this product.

Answer 4

I'll add that for Windows, WireShark makes for a handy syslog viewer, ironically enough. I've tried several other syslog tools, and really, Kiwi is the best for syslog out there, but the "free" version is a bit nerfed. Others I ran into were either poorly programmed (crashing on minor issues -- logview4net), had a poor interface (Star SysLog Daemon Lite), or didn't even run (nxlog)

You can use WireShark's filter language to drill down on log data. It's overkill, but until someone writes a free syslog viewer/collector for Windows and makes it decent, this is one field that will be a hard one for most people.

Example:

# Display level 6 alerts from 192.168.5.90 in WireShark
syslog.level == 6 && ip.addr == 192.168.5.90

Answer 5

I've always used 'tail -f | grep re' or occasionaly 'awk'.

Answer 6

Another good log viewer is Lilith (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lilith/ and http://lilithapp.com/). It is open source and works well with Logback, log4j & java.util.logging.