http://www.baremetalsoft.com/?app=BareTail
The bane (or savior) for every network or system administrator is the log file. We spend a LOT of our career parsing files created by various applications to discover where things went awry - not to mention eternally trying to make our systems operate better, faster and stronger *queue the Six Million Dollar Man sound effects..."nananananana"*.
When I ran across this little gem while in the admin corner over at BlackBerryForums.com, I was amazed by BareTail's effectiveness and simplicity. A BES admin was asking how he could follow a BlackBerry activation process from the server side, so he could monitor it for anything that looked out of the ordinary. Another member suggested using BareTail to watch the BlackBerry activation logfile in real-time. I wasn't having this problem, but I saw immediately how useful this tool could be for basically everything else I was running!
Basically, the gist is this: You configure BareTail to watch a particular logfile as a process is running (and hopefully writing to the logfile), so you can monitor logging in real-time. Additionally, you can set up colored filter parameters so things like 'Error' or 'Warning' (or whatever else you specify) will stand out and be highlightedto make log parsing easier on your eyes.
Finally, you can enable the 'Follow tail' option, which automatically scrolls the viewer to the end so as to follow the logfile as entries appear.
Honestly, this really should be a SysInternals tool - it has the same feel and would fit right in with the rest of those extremely handy programs. And like the SysInternals' tools this is a single-executable utility, which makes it is a perfect addition to your system tools USB drive.
From the website:
- Real-time file viewing
Follow tail mode (like tail -f on Unix)
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View files of any size (> 2GB)
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Scroll to any point in the file instantly
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Configurable highlighting
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Monitor multiple files simultaneously
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Visual indication of file status/changes
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International character sets (Unicode and UTF-8)
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Many file formats (Win32, Unix, Microsoft IIS logs)
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Flexible configuration options and storage
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Single small executable, no installer
The BareTail log viewer can be used by individuals or organizations, without charge.The Pro version has a few more enhancements including a fast search algorithm, export/copy search results and the ability to save and manage easy-to-reference search patterns.
2 comments:
BareTail is a great utility. I also have the GnuWin32 tools on my system which includes the ports of tail and grep. http://getgnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
We have bought the Pro version of both BareTail and BareGrep and they are awesome. We have log files that are generated by our firewall logging IPS events and the log files are roughtly 500 mb and BareTail and BareGrep are blazing fast when working with those files.
You are correct they do feel like a SysInternals tool.
My only complaint is there isn't a Mac OS X version of them.
Keep up the good reviews, I enjoy them greatly.
And also nice, if is possible to save the settings. Mu use of it is to start it and it opens the 6 most important log files.
About a Mac version. If you thing about it, it is not hard to write. Just a program that takes a look at a file and read the last blocks of it. OK, I can't do it myself, because Baretail has a rather rich set of possibilities and it looks good.
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