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General Software Discussion / JLog: Cool free (open source) generic remote log file management/watching
« Last post by mouser on April 25, 2007, 02:57 AM »This isn't a tool for everyone, but server administrators might find it quite useful:
JLog is a powerfull tool that helps to manage multiple log files in a cluster environment. I developped it because I'm a technical expert of IBM WebSphere Portal and I have to check regulary more than 300 log files from a cluster (WebSphere SystemOut, SystemErr, WebSphere Portal, custom Application Log).
Without such a tool, it's impossible to have a global view of the messages in logs, you will allways miss something. It's impossible to look at all log files.
With Jlog, the log review task is much more faster and efficiant.
Functionalities
JLog can be used without any modification of the application. The only need is an ftp or sftp access to the log files. You don't have to customize your logs or change any configuration of your application.
JLog main goal is to download all the log files using ftp and then parse each one with the defined parser to collect information (exceptions or messages) and display the result of the parsing in a table. The table displays each messsage found and how many were found. If you click a line in the table a Detail Dialog appears and shows how many exceptions are found in each log file. If you double-click again in the detail dialog the corresponding log file is opened in the defined text editor to the message line for further analysis.
It can also compute statistics from data collected in the log file (for instance WebService average response time, min, mas, ...).
JLog supports natively GZip files (parsing and display in text editor).
Once the logs are downloaded, you can also search any String in the logs.
Another functionality is the export of the parsing result to a file that can be opened using Microsoft Excel or an Excel like application, or HTML. You can also merge all the export files to one file that will show the exception count daily in order to be able to analyse the log evolution in time.
JLog can also be automaticly executing with a command line. This helps to automate reports creation using crontabs in Solaris for instance.
