MultiTail



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Daily updated list of URLs pointing to MultiTail: click here.

Tools for running in a MultiTail window (with '-l')

acpitail
acpitail shows in a tail-like way information off the battery-state, fan-states, temperatures, etc. of an ACPI capable system (mostly laptops).

boinctail
BOINCTail displays the status of jobs running in the BOINC environment in a 'tail-like' way.

proctail
proctail is like a line-oriented 'top'. It displays memory-usage, load and the processes which used cpu-time since the last check.

MySQLtail
MySQLtail does 'tail' on a table in a MySQL database.

NagTail
NagTail is like tail on the Nagios status logfile.

HTTPing
Httping is like 'ping' but for http-requests. Give it an url, and it'll show you how long it takes to connect, send a request and retrieve the reply (only the headers).

RSSTail
RSSTail is more or less an rss reader: it monitors an rss-feed and if it detects a new entry it'll emit only that new entry.

BTail
Btail monitors a logfile for specific events. To do this it uses a bayesian filter to determine what events are worth passing through and which should be suppressed.

WTMPTail
WTMPTail shows which users login and logout

sample_load
Functionality similar to top, but line-oriented instead of fullscreen.

acctail
Shows all processes that have exited together with their resource-usage.

eventlogtail
EventLogTail shows the last 3 (configurable) and all new events that appear in the eventlog. It's like "tail -f logfile" on a UNIX-system. NOTE: eventlogtail only runs on microsoft windows boxes!

Tail replacements

Using these in MultiTail: put a line "tail=[PATH_TO_REPLACEMENT]" in multitail.conf. E.g.: "tail=/usr/local/bin/inotail".

turbotail
A drop-in replacement for the original (GNU-)tail program which uses the (SGI) FAM daemon instead of polling every second(!). Verified to work correctly with MultiTail. This program contains a few unsolved bugs.

inotail
Inotail is a fully Posix compliant tail program. It uses the Linux kernel inotify interface.
The plus of inotail are that it uses less system resources (it doesn't use polling like the original (GNU-)tail) and it reacts snappier on changes in the file(s) monitored. To be able to use this program with MultiTail, one needs at least version 5.1.0 of MultiTail and the 'posix_tail:yes' line in the multitail.conf file.

Meta links

ttyutils
Ttyutils is a suite of UNIX terminal tools. It includes ttyexec, ttylook, ttyadmin, and a few extension programs. ttyexec executes command in a pseudo terminal, captures all stdandard output from the command, and passes it to a built-in virtual terminal emulator and real terminal. ttylook is similar to the BSD watch(1) program, but has fewer limits and can interact with existing ttyexec instances. ttyadmin is a administrator tool which uses an ncurses interface to view and control existing ttyexec instances.

MonkeyTail
MonkeyTail allows a user to tail multiple files on both local and remote hosts and clearly marks inactivity by putting 5 newlines in the output whenever a pause in output over 3 seconds is detected.

Logapp
Logapp is a wrapper utility that helps supervise the execution of applications that produce heavy console output (e.g. make, CVS, and Subversion).

glTail.rb - realtime logfile visualization
View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server you have SSH access to, in an intuitive and entertaining way.

www.loganalysis.org
Tons of links to tools and scripts for analysis, viewing, etc. of logging.

Programs with functionality more or less similar to MultiTail

Got a link that you think should be on this list? Please contact me at the following e-mail address:
folkert@vanheusden.com

Arbitrary Command Output Colourer
acoc is a regular-expression based colour formatter for programs that display output on the command-line. acoc applies matching rules to patterns in the output and applies colours to those matches.

Bandsaw
Band Saw is a syslog monitoring program for GNOME. It allows the user to define filters that specify which log messages should be drawn to the user's attention. Combined with syslog's remote logging functionality it provides an effective, scalable, and easily deployed monitoring solution.

CCZE
CCZE is a robust and modular log colorizer with plugins for apm, exim, fetchmail, httpd, postfix, procmail, squid, syslog, ulogd, vsftpd, xferlog, and more.

Colorize
colorize reads text files or the standard input line by line. It tries to match each line against a set of configurable regular expressions, and if one of them matches, it renders the line in color by means of ANSI escape sequences.

ColorTail
Colortail works like tail but can optionally read color config files where it's specified which patterns result in which colors.

ctail
ctail is like running tail -f, but can be used on multiple files. It uses the Curses library to split the screen into as many windows as there are files to watch. The size of each file's window can optionally be specified on the command line. Regular expressions can be used to display only lines matching (or not matching) arbitrary criteria.

GILoT
GILoT is an interpreting and formatting log tailer. As it tails a log file, each log entry is matched against rules dictated in the XML rules file; if the log is matched, the log message is formatted to output only the requested data. As such, only relevant data is parsed and reading the log entries becomes much easier. At the moment, it features two different UIs: one plain console UI and one ncurses-based TUI.

LoFimo
LoFiMo is used to monitor logfiles in real time. The output is presented via a web interface and optionally on the console. Using the web interface it is possible to monitor log files from a remote machine. LoFiMo can be used to colorize the log entries using filters. filters can also be used to reformat log entries, hide log entries or play sounds or execute commands when certain log entries are read. LoFiMo uses inputs to read log entries from different file formats. It can for instance parse files created by the syslog daemon or the apache web server.

logalert
Logalert is a log file monitor tool which executes a specific action whenever it matches a string (pattern) occurrence. It reads an entire file (or starts at the end, just like tail -f) and keeps track of any changes, waiting for a specific pattern (a syslog process error, a user login, etc.) and starting an action you define when it finds it. It uses regular expressions to match the pattern occurrence and executes commands via shell interaction. It deals with the log rotation and temporary removals normally used by sysadmins.

LogMon
Something similar to MultiTail. Very similar in fact: it has also split-screen, regular expressions and coloring.

Logrep
Logrep is a secure multi-platform tool for the collection, extraction, and presentation of information from various log files. It features HTML reports, multi-dimensional analysis, overview pages, SSH communication, and graphs, and supports 25 popular systems including Snort, Squid, Postfix, Apache, Sendmail, syslog, iptables/ipchains, xferlog, NT event logs, Firewall-1, wtmp, Oracle listener, and Pix.

logtool
Logtool is a command line program that will parse ASCII logfiles into a more palatable format. It will take anything resembling a syslog or multilog file (this includes syslog-ng, and probably most of the other variants out there), and crunch it into one of the following formats for your viewing pleasure: ANSI (colorized for easy "at a glance" viewing), ASCII (for e-mail'ed reports, and term's that don't support color), CSV (for importing into your favorite spreadsheet/database), HTML (for generating web pages), RAW (for no good reason)

LogWatch
Logwatch is a customizable log analysis system. Logwatch parses through your system's logs for a given period of time and creates a report analyzing areas that you specify, in as much detail as you require. Logwatch is easy to use and will work right out of the package on most systems.

MergeLog
mergelog is a program, which merges HTTP log files by date in 'Common Log Format' (Apache default log format) from Web servers, behind round-robin DNS. It has been designed to easily process huge logs from highly stressed servers, and can manage gzipped files.

mtail
mtail is a small tail workalike that performs output coloring.

Multail
Multail ("Multiple Tail") is a simple bash-script which enables you to 'tail' and follow (like the command 'tail -f') up to three files at the same time, without the 'jumping' effect of the original 'tail' command.

MultiTail (!)
Yes, another one. This one is a 'gdesklet'.

mylogwatch
mylogwatch is a shell script that parses MySQL error logs and notifies you if new entries are detected. The need for this grew from a MySQL replication farm where notification was required when replication slave threads went down.

qlogtools
Qlogtools also contains a small multitail-like program with the same name. It can only tail multiple files but it does that well.

re-tail
Re-Tail is a command line program which is intended as an intelligent incremental logfile reader. It will read a file or group of files given on the command line, and output any changes since last time it read the file(s) in question. It will attempt to compensate if the filesize changes unexpectedly, and will also attempt to compensate if the file contents changes as well. It is not a very complex program.

scroller
Scroller is a replacement for the command "while true; do clear; xxx; sleep 10; done". It uses ncurses to redraw the new output much more smoothly, and truncates the output to the size of the screen, without causing the program to abort.

Splunk
Splunk organizes and makes sense of any type of machine data, including Web servers, application servers, email servers, databases, and network devices. It uses algorithms that dynamically discover event relationships across diverse domains of machine data and build a searchable Web of events to trace the real behavior of running systems. A Splunk server can optionally work with Splunk.com, allowing users in different organizations to participate in a global troubleshooting community and share knowledge about common events and problems while preserving data privacy.

swatch
Swatch: the active log file monitoring tool. Swatch started out as the "simple watchdog" for activly monitoring log files produced by UNIX's syslog facility. It has since been evolving into a utility that can monitor just about any type of log.

Tenshi
tenshi (formerly wasabi) is a log monitoring program designed to watch a log file for lines matching user defined regular expressions and report on the matches. The regular expressions are assigned to queues that have an alert interval and a list of mail recipients. Queues can be set to send a notification as soon as there is a log line assigned to them, or to send periodic reports. Additionally, uninteresting fields in the log lines (such as PID numbers) can be masked with the standard regular expression grouping operators ( ). This allows cleaner and more readable reports. All reports are separated by hostname and all messages are condensed when possible.

Wtail
Splits the terminal in 2 halves in which 2 logfiles are displayed. Originally MultiTail started as an enhanced version of Wtail.

xlogmaster
Xlogmaster is a program that lets you monitor everything that's going on on your system in a very quick and comfortable way. It allows reading logfiles, devices or running status-gathering programs, translating all data (if wished) and displaying it with filters for highlithing / lowlighting / hiding lines or taking actions upon user-defined events.

xtail
xtail watches the growth of files. It's like running a "tail -f" on a bunch of files at once. You can specify both filenames and directories on the command line. If you specify a directory, it watches all the files in that directory. It will notice when new files are created (and start watching them) or when old files are deleted (and stop watching them).

tailforwin32
A microsoft windows tail program. Has some functionality MultiTail also has.

pctail
Python Colorized Tail is a script that tails and colorizes syslog output from multiple files.

bofhlog
Bofhlog is a simple tool for "active" and "passive" monitoring of Unix log files. "Active" means that you can see the changes in log files on the screen as new log entries are entered by syslog. It is the same functionality that "tail -f" offers, except that bofhlog can handle logrotate. "Passive" means that you don't have to watch the logs all the time; bofhlog can email or contact you by other means if something "critical" is entered in the log files. "Critical" means that bofhlog can be used both as a lightweight security auditing tool and as an error diagnostic tool for a Unix system.

WatchLog
WatchLog is a Perl program designed to give users a better real-time view of their Web traffic. Simply doing a 'tail -f' on the server log file often yields confusing results as you can be bombarded with scrolling with a single hit. WatchLog attempts to present the same information in a clean, formatted, real time view of the activity on a Website by watching the logfile and presenting only the relevant data.

klogview
klogview is a KDE real-time log file viewer, like tail -f. The main window contains any number of dockable log panels, with an arbitrary number of log sources in each of them. Every log source can have a separate font color and style. Other features include filters, alerts, different encodings, and tray support.

Simple Colourised Helpful Logs
Simple Colourised Helpful Logs is a log viewer that removes process IDs from service names, reformats the date, and executes external programs depending on the received message's host name, service name, or based on a custom string. The program also includes a built in 'tail -f' function so you don't need an external script to set up a pipe.

retail
retail is intended as an intelligent incremental logfile reader. It is useful to track log file changes (i.e., new log entries) via cronjob or script, and works nicely as a companion to the LogTool program.

Beeper
Beeper is a simple program that emits a sound when newlines occur in standard input. It is useful in conjunction with commands like grep, find, and tail.

mtail
mtail is a small tail workalike that performs output coloring using ANSI escape sequences (although the sequences are overridable, so you could cause it to output something else, e.g., HTML font tags). It is written in python, is fairly small, and should be relatively platform-independent.

WatchLog
WatchLog is a perl program designed to give you a better real-time view of your web traffic. Simply doing a 'tail -f' on the server log file often yields confusing results as you can be bombarded with scrolling with a single hit. WatchLog attempts to present the same information in a clean, formatted, real-time view of the activity on your website by watching the logfile for you and presenting only the relevant data.

Miscellaneous

Octopussy
Perl/XML Logs Analyzer, Alerter & Reporter.

inotail
inotail is a replacement for the 'tail' program found in the base installation of every Linux/Unix system. It makes use of the inotify infrastructure in recent versions of the Linux kernel to speed up tailing files in the follow mode (the '-f' option). Standard tail polls the file every second by default, while inotail listens to special events sent by the kernel through the inotify API to determine whether a file needs to be reread.

Tail server
Tail server allows you to export the output of a "tail -f" command of a log file to a TCP port, allowing it to be viewed remotely with telnet. It provides a regular expression filter to include or exclude output view.

Visual REGEXP
This tool helps you develop regular expressions in a visual way.

andatool
Andatool displays in realtime how often one or more regular expressions match with what scrolls-by in a logfile.

Screen
Screen is a terminal multiplexer

SplitVT
splitvt takes any VT100 terminal window and splits it vertically into two shell windows. It allows you to watch two terminal sessions at once, which can be very useful whenever you want more screen real-estate without messing with windows.

Twin
An X11 alike windowing system for the console.

AA-Lib
AA-lib is a low level gfx library just as many other libraries are. The main difference is that AA-lib does not require graphics device. AA-lib replaces those old-fashioned output methods with a powerful ASCII art renderer.

aalib-based X server
An X-server which can run on a ascii-console.

QT/Console
Qt-Console is a widget toolkit for software developers. It is based on Qt, which is still being developed by Trolltech. Qt-Console simplifies the task of writing and maintaining CUI (console user interface) applications. As Qt-Console is based on Qt, it inherits Qt's object-orientated nature and multi-platform design. Now every Unix equipped with ncurses is ready to experience the power of Qt-Console.

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