HACKER Q&A
📣 arduinomancer

Log file visualization tool that isn't a webapp?


Are there any tools for easily analyzing/visualizing time series text logs locally that aren't webapps?

The world of log analysis/visualization seems extremely bloated with options now days due to all the SaaS startups.

I'm not looking to set up some cluster/docker/server stuff or load the data into a third party service.

Ideally I just want to pull some logs from my servers and analyze them locally.

Is there something better than excel for doing this?

  👤 tanin Accepted Answer ✓
I'm not sure why Excel is suitable in the first place. It has 1M row limit.

Plus, generally, a log file is JSON-based, not CSV.

If you are looking for a quick tool to perform SQL on CSV (maybe your log is in CSV), I've built a desktop app for this: https://superintendent.app

👤 tstack
The Logfile Navigator (https://lnav.org) is a terminal-based tool for digging through logs. It's visualization capabilities are pretty limited at the moment (it can draw stacked bar charts for the results of SQLite queries). It would be interesting to know what other types of visualization you would be interested in.
👤 jonatron
What type of logs? The old school Analog/AWStats/Webalizer probably still work for HTTP server logs.
👤 codetrotter
Command line tools like grep, cut, awk, and others can be highly suitable for the job. But like one commenter already mentioned, it’s going to depend on what kind of logs you are looking at. And furthermore, what kind of analysis you are looking to do.
👤 jimmySixDOF
If you're ok with Pyhton then Matplotlib might work for you on the viz side.