How do you visualize logfiles in realtime?

Question

Sometimes it might be useful, but mostly just looking cool or impressive to visualize log files (anything from http requests and to bandwith usage to cups of coffee drunk per day). I know about Visitorville which I think look a bit silly, and then there's gltail.

How do you "visualize" your log files in realtime?

Answer 1

You may take a look at Apache Chainsaw. This nifty tool allows Log incomes from nearly everyqhere and has live filtering and colering. If you have an already written Log, I'm not sure if it can read it, it's been a while since I used it last time (was very usefull for the prototyping phase of our JBoss server)

Answer 2

There is also the logstalgia tool. Visualizes Apache logs. See http://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/ for more details and a youtube video.

Answer 3

Google has released the Visualization API that is probably flexible enough to help you:

The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations. The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large.

It requires some Javascript knowledge and includes Google Docs integration, Spreadsheet integration. Check out the Gallery for some examples.