As the days go on I tend to pop up shell windows with tail running so I can follow the traffic on my web server(s). Well that was all fine and good, but it got really messy following many servers. Plus straight text wasn’t very pretty. Then Dougal Cambell pointed out a cool cross platform graphical tail program. Written in ruby, it isn’t for the faint at heart to get working, but once working its quite workable.
The program “glTail” is really just a Ruby script that utilizes OpenGL to give you a visual showing of your servers traffic. It took a little tweaking but I soon had it running smoothly under Ubuntu. What does gtail do?
- Monitors logfiles in realtime over an ssh connection to remote servers.
- Can monitor multiple logfiles on multiple servers, simultaneously.
- Currently has parsers for Apache, IIS, RubyOnRails, and Postfix logs (and Dougal got the Postfix parser to work pretty good on Sendmail logs).
- Pretty!
The minor things I ran across getting it working.
- Take your time following the install instructions, it took a bit to get the few libraries installed correctly.
- Simplify for your setup. When editing the .rb file set it too just do 1 server to begin with. That will allow you to find any strangeness.
- The script wants FULL paths. Not relative. No paths that use variables. And be careful about simlinks.
- Be careful with password, I found that some characters I used in my passwords where conflicting.
- You can use spaces and such in the server name, so make them descriptive.
- If you have a bit of memory, then you can have more and more servers… just realize that the more servers you have followed, the laggier the display gets.
Currently I’m only following 4 (now Eight) of my servers, but it runs so smoothly and cleanly I’ll be adding more servers I’m sure. If you are running Ubuntu, here is a decent thread in which the author himself has been helping people.
Major props for it so far, and for a .05 version it runs very well. I look forward to seeing where it grows too. Meanwhile I’m just going to sit here, drink my Fat Tire, watch my Austin Powers and just get memorized by the traffic.
EDIT: I updated with a more current screenshot showing how the dots may become different sizes.
Tags: Hosting, Linux, Programs, ruby, rubyonrails, server, server administration, utilities, Windows
I’ve stumbled upon this gl_tail too but cannot find any documentation (or brains) as to how to get it to work with IIS logs…any ideas?
Well if you know rexgrep it isn’t too hard. Basically copy the line that filters apache. Dupe it and rename the filter “iis”. Adjust the log pattern to match iis and you should be set.
Its like compare and contrast. See what the pattern is and make it match.
The new version that was released (.06) has been completely reworked. Its more stable and the config has gotten a lot easier. Plus he did a couple minor usability things with the way it looks that’s nice.