Logtales

Logtales lets you visualize log events grouped per item on a timeline. Let it tell you the tales of your application, found in their logs.

Dependencies

• Elixir 1.5, see mix.exs for packages
• Elm 0.18, see front/elm-package.json for packages

Run the demo example

Displays events from a subset of the July 1995 NASA Kennedy Space Center WWW server log.

bin/demo.bash

Note: this resets the existing events database and retrieves Elixir backend dependencies.

How to use

• Configure the backend (see Configure section)
• Get dependencies with mix deps.get (This is unnecessary if bin/demo.bash was run previously)
• Load log file into database with mix load
• Start the app with bin/run.bash
• Open http://localhost:4000
• Use the slider to travel through time, you can edit the width of the viewed range

Configure

• Set the file value in the :logtales config in config/config.exs to the path of your log file
• Set the regex value in the :logtales config in config/config.exs. This is an elixir regex that must contain three named capture groups: date, item and content. It is used for both filtering log events and finding the date, item and content of event that will be displayed. For example, for a log whose lines are like

[2017-01-01 23:00:00] [an item] blah blah blah
[2017-01-02 00:05:00] [another item] blah blah blah
[2017-01-02 00:05:00] [an item] blah blah blah

the regex may be

~r/^\[(?<date>\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d \d\d:\d\d:\d\d)\] \[(?<item>[^\]]+)\] (?<content>.*)/

The item can be anything meaningful for you to group events when plotting them on a timeline. Events of the same item will be displayed on one line, there will be one line per item. For example if your logs are authentication logs and the application prints some events with a username in it, you can use the username as item. As a result there will be one line per username on the timeline plot.

• Set the date_format value in the :logtales config in config/config.exs to the Timex format to use to parse dates captured by the regex.

Start the application

mix deps.get  # If Elixir dependencies were never retrieved
bin/run.bash

This starts the application at http://localhost:4000.

Load the log file into database

This resets the existing database and loads events from the configured file

mix load

Run the tests

Backend

mix test

Recompile front-end on changes (for development)

There is a mix task that watches the front-end Elm code and recompiles the Elm application when changes are detected. This is handy during development.

mix eye_drops