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Logfiles Made Interesting with glTail
Fudgie writes "My boss claimed it was pretty much impossible to create an entertaining way to visualize server traffic and events in a short time frame, so of course I had to prove him wrong. A weekend of neglecting my family produced a small ruby program which connects to your servers via SSH, grabs and parses data from Apaches access log and Ruby on Rails production log, and displays your traffic and statistics in real-time using a simple OpenGL interface (tested under Linux and Mac OS/X). It's a bit hard to explain over text, so please have a look at fudgie.org for an example movie, and more information."
The most entertaining way I ever saw to view logs was Visitorville-its kind of like SimCity meets web logging.
Anything put into a logfile could be parsed and shown. I've tried with emails, shoutcast listeners and server logins, but they're not as interesting to show in the movie as I don't have the kind of traffic to make it useful.
Obligatory jokes about 'taking the piss' aside, that is brilliant. It's the ultimate 'machine that does ping' (to name an old sketch) to keep management amused, but also provides real data. I bet that screen will go ballistic when you get Slashdotted (also a good way to visualise DDoS, maybe?).
I was about to say that it's a sort of etherape on steroids, but I've just realised your visualisation could benefit etherape instead (if you don't know etherape, look it up. No tools identifies a virus infection quicker).
Class, I'm impressed.
Insert
http://www.fudgie.org/slashdotted.jpg for how that looks.
Shouldn't be too hard. I'll cook one up this evening.
A lot of my time at work is spent looking at logfiles from webservers, applications servers, and databases looking for things about to break down, but after I introduced this I just need to glance at a screen to instantly see if some server has stopped answering, is taking too long to answer, or is generating way more exceptions than normal. I also add an event (the login text bouncing down the screen in the movie) on each money generating activity, which always amazes marketing people when they walk by.