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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."
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.
http://www.fudgie.org/slashdotted.jpg for how that looks.
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.