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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."
...I'm afraid that's the nearest I've seen to a simulated pissing contest ever! B^>
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
...we just made his log screen look like a bukkake flick.
tell the engineer it can't be done
The most entertaining way I ever saw to view logs was Visitorville-its kind of like SimCity meets web logging.
It's pretty obvious that fudgie.org is just the name of the site and glTail is the name of the program.
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
Still running at 30 fps with ~25 requests / second.
You gotta add an 'Asteroids' ship on the screen that lets you shoot down connections!
"Oh, look! Bob just logged on... let's get 'em!"
...
"IT support. How can I help you?"
"Hi, this is Bob..."
--
X's and O's for all my foes.
perhaps you mean this: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
http://www.fudgie.org/slashdotted.jpg for how that looks.
Shouldn't be too hard. I'll cook one up this evening.
Why use ssh + tail -f when one can send the output to a centralized syslog server? There isn't any need to setup an account, keys, etc. when you can have the individual servers consolidate the data for you.
Remote syslog also means that your servers are more secure: (a) because it is harder for crackers to falsify remote logs as they need to compromise two machines, not just one; and (b) because your visualisation program doesn't need access to SSH keys for all of the machines it monitors, so a compromise on the visualisation computer doesn't automatically mean that all of the servers can also be compromised. However, you could presumably adapt this tool to use syslog quite easily.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
If you want to run glTail on Windows:
1. Use the One-click Ruby installer from rubyforge (not Cygwin ruby)
2. Make sure to `gem install net-ssh`
3. Change "require 'glut'" to "require 'glut_prev'" to enable legacy GLUT ruby bindings
Took me a while to figure this out.
So...how many hours of unpaid overtime did your boss get out of you?
I like getting paid for my awesome work. Kudos, though.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
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.