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Logfiles Made Interesting with glTail

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the because-you-can dept.

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."

9 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Oh dear... by DamonHD · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...I'm afraid that's the nearest I've seen to a simulated pissing contest ever! B^>

    Rgds

    Damon

    --
    http://m.earth.org.uk/
  2. Oh great... by GodlikeDoglike · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...we just made his log screen look like a bukkake flick.

  3. engineering management 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    tell the engineer it can't be done

  4. Re:Looks promising by Fudgie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:just a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect by Fudgie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Still running at 30 fps with ~25 requests / second.

  6. Oh, Sweeeetness! by avirrey · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Re:just a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect by Fudgie · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  8. Running glTail on Windows by Mazin07 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Wait, what... they're not interesting? by Fudgie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.