Log viewer on Windows

Question

I'm a developer, and I generate big log files. I've tried several log viewer applications (free or not), so far mtail I like the most. But, it lacks features.

I would like from my log viewer to:

• handle files > than 10MB
• filtering
• highlight search queries
• behave like a log viewer - do all of these in real time, and fast

The question is:

Which log viewer would you recommend on Windows?

Answer 1

BareTail, which has a free version, works pretty well for us for years.

Answer 2

My new favorite log viewer is glogg. It makes finding stuff in noisy log files very easy. It could use a few more features but does 95% of everything I need it to do, it is open source, written in C++ using Qt and runs on Linux/Windows/Mac. Give it a try.

From the glogg description page:

glogg enables you to use regular expressions to search for interesting events in your log files. It presents a results window which, together with complex regular expressions allows easy isolation of the meaningful lines amongst the noise.

glogg has been primarily developed to help spot and understand problems in huge logs generated by embedded systems. It can be equally useful to a sysadmin digging through logs from databases or web servers.

The main design goals for glogg are:

it should be fast
it does not have any limit on the size of files it can handle
it provides a clear view of the matches even in heavily cluttered

files.

If you think it does not do that, it is a bug and it should be fixed!

Answer 3

I wrote my own little logviewer just because of that, its really raw at the moment, but would be an ok starting point if anyone wanted to extend it.

Answer 4

Take a look a logview4net it's free and has a different take on viewing log files.

A free (open source) log monitor / log viewer for:

* Files and folders
* Incomming UDP traffic
* EventLogs
* SQL- Server tables
* Atom and RSS feeds
* StdOut and StdErr

Answer 5

I would recommend logFaces, it has fantastic real-time log viewer based on eclipse-style design.

Answer 6

Installing MSYS gives you a close version to a Unix environment on Windows, you get all the main binaries. Using these tools you can achieve all the functionality you request using standard commands like tail, grep, less, etc.