Codebox Software

LogMonitor is a Java-based web application, that allows you to monitor server log files via a web browser. This project is released under the GNU General Public License and the source code is available for download from the Sourceforge CVS respository.

This is the web interface, as rendered by Firefox on Ubuntu (see a live demo here)

The text in the main part of the window reflects the contents of the currently selected log file. The box in the upper left-hand part of the screen contains links for each of the log files that are available to view. The log contents shown on-screen are updated periodically using asynchronous HTTP requests via JavaScript (AJAX), so as the log file's contents change, the updates appear in LogMonitor automatically.

If one of available logs is updated while it is not being viewed, then the appropriate link in the left-hand menu will be highlighted, alerting the user to the activity.

LogMonitor's Options dialog allows you to specify how much of the log file to display (for example, the most recent 100 lines), as well as the interval between updates; the time until the next update is indicated by the progress bar in the lower left of the screen.

The appearance of the log display is also highly configurable, the Styles dialog box allows the user to select foreground and background colours for each of the fields in the log, so that irrelevant information can be hidden, and important data can be highlighted.

In order to run LogMonitor you will need a Java web container such as Tomcat, running on the same server as the log files you wish to monitor. Also, please note that the web interface renders quite poorly on Internet Explorer.