this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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78
Logwatch (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In looking for an app to view logs that doesn't require a lot of overhead, I stumbled upon Logwatch. After running it through it's paces, it seems to be pretty capable from docker, fail2ban, to sys logs.

I got to wondering if there are other such log viewers I could try that are in the same genre. Logwatch doesn't greate pretty graphics and dialed out dashboards, but it's fairly quick, I can view from a range of dates and times, and a variety of logs.

I checked out GoAcces, but it seemed geared towards web related logs like webpage hits, etc. With other options requiring elastisearch, databases, etc, they just seemed heavy for my application.

Anyone have any suggestions. So far, Logwatch does what it says on the tin, but I'm curious what others have tried or still use.

ETA: Thanks all for the recommends. I'm still going over a couple of them, but lnav seems like what I'm looking for.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I've been meaning to try Logdy out. Thanks for the reminder!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

lmao this is exactly what I've been lookin for... Thanks! I just knew if I was a lazy fuck and sat on my hands someone would do the work for me eventually!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Glad to help! XD

[–] moonpiedumplings 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

https://lnav.org/

https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/playground/ccdc-logs/

I played around with some non-elasticsearch web/gui based solutions as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I can attest to Lnav being great, short of implementing a full Grafana/Loki stack (which is what i use for most of my infrastructure).

Lnav makes log browsing/filtering in the terminal infinitely more enjoyable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I can attest to Lnav being great

I'm sitting here running it through some logs. So far, it's on top of the stack.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Those two look pretty interesting. Thanks, I'll check them out.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I installed Grafana, simply because it was the only one I had heard of, and I figured that becoming familiar with it was probably useful from a professional development standpoint.

It's definitely massive overkill for my use case, though, and I'm looking to replace it with something else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a sucker for dialed out dashboards. However, logs are confusing enough for me. LOL I need just the facts ma'am. Graphana is a great package tho, useful for a lot of metrics.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

I use Victoria Logs, with vector as the log forwarding agent

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Dozzle, log forge is a new one I've seen but not tried.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It is my understanding that while you can use Dozzle to view other logs besides Docker logs, you have to deploy separate instances. While Dozzle is awesome, I'm not sure I want to spin up 5 or 6 separate Dozzle instances. I do use Dozzle a lot for Docker logs and it's fantastic for that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

The backup is a self hosted splunk.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

https://www.pimpmylog.com/ + rsyslogd, there are docker images

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Wow, you just gave me flashbacks to my first Linux/unix job in 2008. Tripwire and logwatch reports to review every morning.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Saw a posting this past week on SSD drive failures. They're blaming a lot of it on 'over-logging' -- too much writing trivial, unnecessary data to logs. I imagine it gets worse when realtime data like OpenTelemetry get involved.

Until I saw that, never thought there was such a thing as 'too much logging.' Wonder if there are any ways around it, other than putting logs on spinny disks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Oh I'm not moving that much data to log, and the logs I read are all the normal stuff, nothing exotic. I guess if it were a huge cooperation, that had every Nagios plugin known to man and logging/log-rotating that because of logs, yeah I guess.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Cribl Edge? I haven’t tested it for snappy, but I like the nice ui and native docker support.