Graphical log viewer

I’ve seen in a couple of posts where people have posted screenshots of what looks like a nice graphical log viewer. I’m struggling to see what’s what when using the built in viewer as everything scrolls so quickly.

Could someone tell me how to install this please?

Many people use the frontail log viewer that can easily be installed as part of OpenHABian.

Could you point to an example? Beyond Frontail which I assume is what you are referring to as the built in one, all the screen shots I’m aware of are using tail -f on the command line. A few are using [multitail] color scheme for openhab logs. For example:

The above screenshot shows openhab.log at the top, my Rules log file in the middle (I’ve modified the logging config to log Rules to their own file), and events.log at the bottom.

But none of these are graphical. they are pure text based and run from the command line. And they don’t do anything to address “everything scrolls so quickly” because it shows you the logs as they are written to.

But one thing you should use is the filter option in Frontail or grep with tail to only show you the log statements you care about. See How to watch and look through logging for details.

Multitail also has a few useful features. You can stop the scrolling in one of the panes and go back by pressing “b”. Pressing “space” will put a red marker line in all three panes which can be useful to see where the logs line up with each other or to easily see what events occurred after you pressed the space (e.g. press space and then kick off an event to test something). You can also search through the open logs or configure a standing search that highlights lines that match. All this stuff helps, but none of it is graphical.

I assumed they meant displaying the text in a graphical interface, not converting words to graphics.

I can’t find it now :frowning:

It had text down the left of the screen and then columns of coloured blocks. It looked a bit like Node Red but in strict rows and columns… or that kids’ coding platform Scratch.

That is probably Chris’s Zwave or Zigbee binding log viewer. That is just a web site and it only works with logs from those two bindings. They are not for generic openHAB logs or logs from other bindings.

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I think that might be it. I just found an example:

Another way to see your logs in a nice graphical interface is this:

But I have not tried that yet.
It is on my long to-do list to use the Elastic Stack. :smile:

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This may be a little off topic, but my frontail is a docker installation that works well with OH events.log and openhab.log. is it possible for it to also stream the log from zigbee2mqtt( from a completely different directory)?
If so how do I add that to my docker setup?

Likely but this is not a frontail forum. We are not experts in configuring that.

You’ll need to look at the instructions for that container and for Frontail itself. In general, you’ll need to mount the log file(s) into the container and configure Frontail to follow it.