Why Goldilogs?

Why introduce a new log viewer into the already flooded market? Are there room in the world for yet another log viewer?

About me and my needs

I, the developer of the Goldilogs Log Viewer, have been working in software development for about 17 years. For the last 10 years I have been part of a development team, that follow the now so popular DevOps methodology. We have been developing a set of both internal and customer oriented application for a large logistic company. In addition to the development of the applications, we have been responsible for the day to day operation of the entire suite of applications.

In order to constantly monitor the health of the applications, we needed a real-time log viewer or log-monitor. The production (and test) logs were accessible as remote URN resources while development logs were local to the developer workstation.

What we found

After thoroughly searching the internet, we choose the BareTailPro log viewer from baremetalsoft.

The BareTailPro log viewer worked sufficiently, but had some drawbacks. The interface was old and it lacked some obvious features such as sorting, changing display name of the logs and small things such as copying the log path or ‘Open containing folder’. The log viewer worked great but was kind of tedious to use.

We looked for alternatives to BareTail several times, but no better alternatives emerged. Alternatives were either to simple or to complex, loaded entire log file into memory, not real time, only supported one log file etc. For at long time we stuck to BareTail.

Finally I decided to write my own.

Then along came Goldilogs – the bold logviewer

Our initial requirements were simple:

  • Basically the same functionality as BareTailPro, specifically including:
    • Support for multiple logfiles
    • No loading of the entire logfile (since they are quite large and often located on a network path).
    • Instant access (view and scroll)
    • Fast! (no lagging when scrolling large files)
    • Real-time tailing of log files.
    • Searching including tailing
    • User defined color highlighting
  • Easy to use and more modern interface, including:
    • Drag and drop logfiles into the log viewer
    • Easy ordering of the logfiles in the list
    • Changing display name of log file (We have many logfiles named ErrorLog.txt 🙂 )
    • Low CPU/RAM/Network usage.

A lot of time and effort has gone into the development of Goldilogs. Now, after using it in a production environment for a little over a year, I feel it is production stable so I decided to make it public available.

To come

Development have not stopped. We have loads of ideas for new features which will be implemented as time allows. Please feel free to download the free version or start a trial of the Professional version and see if it fits your needs. We believe, that Goldilogs is the best alternative to BareTailPro and a lot of other real-time log viewers.