For several years we have been using BareTail Pro at my workplace. BareTail Pro is an excellent real time log viewer. It’s fast and relatively easy to use, but it has some shortcomings. The interface was quite old and therefore cumbersome to use some places. Since it was no slogger in active development, I decided to build my own log viewer. Because I loved BareTail Pro so much, I used it as a template and build Goldilogs to work in the same basic way. Then I added or changed the things, I was missing in BareTail Pro.
Main goals were:
- Goldilogs should start up fast and display log file content instantly (no loading time).
- Goldilogs must work without needing to loading the entire log file (to minimize memory usage and network traffic/disk io).
- Low memory, CPU and network footprint (We needed live tailing of log files on production servers)
- Main purpose is real-time view of log files in production, test environments and on development workstations.
- And last,
but not least, a modern user interface utilizing drag-and-drop gestures.