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does anybody know a good graphical logfile analyzer for (mainly) syslog messages from ubuntu? maybe one that converts the text-based messages in objects to sort/group/filter messages like windows' logfile viewer.

As alternative more comfortable terminal tools than combinations of grep/sed/cat/less are also appreciated (or a very good combination? :P )

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2 Answers 2

There are various log viewers for the desktop environments; gnome-system-log is searchable and user-friendly; as is ksystemlog for KDE (although of course you then need to install the KDE runtime). The gnome log should be the best one for you really, as it can be used to quickly filter the logs and find what you want; you can go straight to syslog, for example, and find the Ubuntu system messages and monitor how the system is working in the background with cron, etc. I recommend log viewing (and then researching things) as a great way of learning how the system works.

Terminal wise, you can watch any open logs in real-time with tail -f <log file> and grep can be very useful to search for words such as 'Machine' 'Hardware' and 'error', which often pop up in faults: for example grep -i 'machine' /var/log/kern.log. With grep it is important to use the i switch to ignore capitalisation, as you can miss important bits of the log without it. To look through a whole folder of logs, you can use grep -ir <folder>.

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thanks for your reply! is gnome-system-log the standard logfile viewer in ubuntu? because i don't like it that much –  Achim A Jul 13 '12 at 11:46
Yes; if you want to install other log viewers from other desktops such as KDE you also have to install a lot of other files from that desktop environment. I have also used Mate log viewer, which is similar. If you just want to monitor one or two logs, and want quite a lot of search and filter options without using the command line, glogg is worth a look. You have to manually select which logs to view and search. –  user76204 Jul 13 '12 at 12:33
you can combine tail and grep with something like tail -F <log file> | grep -i 'machine (use -F capital to keep following a file name after it's deleted and re-created, eg: when an old log file is automatically archived) –  drevicko Jan 28 '13 at 1:42

You may want to take a look at LogZilla. It is web-based and allows searching, graphs, etc.

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RTFM...LogZilla isn't a Cloud based solution - it's cloud capable, but there's a VM, Subversion Download and even Turnkey hardware available. –  Clayton Dukes Apr 1 '14 at 0:26

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