Live log monitor

Wowza Developer Dojo
1

This is not strictly a Wowza question, but I’m giving it a try here.

I have recently installed the Wowza Dev edition on a linux server in a datacentre. I want to see what happens to the server by monitoring the traces that my app writes to the log. So basically, I need a live log monitor. Just to be very clear: I’m not looking for an analysis tool - I need to see what’s happening live.

I have tried mtail before (just using putty to open a shell and then run mtail on the wowza log), but that’s just spitting out the text. I’d like to have something that interprets the ECLF and does some highlighting, like errors in red. Preferably, the tool would have a remote client so that I don’t need to have a shell window and so that it can do more nifty things in terms of formatting than a text-based UI.

Can anyone recommend a free tool, preferably one that is in the stable Gentoo portage tree?

2

You can run Wowza in standalone mode using Putty.

cd  /usr/local/WowzaMediaServer/bin
./startup.sh

And you can modify what you see in the /conf/log4j.properties Console Appender Fields list.

Richard

3

Another option is logging to a database. Then you can build something around the database.

http://community.wowza.com/t/-/236

Richard

4

i know this is kind of old but i did find 2 alternatives

Windows http://code.google.com/p/log-manager/downloads/list

Mac http://grasscove.com/

5

Dear Richard,

Richard, thank you for your quick reaction, but I’m afraid it is not an answer to my question. Yes, I can see what happens if I run Wowza in Putty from the command line.

But running Wowza from the shell, the server would be killed as soon as putty lost connection. That can be solved by running Wowza as a service and running mtail to see the log as I suggested in my initial post.

But then I don’t get highlighting, formatting or filtering of the log entries. If w3C went to the trouble to make a standard for logging, I’d assume there have to be many applications to watch log files in real-time. Has anyone got any suggestions?

Sander

6

I found a solution to at least part of my problem. To get a real-time copy of the logfile on my local machine, I found a quite simple solution. The command below will append all changes to the remote log file to a local file:

ssh <host> "tail -f /usr/local/WowzaMediaServer/logs/wowzamediaserver_access.log" >> wowza.log

All you need for this is SSH. Now, I just need a log viewer that tails the local copy of the file.

Can anyone recommend a real-time log viewer that can parse ECLF?

7

Hi, I haven’t tried it yet, but the demo looks promising. Try this: http://codebox.org.uk/pages/logmonitor

Regards.