The Hindu Business Line : Monitoring log files

I’m a systems administrator for a private concern and I take care of windows servers and clients. Is there any freeware tool that constantly updates my windows server log files, say IIS log files, to keep tracking them?

Suraj Some free real-time log file monitoring tools are available on the Internet.

The following, ‘baretail.exe’ (Size 220 KB), is one such log file monitoring software. You can download it from this URL: http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail/download.php?p=m

Baretail is a small executable file that you do not need to install.

You will only have to double-click the baretail.exe file.

It is useful in the following scenario:

Some applications write the log in text files.

Usually, if you want to monitor these log files, since it a text file format, you will need to open the file in any text editor such as notepad, WordPad, etc., scroll to the end and see the updated contents.

The problem with text files is that they will not update information in real-time.

In order to see the updated information again, you will have to close and open the text file, only then can you see the updated lines of the log file.

Using Baretail, you can watch the log files in real-time. This has the following features:

Optimised real-time viewing engine that supports view files greater than 2GB size, viewing files over a network, configurable line wrapping, TAB expansion, font, Line spacing, Line offset, Update interval, etc.

You can view the end of a growing file in real time, such as “tail –f “ on Unix systems simultaneously monitor multiple files for changes using tabs and visual indication on each tab of file status and changes.

Lines containing particular strings can be highlighted to help you notice important text.

Also, the highlight colours are fully customisable.

It supports International character sets such as Unicode, UTF-8, ANSI, and ASCII.

This engine allows many file formats, for instance Windows/DOS text files (lines end in CR/LF pairs), Unix text files (lines end in LF), Microsoft IIS logfiles (and other files terminated with a string of nulls).

User Preferences can be saved to a file, the registry, or not at all on exit. Preferences are loaded from a file in the local directory, a file in the application directory or the registry.

Preferences can be loaded and saved at any time by the user, and shared with other users.

It also supports command like use.

M. Sampath

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