Syslog is cool and all, but this is a nice UI for displaying the logs in the browser, so everyone in the company can watch them, or you can easily open it up on an iPad, and hang it on the wall.
Could I use SSH over iTerm, and display multiple windows in Screen? Sure. But this is easier/quicker.
It would be nice if it didn't need to constantly hit local disk on every machine, though.
What is a usecase for everyone in the company to see raw logs? Nagios / zabbix dashboard - sure. Some visits analytics - maybe. General stats / resource usage - not for everyone, but ok.
But why would you ever inflict raw, unprocessed, scrolling logs on anyone other than developers working on a specific bug? (they'd expect an accessible backwards search too)
I work with Mike. Everyone in the company doesn't need to see the logs, but all the developers do and some others (like myself) do too.
This tool is most useful for watching servers after deployments, tracking a process through a bunch of coordinated services, live debugging, or keeping an eye on specific log messages across a bunch of servers.
As many folks have pointed out, there are plenty of solutions for aggregating, storing, parsing and analyzing logs. We needed a tool to make watching live logs simpler. That's what this is for.
I created vsConsole because it was a pain to get access to even the development and test server logs for the apps we were working on. Now the developers and testers have easy access to logs (not just syslogs, but our application logs wherever they may be).
In addition to joining your previous comments on this thread in pointless meanness, this comment is also nonsensical. Who else but humans could be the intended audience for logs, raw or otherwise? They are a cast-iron bitch to do anything programmatic with; whole companies have been created just to tackle that problem.
I'd go one further, entire industries have been created to tackle this very problem! There is a lot of money in mining logs properly, it's easily a billion dollar industry.
Watch a production log file for 5 minutes and tell me if you can get anything meaningful out of it.
OP's ignorance makes him a threat to himself and others. It's this absolute refusal to learn the existing toolset that's pervading modern software development, putting projects in jeopardy. What's odd to me is that not only is the HN community complacent in this, you actually applaud it.
FWIW, this is why your sysadmin is pithy. He has seen software developers pull stunts like this for far too long, unwilling to listen to reason, unwilling to be technically cuckolded by a software package that's existed for thirty years.
Could I use SSH over iTerm, and display multiple windows in Screen? Sure. But this is easier/quicker.
It would be nice if it didn't need to constantly hit local disk on every machine, though.