Call for logview4net user stories
Please let me know how you are using logview4net and what more you want it to do.
I know there are some who use it to monitor and consolidate Apache web logs.
One user told me he monitors the chat log of his MMORPG with logview4net running on a second monitor.
Another use is to watch for activity in an ftp archive.
How are you using it?
Other search terms:
- configure extra actions in logview4net
- logview4net and apache logs
New release of logview4net (9.19)
Yesterday I made a new release of logview4net my multi channel log monitor.
I got a request for a TCP listener in addition to the UDP listener that was already there.
It actually wasn’t much work; First I copied the UDP listener, then I copied some code from the MSDN documentation.
I haven’t done any real testing though so if you want a stable TCP listener please try it out and give me some feedback.
The documentation isn’t updated yet, but the TCP listener is configured just as the UDP listener.
I just realized that the documentation doesn’t mention that you can use “ANY” as the remote IP address if you want anyone to be able to send data to your machine.
logview4net 9.15 released
Get your fresh copy from SourceForge.
I need some help designing part of the GUI for the next release.
The changes in this release are:
- Fixed: [2250820] The part “User Interactions” in the settings dialog doesn’t expand if one adds more patterns.
- Fixed: [2250843] Manage actions missing scrollbar
- Fixed: [2250810] FolderListener: logview4net crashes if an additional file …
- Fixed: Http authentication in the RSSListener
- Fixed: [2250834] Save dialog default folder
- Fixed: [2250823] The default font is “Courier new”. But when one opens the font dialog then”Microsoft Sans Serif” is selected.
logview4net goes WPF
(Edit Dec. 2010) I didn’t coem arount to recreate the GUI in WPF, I find it more valuable to make it run on top of Mono instead. (end edit)
I am rewriting the GUI and recompiling everything for .Net 3.5
This will remove a couple of the existing bugs and hopefully not introduce to many new ones.
If there are things in the GUI you would like to change now is the time to tell me.
The first time I looked at WPF, when it was still called Avalon, I really disliked the flowing layout model. This time I kind of like it.
logview4net passes 10k downloads
Tonight logview4net passed 10 000 downloads on Sourceforge.
There are some open bugs so there will be at least one more release this year.
Next year it will probably be moved to .NET 3.5 and made able to route messages.
Better than logview4net
Someone Googled for ‘better than logview4net’ and ended up on my blog. It must have been an anticlimax to look for something better and end up on the developers blog.
There is a java application called Chainsaw that is part of the Apace Logging Services. I don’t know about all it’s features but it inspired me to create logview4net.
I know there are some performance issues with some usage patterns. If you think you are on of those users please write a comment and use a WORKING email address so that I can try to fix your issues.
Turning down user expectations.
After some indications from a faithful (thanks Bill) user I found a perceived ‘hang’ in logview4net; If you load two large files (>500 lines) it will hide the progress bar for the second file. I have fixed that so now it doesn’t appear to hang while loading the files. It is still unusable until both files are loaded though.
I have to implement some kind of auto sizing of the buffer and then I’ll do a new release. Probably within a week.
The bigger performance issue is a little harder 
I have users that monitor the Windows Event Log and some log files on >50 servers and keep the app running all the time. If I stored all that data their workstations would be out of memory most of the time. So the conflict is between the style of usage where you want to see all data, as in loading a large file, and their style of usage where there is an infinite amount of data. The current solution is to load the large files into memory and just treat it as a large buffer, but it is painfully slow. I would rather just load the data needed on the screen at the moment.
I will keep on tuning it, but implementing a sliding window is almost a new application so it will probably not happen soon. I will keep large file loading in mind though so that it wont get worse. It is the multitude of listeners and the possibility to have more than one listener in a session that makes this hard to solve.
I have previously made the decision to evolve logview4net as a real time log monitor and not a log file parser so I will prioritize new listeners and actions before large file parsing performance.
The application that inspired me to make logview4net is Chainsaw. If logview4net doesn’t fulfill your needs maybe Chainsaw will. I didn’t want to install a Java runtime just to listen to a UDP port so I started writing my own app instead.
New license
I have changed the license for logview4net from BSD to Artistic License 2.0. As far as I understand these licenses this means that you previously could do just about whatever you wanted with the logview4net and now your freedom is limited to your own organization. That is: You may still freely distribute the unmodified binaries, but you are only allowed to distribute modifications within your organization.
The reason for this change is that I don’t want anyone to repackage my stuff and make a lot of money from it. I also want to have the same license for all my open source software and the BSD was a little bit to loose for my future needs.
If you are in need of any other type of licensing please contact me, I am open for suggestions.
New release of logview4net (8.02)
Wow, the releases are coming fast now.
Today I released a new version of logview4net:
CHANGELOG:
8.02
Request:Show short filename on prefix-filename
Fixed: It is not possible to change the buffersize in the viewer config window.
Fixed: HighlightMatch only formatted the first occurance of the pattern in a message.
Fixed: The textbox reverts to default format when enforcing the buffer size
Added a Play Sound action that will play a PCM Wave File on pattern match.
Save your performance baseline
Here’s a one week old post I forgot to publish:
I did some performance testing and fixing in logview4net today, but I threw away the baseline performance report. I managed to shave some processing time, but I only kept the previous report so I am not certain how much I saved. It’s a stupid mistake but hopefully I’ll not make it again now that I’ve told you about it. Save your baseline for future comparison when doing performance optimizations.
Almost all processing time is spent on appending and sometimes formatting text to a RichTextBox. It is not as fast as I would like it to be. I could probably write something that does what I want myself, but I guess someone has already done that. All the functionality of the RichTextBox is not needed for logview4net. I only need to change the font and color properties of parts of the text. There are no editing, tables, bullets, images or anything else that I guess is complicated to do.
After some more communicating with a nice user it seems that the performance is mostly annoying when loading a large file. It is a scenario I didn’t build it for at all. It is build to show one message a time and hence has relatively much time to process it.
…anyway; A new release that works a little bit better in this scenario is on the way. I got the load time for this file down from more than one hour (I killed the process after that.) to less than 30 seconds.
