Tail multiple remote files

Question

Is there a way to remote tail 2 files?

I have two servers(a and b) behind a load balancer and I would like to do something like this if possible:

tail -f admin@serverA:~/mylogs/log admin@serverB:~/mylogs/log

Thanks!

Answer 1

This worked for me:

ssh -n user@hostname1 'tail -f /mylogs/log' &
ssh -n user@hostname2 'tail -f /mylogs/log' &

Answer 2

I was thinking it might also be possible to use:

ssh -f user@hostname1 "tail -f /var/log/file" > /tmp/somefile &
ssh -f user@hostname2 "tail -f /var/log/file" > /tmp/somefile &

The -f option after ssh allows you to enter a password before it runs in the background. Then you could have the line-by-line results in a single file and running:

tail -f /tmp/somefile

Would give you a little more control over the current "tail" command in case you wanted to use other tail options for displaying output.

Answer 3

Take a look at multitail. Fust like the examples above, you can give it as a command to ssh, and then you will end up with one screen displaying (and buffering for easy scrollbacks) multiple logs. It also does coloring, which is very useful for spotting anomalies.

Answer 4

Check out this answer on stackoverflow -- it uses dsh and tail -f.

Answer 5

My preferred option is to go with multitail. I'd run something like:

multitail -l 'ssh user@host1 "tail -f /some/log/file"' -l 'ssh user@host2 "tail -f /some/log/file"'

Answer 6

You can Tail files remotely using bash and rsync, I"m using it and it is a great bash script have a look at the following tutorial

Tail files remotely using bash and rsync

Answer 7

What would you say about something like this? http://gist.github.com/303175

Answer 8

Just a weird solution, but it works!:

Screen 1

ssh user@hostname1 "tail -f /var/log/file" > /dev/pts/6

Screen 2

ssh user@hostname2 "tail -f /var/log/file" > /dev/pts/6

Answer 9

or you can use screen to create two terminals and then split them.

SSH into the first host you want to tail the log file of and before running tail, enter screen.

Then tail the file on this host.

CTRL+A, c will create a new screen or window. From this new window ssh into the 2nd host and tail the file there.

Now to create the split screen

CTRL+A, SHIFT+S, this will create a split screen with current shell in the top part and the bottom part empty. To switch to the bottom part and put the first screen within it,

CTRL+A, TAB, this will move you to the bottom part. Now to bring your first SSH session into this area:

CTRL+A, " (quote symbol) and select the first session and hit enter.

I realize this may look like a lot of gymnastics, and it is, but you do get use to it once you use it a few times.

Here is a really good tutorial or quick reference to screen's commands: http://www.pixelbeat.org/lkdb/screen.html

Additionally, you can create a .screenrc file so that much of what I described can be automated the first time you enter screen.

Another nice thing about this is that you can just close your session and resume it some place else. For example, you're at work and you have some monitoring going on. You can just close your session without logging out, and resume when you get home or to another location.

Answer 10

You can use fabric to tail several hosts (and also grep results, if needed):

$ fab -P -u 'USER' -p 'PASSWORD' --linewise -H host1,host2,host3 -- tail -f /path/to/my/log.log | grep ERROR