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I'm managing several tomcat instances (aprox 30-35) and looking for some console to centralize the logs. I tried php-syslog-ng before (no with tomcat), and found it useful. I would like that these software would have some of these features:

-Syntax highlight according to the severity of the exceptions. -Tree view for stack traces and nested exceptions.

Bonus point:

-Alarm when certain pattern is matched.

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you can use splunk : http://www.splunk.com/ in which you can centralize all logs you have, you can then perform crossed search, it's a freeware, a bit heavy but awesome. You can also use lambda probe http://www.lambdaprobe.org/d/index.htm but it's more for global managment, not especifically for logs.

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    Splunk is great.. Until you hit the amount of logs that you have to pa for. Then it gets insanely expensive. Apr 28, 2011 at 12:20
  • Oh, my bad, I didn't know that there was a log limitation. Thanks
    – Razique
    Jul 28, 2011 at 15:27
  • Goodness. I'd forgotten about this! Jul 28, 2011 at 15:33
  • Splunk is fat, while LambdaProbe (now PSI Probe, link below) is lightweight and great. Thx! github.com/psi-probe/psi-probe Jul 8, 2015 at 11:07
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is it possible to change the logging of tomcat to log4j? For log4j there are a lot of logfile viewers:

They are not all open source but free. Perhaps there is something that helps you.

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Have you tried TCLogView?

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  • No, but it doesn't seem to be what I am looking for, also it's not open source.
    – Ari
    Jan 5, 2010 at 14:31
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not exactly a viewer, but does exception sorting and matching:

http://exctractor.sourceforge.net/

a pain to get running, but once set up, can be useful to produce reports/etc.

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Also, have you looked at MuleSoft TcatServer? We provide ability to view the logs from remote Tomcat instances and you can tail the logs. It is not open source, but free to use in development environment.

Disclosure: I work for MuleSoft, and would be happy to answer any specific questions on Tcat Server.

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We have quite a few tomcat servers I usually admin. What we do is use log4j to actually log all webapp logging to a central log server. What I'm most interested in (from a sysadmin point of view) is to have a look at the logging the container produces itself (in this case tomcats).

So, in order to have look at a few tomcats at a time when things go awry (usually when they are misbehaving) I use a combination of ssh and multitail, which works pretty well under unix. The idea being that you ssh into each box simultaneously and tail the catalina.out file. Multitail has syntax coloring support included and is flexible enough to let you add your own coloring by using regular expressions. When I have to investigate something that happened a few hours ago, I always have to look at the catalina logs themselves, obviously raw.

As per the alarms what I use is a python script that I run in the background, integrated with the startup/shutdown scripts for each tomcat. It basically tails the catalina.out file looking for stuff I find interesting and generating an alert (sms, email, etc) depending on the severity of the issue. I know it might not be the best solution around but it works for me pretty well (and the script is actually not complicated and can be written in your language of choice).

I know this might not be what you are looking for but this is my approach and I'm happy with it by keeping it under the KISS principle. I hope it helps.

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