Wednesday, 20 March 2013

Using Multitail to view multiple logs, all at the very same time

As I'm going through the motions of installing and running IBM BPM Advanced 8.0.1.1 on Linux, I wanted a way to keep multiple log files open all at the very same time.

I harked back to an episode of This Week In Lotus, on which I appeared back in 2010, when I recommended the use of Multitail for that precise purpose.

I re-visited the Multitail site here - http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/index.php - and, from there, found a link to a set of RPMs that someone has kindly pulled together here. This was the version that I downloaded: -


which I then installed ( as root ): -

$ rpm -ivh multitail-5.2.9-1.el3.rf.x86_64.rpm 

and fired it up against my four individual log files: -

multitail -i /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/PCN1Profile/logs/PCSR011.AppTarget/SystemOut.log -i /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/PCN1Profile/logs/PCSR011.Messaging/SystemOut.log -i /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/PCN1Profile/logs/PCSR011.Support/SystemOut.log -i /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/PCN1Profile/logs/PCSR011.WebApp/SystemOut.log 

with the following result: -


One of my colleagues pointed out that I could further reduce the command using a wildcard: -

multitail -i /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/BAMN1Profile/logs/BAMSR011.*/SystemOut.log

2 comments:

Radu Cadariu said...

you just made my day ... thanks

Dave Hay said...

@Radu - no worries, it's a very useful little tool. Enjoy :-)

Note to self - use kubectl to query images in a pod or deployment

In both cases, we use JSON ... For a deployment, we can do this: - kubectl get deployment foobar --namespace snafu --output jsonpath="{...