BlogicBlog: View from the trenches

The blog about Java and XML with focus on troubleshooting issues and tools.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Review: Log4j Chainsaw v2

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Recently, I had been contacted by one of the Chainsaw's developers - Scott Deboy (no blog yet). He asked if I had any feedback on the tool's new iteration as it would seem to be a good match to my interests and blog's goal.

I had looked at the Chainsaw a while ago, but it was not quite up to scratch then. Looking at it again, the tool feels much better and if you have to look at the log files, I strongly recommend to check it out (and/or Splunk).

Initially, Chainsaw may feel a little forbidding due to a large feature set. But as with other strong tools, such as Ethereal and XMLStarlet, if you have to deal with the problem space repeatedly, these tools make it worth your while. And all of those features are actually useful and come from attacking real problems. This is quite a different feel to some of the vendors' tools which look shiny, but fail in real use.

I do however have some gripes that I feel would make troubleshooting much faster if resolved. Most of them are around (otherwise great) highlighting and expression facilities.
  1. For the fields that take an expression, it would be good to see whether the expression typed in so far is correct. Ethereal does this quite nicely. Expression builder is good for beginners, but immediate correctness feedback would be useful for those that are more advanced.
  2. It would be good to have the highlight rules available as a view/pane. In Vim (with OTF script installed) - I can highlight with as little as :1OTF XYZ (1-9 is a color index). So, the price of verifying an idea is very quick. I feel both Ethereal and Chainsaw are slightly behind in that respect. In addition, I can highlight multiple elements in a line with different colours. That really helps sometimes. Again, nothing else I have seen allows me to do that.
  3. The expression window for Next/Previous navigation does not seem to have keyboard shortcuts equivalent to the buttons and requires switching hands from the keyboard to the mouse. Having keyboard mapping would be faster. Some other window also did not seem to respond to Enter key and required switching to the mouse, but I did not note which one.
  4. Bookmarking a particular line and ability to come back to it quickly would be great. This feature however is more nice than important.
So in summary, Chainsaw is very nice, but still with some room to grow.

BlogicBlogger Over and Out

3 Comments:

At April 09, 2006 7:25 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

IMHO it's a nice tool, but 2 things prevented us from using it:
1> No ability to search string inside a logging message. The filter works for the logging-message title but not for the message itself. Say you want to look for all the exceptions - have not found the way to filter all the messages that their content contain 'Exception'.

2> No support over SDH.
It seems that the new version does support this. Have not tried it yet.

Best regards,

Rami

 
At April 09, 2006 10:33 AM, Blogger BlogicBlogger said...

Thank you Rami for your comment.

Have you tried using 'Exception ~= SearchString'? It works for me. It could still be better of course, but there is at least something.

 
At May 02, 2006 1:09 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Try 'exception exists'

 

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