loglook

loglook is a Windows application used to visualize the contents of a log file or text file. Given a search string, loglook plots a histogram of occurences of that string on a time line so that at a glance the user can see the contents of the log file.

Features

• Plotting occurences of a string in a log file to give an overall picture of the contents of the file
• The histogram plots the number of occurences by time
• Clicking on a data point will open the log file in Notepad++, which can then be used for detailed inspection
• allows multiple files to be open at once and so allowing content from multiple files to be compared visually

Download

The _loglook__ installer can be downloaded from the Downloads folder in the loglook repository.

Release Notes

loglook-20190502.zip

• Fixed bug where timestamp was being interpreted as 12 hour instead of 24 hour.
• Fixed bug where notepad++ did not open if the log file path contained a space.
• If you had previously installed loglook, delete the file %appdata%\LogFileDescriptor.json before running the installer.

Customization for new log file types

The default installation of loglook can analyse the time stamp from several common log file formats. Custom formats can be added by editting the file: %appdata%\LogFileDescriptor.json. To analyse a new type of log file, add a new entry to this configuration file and restart loglook. Entries take the form of:

  {
    "FileType": "Simple Time",
    "FileTypeDescription": "Simple timestamp with hours to 10th of second",
    "DateTimeFormatString": "hh:mm:ss.ff",
    "ContentIndexStart": 0,
    "DatetimeIndexStart": 11,
    "DatetimeLength": 11
  }

Building

Prerequisites

This project requires Visual Studio 2019 with Windows Desktop workload installed, to build.

Build Release version

Open solution file and choose "Release" in the Solution Configurations.

• Copy the file LogFileDescriptor.json to the folder %appdata%. Alternatively, run the installer project by running the loglook-installer project.

• Press Ctrl+F5 to build and run the app.

  Build Debug version

  Open solution file and choose "Debug" in the Solution Configurations.

• Copy the file LogFileDescriptor.json to the folder %appdata%

• Press F5 to build and run the app.