Painting by Numbers

Conclusions

The programs discussed here provide somewhat fascinating insights into access logs, version management, and processor utilization. The expressiveness of the generated images and animations is limited.

At the end of the day, programs like Logstalgia with brightly colored dots that whiz around the screen are unlikely to give you more insights than perusing the very text-heavy access logs themselves, despite their appealing visuals.

Graphical log analyzers used for other tasks can give the admin a first hint of (imminent) problems. For example, if you see too many dots with 404 errors zooming past the table tennis bat in Logstalgia, it seems very likely you have something wrong with the links on a website. To discover whether this really is the case, you then need to investigate in depth with other programs.

Most of the featured programs provide movies on their websites that give administrators a pretty good overview of the feature set. Of course, it is much more fun to watch circles dropping into a funnel or see your server swatting dots than to rummage through the long columns of numbers in logfiles.