Feature Request: Color by Alerts / Show-Hide by Alerts

If you think LogMX needs a new useful feature!
Post Reply
wcgraham
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Nov 23, 2007 11:36 pm

Feature Request: Color by Alerts / Show-Hide by Alerts

Post by wcgraham »

Your app adds a lot of features missing from my last log tailer, but it is missing a few that I found very valuable.


1. Color/flag lines based on permanent filter criteria

Since you already have Alerts as permanent filter criteria, it would make sense to add "set line to this color" and/or "set line as marked" for alert behaviors.
This way, I could use an "alert" definition to color lines; lines could still be colored based on Level, but also based on Class, or Message text.

Someone else suggested enhancing Find to New Tab for something like this, but then one could not see the matching rows highlighted but still in the context of the surrounding rows.

Preferably, the Alert [or Active Search] would support compound search criteria, like Class = Request Processor AND Message contains 'path:', but that would be a separate enhancement.

[the usage motivation is like this... Blue for request-starts, green business-tier accesses, yellow for query executions, etc.; and white for all the filler details in between that I may or may not need to read]


2. Show Only rows matching permanent filter criteria

Your app allows showing/hiding based on Class, and showing/hiding based on Level.

But it would be nice to be able to show/hide rows that match a specific Alert, or those that match no Alerts.

This would make it more flexible for a log consumer to decide what levels and kinds of detail they want to see at what time.

Plus, it would allow me to select from a quick-list of named criteria, rather than selecting/de-selecting a handful of different classes.

eg., show/hide all rows that represent web traffic, even though not all traffic log entries are created by the same class, and not all log entries made by one class are web traffic.


The search-and-mark function almost does this job, except that,
- there is only one mark color
- searches are not saved
- new rows are not evaluated against the search


There are a lot of features I think would be nifty, but the above are the ones that I think I can honestly say would be extremely valuable to me.

Like, even, buy the for-pay version valuable.



One related feature I think would be handy, that I fancy I would do if I were writing such an app, but which I understand is a little weird and probably doesn't fit most peoples' thinking, is...

Rather than [just] being able to show/hide all non-alerted/marked/colored rows, provide a method to show/hide the set of rows between two alterted/marked rows.

In essence, this makes each colored row act like a sort of 'header'/'master', and all the non-colored rows after it 'details.

Of course, this is not really [always] the case with a stream of log entries, but I think it would be close enough to be useful.

eg., I collapse the list down to 'highlighted rows only', I scroll down to the warning/info entry that grabs my attention, and then I 'pop open' that row to see the entries immediately after it, or 'pop open' its parent to see the log entries immediately before the warning.

Of course you could get into all kinds of convoluted ideas like treating the different kinds of alerts/pattern-mathes as different hierarchy levels -- eg. expand/collapse an entire 'web-request' section, including any marked items within it -- but I think a simple approach would give 90% of the benefit.

Thanks for listening,

Chris
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2006 10:30 pm

Post by admin »

Hello Chris,

Thank you for all these ideas!

Implementation of a "filter" feature is planned and should be available for February 2008: viewtopic.php?t=34. I suggest adding a "color" option to this filter: for each filter, user will be able to choose an action for entries matching this filter: hide this entry, or color this entry. It should then match your feature request 1) and 2).

Using the Alert feature is only allowed when AutoRefresh is ON, but the Filter feature will be allowed with or without AutoRefresh :D.

Then I guess user will have to be able to save his filters to LogMX preferences, so that he can easilly re-use any of his previous filters.

As for your last request, do you mean being able to visualize logs like you would do within a tree? : each entry color would match a specific tree level, and the more this entry is critical (e.g. ERROR), the more it's close to tree's root. Tree would be collapsed by default and user would be able to expand (or 'pop open') each of these tree nodes (e.g. opening an ERROR entry will display all next WARNING entries before next ERROR entry).
God, I must say I've never thought logs this way :o . This could be a powerful feature. What about this:
When activating a new "tree-view" mode, small "+" and "-" buttons would be displayed on each entry line, and only the most critical entries would be displayed, then user would be able to 'expand' an entry by clicking on its "+".

Xavier.
wcgraham
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Nov 23, 2007 11:36 pm

Tree Levels

Post by wcgraham »

I like your description, as long as the tree levels don't always have to be based on the Level attribute, though that might be the default and most popular setup.

If each "filter" could be assigned a prominence-level number [with multiple filter definitions allowed to have the same value] [default value for a row would be lowest-level], then a tree could be created in much the way that MS Word might assume a table-of-contents based on the heading-level style of various lines.
[By that last part, all I mean to point out is that the stream of log rows might be a sparse tree with "missing" nodes [eg. a Level 1 followed by a Level 4 followed by a Level 2] -- but the hiding-rules should be pretty simple: a Level N row acts as parent/hider to all the following rows up to and not including the next Level N or more prominent row.

New entries tailed to the log could be expanded or collapsed by user preference [even specifying the level to expand to?].

You can put me on the mailing list for when the next release happens, if I am not already.

Chris
Post Reply