BareTail
Historically, system administrators would drop down into a shell to run tail ‐f to follow logs in real time. Developed by Bare Metal Software, BareTail is an amazing, free, tiny tool that packs quite an impact. You can monitor your logs in real time in a GUI that allows you to navigate between multiple tabs to organize your streams of logs, highlighting and filtering those parts that are important. You can leave it running, and it refreshes constantly.
When you decide you need a tool to watch the flow of your logs, go to www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail to grab the tool. It downloads as baretail.exe, but it does not “install” as a permanent file. You can move this file and run it from any location with extremely flexible configuration options. I usually keep it on a USB.
Once you open BareTail, the first option under the main menu is Open. Click the Open File option to open a dialog box to navigate to the program logs you want to monitor. In Figure 9.8, you...
