Looking for a good debug log file viewer

Question

I am looking for a good (and preferably free) debug log file viewer with the following capabilities:

1. Filter only log points from certain log levels
2. Filter only log points from certain threads
3. Filter only log points within certain time frames
4. Filter only log points from certain loggers
5. Successive filterings (i.e. filter within filtered results)
6. Multiple highlightings (i.e. highlight multiple keywords with different colors)
7. Strong regex capability
8. Work with very large text files (think hundreds of MB)

I'm debugging a multi-threaded program that logs with standard log4n format:

[datetime] [thread] [loglevel] [logger] [message]

Having the ability to filter and see only certain log levels, certain threads, certain time frames would be very helpful. And able to apply multiple filters successively (i.e. applying another filter on top of filtered results) would be even more helpful. Most text editors have search capabilities to various extent but you cannot do a search within the search results. Also, able to do multiple highlightings (i.e. 2 phrases in 2 different colors) would be nice. Again most text editors can only do 1 highlighting at a time, and usually not in conjunction with (i.e. restricted to) a search results.

Anyone know of an application that has the desired capabilities listed above? Thanks!

EDIT: I looked at both Chainsaw (http://logging.apache.org/chainsaw/index.html) and Baretail (http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail/index.php) but neither is suitable for my needs. The former doesn't seem to work with offline text files on Windows and the later has excellent highlighting capabilities but cannot show/hide only certain lines.

Answer 1

The latest developer snapshot of Chainsaw works well with offline files - using a LogFilePatternReceiver it can parse (or parse and tail) regular text files.

Developer snapshot available at: http://people.apache.org/~sdeboy

Answer 2

Try GamutLogViewer: http://sourceforge.jp/projects/sfnet_gamutlogviewer/

I never use it, but looks like it meets most of your needs based on the "official" description:

GamutLogViewer© is log file, logfile, viewer that works with Log4J, Log4Net, NLog, and user defined formats. It supports filtering, searching, highlighting and many other useful features. This is a Windows application.

And it should be an open source project you can contribute to make it better :)

Answer 3

See my previous post about logFaces, it was built precisely for the tasks you describe. Here is a short video about processing raw log files.

Disclosure: I'm the developer of this product.