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Chainsaw v2 - Introduction/Table of Contents

Welcome to the home of Chainsaw v2!

Chainsaw v2 is a companion application to Log4j written by members of the Log4j development community. Like a number of Open Source projects, this new version was built upon inspirations, ideas and creations of others. Chainsaw v2 has it's roots from the original Chainsaw utility written by Oliver Burn, and with inspiration from the Log Factor 5 utility contributed by ThoughtWorks Inc.

Download

Latest Build Date: 2006-03-02 (SVN tag 'release_20060302')

• Java Web Start
• OS X 'native' distribution (uses Java still, but looks like a real OSX application)
• Unix/Dos standalone (.bat/.sh)
• Important Distribution notes!!/Using DB/JMS or VFS with Chainsaw

Table of Contents

• So what is it really?
• Quick Tour of Chainsaw features
• Project Status/Support/Feedback
• Installation
• Getting Started
• Tutorial and User Manual
• ZeroConf - Zero Configuration

So what is it really?

 It's a GUI-based Log viewer. A picture tells a thousand words...

[zoom image]

These screen shots were taken on Windows 2000, running Sun JDK 1.4.2.

Rather than rely on a combination of tail/grep/vi or equivalent to view/query/trace-through a huge trail of logging events, you can use Chainsaw. Chainsaw can read log files formatted in Log4j's XMLLayout, receive events from remote locations, read events from a DB, it can even work with the JDK 1.4 logging events.

Quick Tour of Chainsaw features

  Heres just a brief run down of some of the features of Chainsaw v2:

• View remote events - Remote events are "received" by Chainsaw using Log4j 1.3's new Receiver concept.
• Saved Preferences - You can fully customize each Tab the way you want it, and it will restore it's state the next time.
• Responsive - When events are screaming in, you don't want the GUI to meltdown. You can control how responsive the GUI is and determine the frequency of updates.
• Tabs/Docking - Chainsaw routes separate applications/remote hosts' events to a unique Tab within the GUI. These tabs can be undocked from the main window. Using these features you can manage multiple application logs using the one GUI.
• Coloring - You can specify your own rules to color each event row depending on the attributes of a LoggingEvent to help you locate important events.
• Dynamic and powerful filtering - Helps you locate stuff. There's support for quick-and-dirty filtering, right through to advanced expression-based filtering (e.g. "LOGGER == 'com.mycompany' && LEVEL == ERROR" ).
• Cyclic - A tab view can support a Cyclic-based model, which constrains it's view to the last X events, ensuring you don't hog memory. This is great for monitoring live applications.
• Built-in documentation and tutorial - HTML-based documentation included in the package.

Tutorial and User Manual

 Chainsaw already includes help with with a Quick Reference and a Tutorial to get you started, all viewable from within the GUI!. A User Manual will be made available around release time.

Distribution Notes

Due to Java classloading rules, it is impossible to ship the Jakarta Commons VFS extension to Chainsaw OR have DBReceiver or JMSReceiver bundled with Chainsaw. Several VFS filestore implementation jars cannot be shipped with Chainsaw because of licensing issues, and for JMSReceiver and DBReceiver you are required to have proprietary driver jars locally which we obviously can't ship. You can follow these steps to enable the DB, JMS and/or VFS components inside Chainsaw.

1. [DBReceiver] Download the DB extension to Chainsaw
2. [JMSReceiver] Download the JMS extension to Chainsaw
3. [VFS] Download the VFS extension to Chainsaw
4. [VFS] Download VFS
5. [VFS] Download Commons Logging Jars
6. [VFS] Download the VFS filestore implementation jars you wish to use
7. Place all these jars in your .chainsaw/plugins directory (the .chainsaw directory is in your home directory)
8. Start Chainsaw, which should now recognize the existence of these components and allow you to use them.

This applies to all distributions.

ZeroConf - Zero Configuration

Chainsaw has ZeroConf elements embedded within it, but you'll need to add a few things to your application to enable your application for ZeroConf.

Download:

1. log4j ZeroConf extension
2. JmDNS bundle
3. Add the log4j-zeroconf.jar and the jmdns.jar from these bundles and add them to your application's classpath.
4. Modify your log4j configuration so that it use the ZeroConfSocketHubAppender. Here is a complete log4j.xml file that you can use as a base:

   <log4j:configuration debug="false" threshold="debug"  xmlns:log4j="http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/>
       <appender name="zeroconf" class="org.apache.log4j.net.ZeroConfSocketHubAppender">
           <param name="Name" value="MyZeroConfSockeHubAppender" />
       </appender>
       <!--ROOT Logger-->
       <root>
           <level value="INFO" />
           <appender-ref ref="zeroconf" />
       </root>
   </log4j:configuration>
   				

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