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.
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Table of Contents
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 Web Start's classloading rules, it is impossible to ship the Jakarta Commons VFS extension to Chainsaw.
Several VFS filestore implementation jars cannot be shipped with Chainsaw because of licensing issues. The log4j dev team has chosen to not distribute VFS
with the Web Start version, however you can follow these steps to enable the VFS components inside Chainsaw.
- Download the VFS extension to Chainsaw
- Download VFS
- Download Commons Logging Jars
- Download the VFS filestore implementation jars you wish to use
- Place all these jars in your .chainsaw/plugins directory (the .chainsaw directory is in your home directory)
- Start Chainsaw, which should now recognize the existence of VFS components and allow you to use such things as the VFSLogFilePatternReceiver
The Unix/DOS batch file and OSX distribution already include the base VFS component jars, so you just need to download the filestore implementation jars and place them
in the plugins directory.
