Introduction

Welcome to the home of Apache 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.

Available Distributions

  • Java Web Start
  • Standalone -.sh/.bat
  • OS X 'native' distribution (uses Java still, but looks like a real OSX application)

    Click Download link for more information.

So what is it really?

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

Screenshot

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.

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.