Logfiles Made Interesting with glTail

Fudgie writes "My boss claimed it was pretty much impossible to create an entertaining way to visualize server traffic and events in a short time frame, so of course I had to prove him wrong. A weekend of neglecting my family produced a small ruby program which connects to your servers via SSH, grabs and parses data from Apaches access log and Ruby on Rails production log, and displays your traffic and statistics in real-time using a simple OpenGL interface (tested under Linux and Mac OS/X). It's a bit hard to explain over text, so please have a look at fudgie.org for an example movie, and more information."

Oh dear...

...I'm afraid that's the nearest I've seen to a simulated pissing contest ever! B^>

Rgds

Damon

Oh great...

...we just made his log screen look like a bukkake flick.

Just took a look at the video

And it looks like lots of things taking a wee. Once the site is slashdotted, it'll be a veritable golden shower...

Nice work though.

engineering management 101

tell the engineer it can't be done

Visitorville

The most entertaining way I ever saw to view logs was Visitorville [visitorville.com]-its kind of like SimCity meets web logging.

Not "Fudgie", glTail

It's pretty obvious that fudgie.org is just the name of the site and glTail is the name of the program.

Wow !

Obligatory jokes about 'taking the piss' aside, that is brilliant. It's the ultimate 'machine that does ping' (to name an old sketch) to keep management amused, but also provides real data. I bet that screen will go ballistic when you get Slashdotted (also a good way to visualise DDoS, maybe?).

I was about to say that it's a sort of etherape on steroids, but I've just realised your visualisation could benefit etherape instead (if you don't know etherape, look it up. No tools identifies a virus infection quicker).

Class, I'm impressed.

just a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect

Notice in the movie that one of the sites being monitored is fudgie.org, which is what is linked to here. This looks like a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect. :) Wonder what that must look like. Might tax the renderer pretty hard. I guess that is one way to get load testing done!

-molo

Re:just a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect

Still running at 30 fps with ~25 requests / second.

Re:just a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect

http://www.fudgie.org/slashdotted.jpg [fudgie.org] for how that looks.

doom

didn't someone once do a version of doom that displayed network activity?

I recall seeing screenshots, but that was years ago.

Re:doom

perhaps you mean this: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ [unm.edu]

Oh, Sweeeetness!

You gotta add an 'Asteroids' ship on the screen that lets you shoot down connections!

"Oh, look! Bob just logged on... let's get 'em!"

...

"IT support. How can I help you?"

"Hi, this is Bob..."

--
X's and O's for all my foes.

Wow

Man this is cool. Very cool.

Compiz for syslogs - ohmygawd !

Luckily, I saw the movie before the meltdown of the server. It always pays to be on time. ;)

For those unlucky and late, actually, you missed a competition of peeing coloured snowflakes from the right versus doing the same from the left.
Only, the sources on the left are much better at aiming.
Plus, you have some 'Login ...' scrolling top to bottom; like the cast of a movie.

Heads up, Fudgie, it is truely the most amazing display of log files ever creeping across my eyes.
Keep the good work up, and please post again when you have something actually useful for the sysadmin.

I declare you 'King of Log Candy' !

Ob quote

All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.

Postfix?

I'd enjoy a postfix version

GNU GPL

#!/usr/bin/env ruby # gl_tail.rb v0.01 - OpenGL visualization of your server traffic # Copyright 2007 Erlend Simonsen # # Licensed under the GPLv2

Hey, this is not the correct way to apply the GNU GPL licence. I don't know whether you had very little time available or just don't care, but the correct way is to explain exactly what licence (full title) the program is under and enable the user to find the licence (provide a copy of it and explain that the author of the licence is FSF, giving their address). We nerds of course understand completely what you mean, but other people may have no idea what you are talking about. To learn how to apply GPL on your program read this [fsf.org].

Good work, by the way. Was there any reason you preferred GPLv2 and not GPLv3? Also from the wording of your licence I think that you intended this to be available only under v2 and not v3 (you say "Licensed under the GPLv2" without a "or any later version" clause).

Sorry, but the boss won this bet

its still NOT entertaining.. Its more bizzare then anything else.

syslog, not ssh+tail -f

Why use ssh + tail -f when one can send the output to a centralized syslog server? There isn't any need to setup an account, keys, etc. when you can have the individual servers consolidate the data for you.

seconded

Remote syslog also means that your servers are more secure: (a) because it is harder for crackers to falsify remote logs as they need to compromise two machines, not just one; and (b) because your visualisation program doesn't need access to SSH keys for all of the machines it monitors, so a compromise on the visualisation computer doesn't automatically mean that all of the servers can also be compromised. However, you could presumably adapt this tool to use syslog quite easily.

Running glTail on Windows

If you want to run glTail on Windows:

1. Use the One-click Ruby installer from rubyforge (not Cygwin ruby)
2. Make sure to `gem install net-ssh`
3. Change "require 'glut'" to "require 'glut_prev'" to enable legacy GLUT ruby bindings

Took me a while to figure this out.

Audialization

fastfinge> I used to have a program that would play a musical note every time someone hit a port. so for each port it would have a different note
fastfinge> i put it in the dmz
fastfinge> much musical entertainment
fastfinge> I should find the source for that thing again. i could change midi intruments depending on the type of packet.
fastfinge> or maybe create length and timbre data from the source IP?
2006-09-20

Booooring.

We did something similar like 10 years ago, hooking the log-file to the sound server where each port hat its individual sound and the frequency of connects directly related to the respective sound's volume.

Was rather interesting as you actually could *hear* all those Windows trojans and worms trying to dig their way into your (Linux) system.

Google called

They heard about your cool project and want to subject you to a series of tedious interviews, ultimately not offering you a job because you didn't go to stanford.

Not impressed

A weekend

It *really* shows that this was hacked together over a weekend. I've spent 15 minutes trying to get it to run, and all I see are Ruby warnings about about obsolete code, and failed dependencies. I've installed about a dozen packages to try to satisfy this beast's dependency hunger, but to no avail. Behold:

$ ls /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/ssh
connection lenient-host-key-verifier.rb service userauth
errors.rb null-host-key-verifier.rb session.rb util
host-key-verifier.rb proxy transport version.rb
$ ./gl_tail-0.02.rb
./gl_tail-0.02.rb:55:Warning: require_gem is obsolete. Use gem instead.
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:312:in `report_activate_error': Could not find RubyGem net-ssh (>= 0.0.0) (Gem::LoadError)
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:246:in `activate'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:75:in `active_gem_with_options'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:60:in `require_gem'
from ./gl_tail-0.02.rb:55
$

Nothing to see here folks, just some Works On My Machine crap by some Ruby fanboy who can't keep pace with Ruby's latest whims about how people should write their code.

Next ?

Of course, the logical next step is to make it into a game. Log File Centipede!!!!1!11

Curiously, I spent a good half-minute staring at the animation. For a busy site this could actually be really useful, to watch a slashdotting as it unfolds in real-time, and to a skilled sysadmin it could offer the kind of timely info required to properly tune the server to survive the bursts.

I'm not going to start watching this thing 8 hours a day (though some drones would), but it definitely does have limited uses that aren't currently matched by other analysis tools.

Two words...

Movie OS

not as eye candy as Netcosm

netcosm youtube vid [youtube.com]

Inverted spludge

I'd like to see a dDOS in action with this

Fish, you gotta have fish

people love fish-tanks

Move of the slashdotting...

Is available at the site.

Re:Looks promising

Anything put into a logfile could be parsed and shown. I've tried with emails, shoutcast listeners and server logins, but they're not as interesting to show in the movie as I don't have the kind of traffic to make it useful.

Re:Looks promising

So...how many hours of unpaid overtime did your boss get out of you?

I like getting paid for my awesome work. Kudos, though.

Re:Pretty, but?

I believe this sort of tool is useful for realtime monitoring of net resources utilization. It can assist you giving graphic clues when something goes out of the usual parameters, like DDoS, slashdotments (sp?), router failure, etc. Depending on information being monitored and how it is displayed, it could also be used for long-term decision like buying more hardware or switching software because the current setup is not handling the load.

One nice, but more local example is the "duck" activity monitor (a windowmaker classic): a duck floats by a mass of water. If the water gets to high, it means the memory usage is high; if it has too much bubbles, processor is being hit. No percentages nor text, just a simple graphic.

A place I used to work is now trying to develop something like this: visualizations where you can tell trouble is brewing in a glance. This is useful for them because their services involved a lot of maintenance of third-party networks but having someone dedicated to nanny all systems is "dumb" and error-prone. Their solution consists of multiple screens around the office showing how the systems they are responsible for are behaving.

Re:SSH - jeesh kill the dinosaur

Uh, wtf are you talking about?

Re:Accessing log files via sudo?

Sure it can. You'd just need to send the sudo-command line, and send the password if you got a password prompt in return. Or you could just let other users read the access log for a while, so see how it looks before you decide if this is something you'd like to try.

Re:Wait, what... they're not interesting?

A lot of my time at work is spent looking at logfiles from webservers, applications servers, and databases looking for things about to break down, but after I introduced this I just need to glance at a screen to instantly see if some server has stopped answering, is taking too long to answer, or is generating way more exceptions than normal. I also add an event (the login text bouncing down the screen in the movie) on each money generating activity, which always amazes marketing people when they walk by.

And replace it with what?

RDP? VNC? RSH???

Re:I hate flash!

Grab the divx version of the movie, then.

Re:Wait, what... they're not interesting?

Almost half a decade? Holy shit, that's nearly one-twentieth of a century!

Re:Pretty, but?

Even more to the point, the article says the boss challenged him to create a visualization tool that was entertaining... this is sort of interesting, but entertaining? Or did Fudgie misspeak?

Re:64 bit prob?

Ah, finally someone else with this error. Been bugging me, and the person that reported it didn't mention running 64bit. That could be it. -- Erlend

Re:64 bit prob?

Solution is to install the latest ruby-opengl from gems, and replace all

GLUT.BitmapCharacter(GLUT::BITMAP_8_BY_13,c)

with

GLUT.BitmapCharacterX(c)

The next version will have an auto-fallback to this function if the exception is raised.