Watch all of your logs using monkeytail

Monkeytail is a neat little tool which allows web developers and sysadmins to easily watch new additions to their log files by tailing them (i.e. tail -f) and providing helpful vertical spacing after detecting pauses in the output.

What makes monkeytail so useful is its ability to easily tail multiple files together, even when it involves connecting to these machines over ssh and running sudo on them. For example, you could tail all of your load-balanced servers by doing:

mtail @webservers

where webservers is an alias defined in ~/.mtailrc:

<group webservers>
    sudo yes
    <file>
        filename /var/log/apache2/error.log
        prefix "server1: "
        host server1.example.com
    </file>
    <file>
        filename /var/log/apache2/error.log
        prefix "server2: "
        host server2.example.com
    </file>
</group>

It is available in Debian unstable and from its official homepage.

Kudos to Martyn Smith for turning this idea into a release!