Show HN: Nerdlog – Fast, multi-host TUI log viewer with timeline histogram

Summary

Nerdlog Nerdlog is a fast, remote-first, multi-host TUI log viewer with timeline histogram and no central server. Loosely inspired by Graylog/Kibana, but without the bloat. Pretty much no setup needed, either. It's laser-focused on being efficient while querying logs from multiple remote machines simultaneously, filtering them by time range and patterns, while also drawing a timeline histogram for quick visual insight: Primary use case: reading system logs ( /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog ) from one or more remote hosts. Very efficient even on large log files (like 1GB or more). It does support some other log formats and can use any log files, but that was the primary use case which was driving the implementation: we were having our web service backend running as systemd services on a bunch of Linux instances, printing a lot of logs, and wanted to be able to read these logs efficiently and having the timeline histogram, much like tools like Graylog have. Design highlights No centralized server required; nerdlog establishes an ssh connection to every node that the user wants to collect logs from, and keeps them idle in the background (although a separate server to store the log files might still help in some cases; see the Requirements and limitations sections in the article); Logs are not downloaded to the local machine in full: all the log analysis is done on the remote nodes, and on each query, only the following data is downloaded from each node: up to 250 messages from every logstream (configurable), and data for the timeline histogram. It's obviously possible to paginate over the logs, to get the next bunch of messages, etc. Nerdlog then merges the responses from all nodes together, and presents to the user in a unified form; Most of the data is gzipped in transit, thus saving the bandwidth as well. Demo Here’s a quick demo showing how Nerdlog works across four remote nodes: Project history It might be useful to know the history to understand the project ...