The “Break it Down” Blog

“Fudgie” took a personal challenge from his boss to see if he could make log visualization interesting from your Apache log file.

1 week, some Ruby and some OpenGL later he created glTail.rb; a real-time Apache log visualization toolthat uses OpenGL to render some interesting effects that represent traffic (Supported on Mac and Linux).

It’s hard to explain how this looks in action, but he represents sources and targets of traffic along the left and right hand sides, and then cascades of balls represent the traffic itself along with it’s latency and those split out into the center of the screen.

It’s a lot easier if you just watch the movie of it