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Comment by yisheng | Hacker News Reader

Any upsides to using this over a Table view in default kibana?

I am the author of the plugin.

This view is tailor made to view log files. Personally I didn't like using the Kibana table-views to view log files. Features like 1) Filter logs files from particular machine 2) Live tail 3) Seek to any time in log file (e.g. you can enter 'last friday' in seek window) 4) filter by program/app

makes logtrail suitable for viewing and debugging log files.

Moreover I always wanted a interface like this in Kibana to view all my log files in a single view :)

Yes, the live tail portion. With Kibana you'd have to refresh the page to see new logs come in. This is more like Papertrail. Looks like they pretty much copied the UI of papertrailapp.com as well from the screenshot, although it doesn't have the alerting functionality that Papertrail does. This looks like a cool alternative though to get live tailing if you're already on ELK.

It looks like the "live tail" logic is based on polling on an interval - how is that different than Kibana's auto-refresh feature in the timepicker?

Yes the whole view inspired by PapertrailApp ( as mentioned in the first line of README ) . I liked the Papertrail App UI, but didn't want to use cloud based solution.

We've received a complaint that your project isn't just inspired by Papertrail but copies its UI wholesale. This seems to me a borderline case: your project seems legit in that it isn't just a ripoff of someone else's work, but the complaint seems legit too, because cloning their UI (including copying some CSS) is taking a lot more than inspiration.

We've edited the title above to clarify this in a way that attempts to be fair and neutral. (The submitted title was 'Show HN: Logtrail – A Kibana plugin to view, search and tail logs and events'.)

Fair enough. The CSS file was not copied, but I tried to get the same style.

By the looks of it, this seems to be a bit more flexible than the default table view, i might be wrong however because i never touched those.

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