Reading Server Logs (for humans)

[MagneticDuck`]

Occasionally I find it useful to dig through the logs from a server to figure out what happened when I was away. Unfortunately this (raw server logs) is quite difficult to read even with the help of grep and less, so I wrote a small utility program this afternoon to convert it into a more human-readable format. Just leaving this here in the chance anybody could find it useful in the future.

It presents the following information in a neatly formatted output:

* Join and quit logs with quit reasons and vapor IDs
* Chat with nicknames
* Timestamps on all events (in delta time since server started)
* Map switches
* Explicit notification of time-gaps between meaningful events larger than 30 minutes.

For bonus points, "watch -t -n 1 'cat log.txt | altitude-printer | tail -n 50'"

I should stop wasting time and get back to solemnsky now...

EDIT: woke up this morning realizing I made ~20 player IP addresses public, the offending data (raw server logs) is now removed from all git references.

[Aki1024]

This can view a server's chat log by which server the speakers were in: Altitude Chat Parser

Like yours, this one is also open source.

[MagneticDuck`]

It's worth noting, to avoid confusion on the part of third parties, that these two tools have very different functions: mine parses server-side logs (servers/log.txt on the server) and Aki's parses client-side logs (.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Altitude/config/chat_log.txt). Thanks for the link Aki.

EDIT: I was wrong, Aki's utility also deals with server logs.

[Aki1024]

Originally Posted by MagneticDuck`

It's worth noting, to avoid confusion on the part of third parties, that these two tools have very different functions: mine parses server-side logs (servers/log.txt on the server) and Aki's parses client-side logs (.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Altitude/config/chat_log.txt). Thanks for the link Aki.

The latest version parses either client or server logs. 1.0 was client only, but I later added the ability for the JSON server logs to be read. ^.^ I think I like your format more, and yours goes straight to file, which is a better long term solution. It doesn't appear that either of us handle if the user was talking in team chat ("team":true,"type":"chat"), or what team they were on ("player":0,"team":2,"type":"teamChange").

Here's a server log with the IPs as LAN only, so they are safe to be public, but it only has one player in server: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=EdNuEZVP