The Best Log Viewer for Developers in the Universe

It is hard for developers to imagine troubleshooting applications problems without debug logging. When all else fails and you can’t figure out what your code is doing, our answer is to always add more logging. But unfortunately, log files can a spaghetti style mess thanks to lots of web requests happening at a single time. Prefix can organize your logging by web request while at the same time showing you SQL queries, HTTP calls, errors, and a whole lot of other things in one amazing log viewer.

Prefix is free for .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, Ruby and Python developers! Learn more about Prefix

Organizing your spaghetti style logs

Using our own application as example, one of our dashboard type pages does a lot of AJAX calls to load different parts of the page. With Prefix, we can see all of the 21 web requests.

Snippet from Prefix for just part of the 21 requests

My log file contains dozens of log messages from loading 1 web page. It is hard to even know which log message was from which request. Luckily, Prefix can show me the log messages for the single web request that I actually care about.

I wanted to see my logging so I could verify what elasticsearch query was being used. But Prefix also shows me that this web request does a couple database queries as well. So not only can I see my logging, but I can see how long it took to run my elasticsearch query, and those database queries. Pretty amazing for no code changes!

Configuring Prefix to view your log messages

Let Prefix know what programming language you’re using. Configuration is easy and currently supports 6 popular languages on both Windows and Max.

For .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, and Python configuration instructions, check out these docs. 

Prefix is much more than a log viewer for developers

Viewing your logs with Prefix is awesome. But what really makes it a big deal is being able to see it in context with the SQL queries, HTTP calls, queuing, caching, and other operations that your code is doing. Odds are, many of the other details it automatically shows will save you time from adding more logging!

Once you have used Prefix, it is hard to imagine troubleshooting application problems without Prefix.

The Prefix Log Viewer is also full text searchable, giving you the ability to find specific logs you are looking for without having to dig into the traces.

Want even more power to write better code faster and catch any issues before they get to production?

Author

mwatson

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