ClefInspect

A lightweight Windows (.NET, WPF) desktop app for viewing CLEF logfiles (JSON logfiles by Serilog).

Currently runs on Windows with .NET 6.0 only. Distributed as a zip archive.

Features

• Displays CLEF events.
• Add columns based on the properties available in your logfiles.
• Filter events (text and properties) and pin (always display) individual events.
• Scroll to events by timestamp, switch between local and UTC timestamps.
• Show the time difference between events.
• Can follow (tail) log files while other processes write to it.
• Tabs
• Copy selected events to text or JSON.
• Limitation: Structured data in the logfile gets "stringified".

Why ClefInspect?

There are amazing full featured log servers, analysers, and viewers for CLEF.

My work with CLEF logfiles is mostly bug-hunting and timing analysis of extensive logfiles. The main task is to collect the revealing events and put them into a context. As none of the tools I found could fit my workflow perfectly, I created ClefInspect.

With ClefInspect, you can crawl the logfiles and keep track of important events very efficiently by pining them. A typical workflow is filter -> pin -> filter.

Usage

Use File -> Open, open with or drag & drop to open logfiles with ClefInspect.

The text filter searches in the message only. It allows for multiple keywords (e.g. users,login,logoff) and quotes ("a comma , here"," do not trim the spaces ").

Events must match all filters to be displayed (pinned events are always displayed).

Use timestamp field to browse to a event for a given time (enter a timestamp + Enter). This does not act as a filter, but just navigates the view to a given time.

Shortcuts

• Ctrl+C: Copy selected lines to clipboard (formatted, with the displayed columns)
• Ctrl+Shift+C: Copy selected lines to clipboard as CLEF Events
• Ctrl+P: Pin selected lines
• Ctrl+U: Unpin selected lines
• Ctrl+A (when in the Event list): Select all displayed events
• Ctrl+O: Open a logfile
• Ctrl+W: Close the active tab
• Ctrl+Tab: Switch the active tab

Installation

ClefInspect is distributed with a zip. Just extract the zip to a folder of your choice (e.g. ClefInspect in your users directory).

Configuration (optional)

You may want to put a file ClefInspect.defaults.json in the folder of ClefInspect.exe:

{
"clefFeatures": {
	"WriteableConfig": false
},
"viewSettings": {
	"LocalTime": true,
	"OneLineOnly": true,
	"DefaultFilterVisibility": [
	"Level",
	"SourceContext"
	],
	"DefaultColumnVisibility": []
},
"session": {
	"Files": [
	"C:\\temp\a.json",
	"C:\\temp\b.json"
	]
}
}

Future

I use ClefInspect 1.1 actively, thus i will enhance and fix every now and then. Feel free to report bugs or wishes on github.

Commercial support is available via my employer (see my github profile).

There are ideas to develop ClefInspect 2.0 for cross-platform by rewriting the WPF UI using Avalonia UI. Please contact my if you are interested to collaborate.