When Umbraco 8 came out, we changed the logging format from simple strings to rich JSON log files. This allows us to do filtering, highlighting and grouping of log items but it came at the cost of readability.
Luckily, my colleague Warren made an excellent new menu item in Umbraco's developer section to explore and search the logs.
Screenshot of the Umbraco log viewer showing a lot of errors in my site (ouch)
But what if this log viewer also came as a stand-alone app, so that you could download log files and explore them on any machine, without having to log into an Umbraco instance? Again, Warren has the answer here as he developed the most excellent Compact Log Viewer.
Screenshot of the Compact Log Viewer showing a similar interface to the log viewer built into Umbraco
There really isn't a whole lot to say about the app, it's very similar to the Umbraco backoffice version and it allows you to explore your logs to your heart's content. Additionally, you can open any CLEF (Compact Log Event Format) formatted file, not just Umbraco logs.
