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

Cool plugin! If you are the author, would you be willing to share your experience of building the plugin to begin with? We don't have a publicly documented plugin API or anything, so I imagine you had to figure a lot of this out from reverse engineering and such.
Agreed, there are not lots of tutorials out there explaining plugin development in Kibana. Mostly I used Timelion and Kibana source code as reference and also I kept the Kibana API dependency to minimal since it is not documented and may change anytime (and also I am new to Javascript, so had tough time in understanding the code :)).
On first look, it looks great. Wish there were an easier to try it out. Would love to help with that.
Do you mean hosting a demo of the plugin? Send me a mail ( email is in my github profile)
Yes
Thanks!. Please PM me via email (email is in my github profile )
Graylog has this out of the box since v2.0 and integrated with the authentication layer: https://www.graylog.org/blog/55-announcing-graylog-v2-0-ga
Graylog is awesome!. I have developed few plugins for Graylog too. I miss the console-like interface of Papertrail to view logs in Graylog.
We just rolled out Graylog as well. It's not quite as "console" as Papertrail (I use that as well)... but I prefer it. Few more buttons and nobs to turn, more graphs.

Overall, Graylog is a great "all in one" for collecting, storing, managing and reviewing the logs.