glTail.rb – Visualize Traffic In Real Time On Your Web Server

This is probably the most visual way I have ever used to analyze web traffic. Quoted from the authors website:

“glTail.rb allows you to view real-time traffic, data, and statistics from any log file on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way using Ruby, net-ssh, and OpenGL.”

The latest version adds several new features and fixes several bugs which annoyed me.

Release Notes:
13 Oct 2007 – v0.06 – Handle referrals including your site as params
– Handle disabling a block without disabling the source
– Rework coordinate systems, and swap to glOrtho instead of glFrustum
– PureFTPD parser
– MySQL activity log parser
– Background reverse IP lookup
– Use yaml for config file (Ian Ownbey <iownbey@notesake.com>)
– Highlight rate/total/avg column
– Split source into several files (Ben Bleything <ben@bleything.net>)
– qmail/vmpop3d parser (James Grant <james@lightbox.org>)
– Postfix fixes (Andre Luiz dos Santos <andre@netvision.com.br>)
– TShark parser (Landy Bible <landy@ljb2of3.net>)
– Updated Squid parser (Isuraeru Ochoa <isuraeru@gmail.com>)

Here is a video in case you would like to see it in action.

Ahhh – I love it.