We are not rolling out LogFusion to our entire user base and have started shifting to a different vendor for viewing logs, but I wanted you know why. We had high hopes for LogFusion, but there are a couple of issues that prevent us from loving it.
This one should be obvious by now, but we need some way to group our log files. Either by tab-grouping or by multiple viewer instances each with their own group of tabs or even have colored tabs to keep it grouped manually (although cycling tabs really becomes a pain).
In our enterprise environment, we can have 88 logs in total, 26 for our test and acceptance servers each, 36 more for production servers. This is just three development teams managing one process. Much more coming up (yes we have an Elastic Stack, no it cannot replace hands-on log viewers).
Long lines being logged are not shown entirely. For example we are logging serialized JSON or fixed-width messages, but LogFusion is showing an ellipsis instead (even after double clicking the capped line).
When right-clicking on a log and selecting Clear Log (not deleting it!), then the screen is cleared, but there is no way to reload the file to get the logging back. For example, to reduce noise just before a test, we will clear the log (which is only a visual change, the actual log remains unchanged). Then getting the cleared lines back means we need to close and reopen the log manually, which also displaces the tab to the end.
As far as I know, we cannot start LogFusion from the CLI with a list of logs, to create a new tabbed window. It reuses the open window and adds the tabs to it. If it did open as a new instance, we could manage our groups that way.
LogFusion seems to opens logs sequentially and synchronously and is unresponsive while it does so; opening LogFusion to get to the right tab is painfully slow. Taking a look at Baretail, it opens all logs simultaneously and even when a log isn't loaded the GUI doesn't lock up and you can select the correct tab right away. LogExpert also locks up for some time, but loads the logs in parallel so becomes responsive much faster.
And just as important to us:
LogFusion's development team communicates suboptimally; there's no roadmap, no indication of planned features, no transparent priorities. It would be great if you had a roadmap, a long-term vision, it would be great if you worked with a public Jira back-log or a Trello board. Even a simple issue tracker would be a big improvement. As it stands, it's completely unclear what BinaryFortress intends with LogFusion or what it will pick up next and what is in the pipeline to be picked up.
I'm sure one day LogFusion wil be the great product we expect, but for now we need to move on.
Sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you, but thank for the feedback, it's definitely helpful! We'll review your points and if we're able to make any of these improvements in a future version, we'll definitely let you know.
