Show HN: A Better Log Service

153 points · williebeek · 5 days ago

Hello everyone, there are many log services available and this is my attempt at a better one.

Most online logging tools feature convoluted UIs, arbitrary mandatory fields, questionable AI/insights, complex pricing, etc. I hope my application fixes most of these issues. It also has some nice features, such as automatic Geo IP checks and public dashboards.

Although I've created lots of software, this is my first open source application (MIT license), the tutorial for selfhosting is hopefully sufficient! Most of my development career has been with C#, NodeJS and PHP. For this project I've used PHP (8.3) which is an absolute joy to work with. The architecture is very scalable, but I've only tested up to a few billion logs. The current version is used in production for a few months now. Hope you enjoy/fork it as you see fit!

90 comments

hk1337 · 5 days ago

It's a minor thing but I would remove the jQuery dependency. You're not doing much with that plain javascript couldn't do just as well if not better. Plain JS has come a long way since jQuery first came out.

piterrro · 5 days ago

> there are many log services available and this is my attempt at a better one.

Out of curiosity, can you describe how your service is better than others?

>I hope my application fixes most of these issues

Do you care to elaborate on the "how"?

adriand · 5 days ago

I’m curious about the open source nature of this and how you / people in general manage a project where you are hosting it and need to maintain its security, but are also presumably merging pull requests as people contribute to the project. I would be quite paranoid about this, ie concerned that someone might slip a line of code in with the intent of breaching the service that I would not catch during code review. I know this is true of any open source project but it feels especially fraught when you are also hosting it and letting people sign up and pay for it. I’m wondering if you or others have experience with this and what approaches and practices mitigate this risk.

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TripleChecker · 5 days ago

It looks like that's a PHP codebase. I'm curious why one should use this solution instead of more performant Go/Rust log backends?

Also, one of the login links takes you to a 404 page: https://triplechecker.com/s/jDTmQa/txtlog.net

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dobin · 5 days ago

Pretty unrelated, but i like how it displays large amount of potentially diverse JSON events. Would need some better filtering and sorting, hiding of keys etc. Products which do this well are Elastic and Splunk, but are too heavy for my taste.

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