# ottyl

Observability for any command's terminal output — no logging backend, no agents, no config to ship.

```bash
your_app --verbose | ottyl
```

Pipe a program's stdout into `ottyl` and turn it into a searchable log timeline, ad-hoc metrics extracted from the log lines themselves, and Grafana-style dashboards — served from a single local binary, for the lifetime of that process:

- **Search:** A syntax-aware filter bar over your logs — regex matches and metric comparisons like `latency_ms[value]<200`, with relative (`5h`, `-3m`) and absolute datetimes.
- **Log timeline:** A bucketed bar chart of message volume over time, Kibana-style. Drag across it to set the active time range.
- **Metrics from logs:** Declare a metric by matching a regex against your log lines and extracting a value. It applies retroactively to everything already ingested, and to everything that follows.
- **Dashboards:** Bar, line, and pie chart panels driven by PromQL-style queries over your declared metrics.
- **Mixed sources:** Poll an existing Prometheus/OpenMetrics endpoint alongside log ingestion, in the same dashboard.
- **Profiles:** Parsing rules and dashboards are saved per app, so they're there again next time that app runs through ottyl.

## Use cases

- Debugging a noisy CLI or long-running script, instead of scrolling a terminal buffer.
- Getting metrics and charts out of a program that only ever prints text.
- Local dashboards without standing up a metrics stack.
- Combining scraped Prometheus metrics with log-derived ones during a debugging session.

## Get started

Requires Rust and Node.js. The webapp is built and embedded into the binary, so the result is a single self-contained executable.

```bash
git clone <this-repo>
cd ottyl
make build
your_app --verbose | ottyl
```

Or point it at a log file instead of stdin, and mix in a Prometheus/OpenMetrics endpoint:

```bash
ottyl --file /var/log/your_app.log --metrics-url http://localhost:9090/metrics
```

ottyl prints the URL of the local web server it starts (an OS-assigned free port by default; pin one with `--port`). See `ottyl --help` for the rest, including where settings and profiles live (`--settings-path`).

Full documentation — filtering syntax, parameters, metrics, dashboards — is built into the app itself, under the nav menu's docs section.

## Development

```bash
make dev    # frontend dev server with hot reload, proxying to a separately running `cargo run` backend
make test   # backend + frontend tests
make lint   # clippy + oxlint
```