The "Sort by" / "fall back to ottyl_seq" control now lives in LogTimeline's header next to the time-range presets, since the setting actually drives the shared range/log fetch rather than being a Log-Preview-only concern. LogSortSettings and its load/save helpers moved into LogTimeline.tsx alongside SortPicker; the localStorage key was renamed to ottyl.logTimeline.sort, with loadLogSortSettings falling back to the old ottyl.logPreview.sort key so an existing choice isn't lost on first load after the move. LogPreview now just renders logs in whatever order the caller already sorted them. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XFUNZwCvz3kcod3352ZR2o
ottyl
Observability for any command's terminal output — no logging backend, no agents, no config to ship.
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.
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:
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
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