Look into https://logdy.dev . I've played around with it a little bit, but really putting some work into learning it and integrating it with OTEL traces is my next side project.

Another alternative is https://openobserve.ai/ . It needs to run as a daemon to ingest logs (instead of opening a file), but it has a really nice UI.

Thanks! Part of what enables us to make a helpful lightweight solution is that we're leveraging the Kubernetes API to give logs context without requiring extra configuration. It'd be great to generalize Kubetail but a lot of that depends on how cloud platforms evolve over the next few years. Do you use Kubernetes?

Sorry for bringing up my own side-project on a "Show HN", but I'm making humanlog.io which does exactly what you want. Local-first log query engine (and tracing too, soon). You feed it your logs and you can search them, aggregate them, and soon make some graphs and dashboards with them. It started as just a CLI tool to parse and make structured logs pretty, and now I'm turning it into a full observability tool on your machine.

It's very WIP but I would love to help you get started if you want to try it out.

Happy to see this mentioned and still being useful to people! I started this project 9 years ago at a startup but progress stopped when the startup got acquired. The community took over and has done a fantastic job keeping it alive

I was about to comment about Stern. It's an established well known OSS project - I wonder if the author knew about it, and if so.. what was his inspiration for creating an almost identical clone, albeit with a UI on top?

If you get a chance to try out the Kubetail CLI, I'd love to hear your thoughts! There's a lot of overlap with stern at the moment but we're planning on adding new features soon that will be unique (e.g. remote grep, system logs).

+1 for Stern especially since it only has Go dependencies whereas Kubetail does not. Ease of integration with an existing stack is a bigger addition than the lack of a web UI is a subtraction.

Stern is the best!

While the search offered is handy, I watch logs on multi-pod workloads via:

    kubectl logs -f -l app=api --max-log-requests=50

This follows along all pods with the given label (app: api) for up to 50 pods or however many you want. Quite useful when I'm looking for specific output such as ERROR logs to just pipe it to grep like this:

    kubectl logs -f -l app=api --max-log-requests=50 | grep ERROR

and get realtime filtering of all log output without having to tail individual pods by name.

Thanks! Your comment made my day! It sounds like your use-case is similar to mine when I started working on the project. Now we have a community of contributors working on Kubetail so if you have time, stop by our Discord and let us know what else we can do to help (https://discord.gg/CmsmWAVkvX).

Thanks! I used Screen Studio for the demos (https://screen.studio). I had to pay for it but I couldn't find the zoom+highlight feature anywhere else.

Regarding Heroku - I loved Heroku the first time I used it so I set up my Kubernetes cluster to work in a similar way (`git push` to deploy to production). I know K8s has a reputation for being useful only for large deployments/large teams but in my experience this isn't true. You can run a single node cluster and use it to host multiple projects all sharing the same load balancer, or you can scale up to thousands of machines with many microservices working together internally. Would it be helpful for you to see a HOWTO for setting up a Heroku-like K8s cluster?

Hi @nodesocket! Thanks for your support! Your help ironing out the bugs after launch was incredibly helpful.

Yes, there's no index. It uses grep (powered by ripgrep) under the hood.

Thanks! Kubetail doesn't cache or store logs itself. By default, it uses the Kubernetes API to fetch logs from your cluster and send them directly to your client (browser or terminal). If the "Kubetail Cluster API" is installed then it uses Kubetail's custom agent to do the same.

Kubetail is more lightweight than Loki/Grafana. It fetches logs using the Kubernetes API which means you can only see the current state of the cluster but you can use it without installing any additional software or provisioning storage. Our new search feature greps container log files on the nodes themselves as compared to Loki/Grafana that builds a full-text index in the background and queries that at search time (I think).

Stern is a CLI tool which more closely compares to the Kubetail CLI tool (as opposed to the Kubetail web interface). Currently, there's a lot of overlap between the two tools but Kubetail gives you more control over source filters and time. For example with the Kubetail CLI tool you can do queries like this:

    kubetail logs deployments/web \
      --since 2025-05-01T00:00:00Z \
      --until 2025-05-02T00:00:00Z \
      --zone us-east-1a \
      --with-ts \
      --with-node \
      --with-pod \
      --tail=100

I'm not too familiar with stern though so please correct me if I'm wrong. In any case, soon we're going to add more features to the Kubetail CLI tool that will be unique (e.g. remote grep, system logs).

Thanks for posting a link to Johan's project. I'm in touch with him to figure out the best way to avoid confusing users.

I have hacked together a shell script using tail -f with multiple inputs (from kubectl log), and fzf (to select namespace/deployment if there are many).

you can also use stern for that!

https://github.com/stern/stern