A lightweight Windows (.NET, WPF) desktop app for viewing CLEF logfiles (JSON logfiles by Serilog).

Currently runs on Windows with .NET 8.0 only. Distributed as a zip archive. You need to install .NET Desktop Runtime 8.0 to run ClefInspect.

• Displays CLEF events.
• Add columns based on the properties available in your logfiles.
• Filter events (text and properties) and pin (always display) individual events.
• Scroll to events by timestamp, switch between local and UTC timestamps.
• Show the time difference between events.
• Can follow (tail) log files while other processes write to it.
• Tabs
• Copy selected events to text or JSON.
• Limitation: Structured data in the logfile gets "stringified".

There are amazing full featured log servers, analysers, and viewers for CLEF.

My work with CLEF logfiles is mostly bug-hunting and timing analysis of extensive logfiles. The main task is to collect the revealing events and put them into a context. As none of the tools I found could fit my workflow perfectly, I created ClefInspect.

With ClefInspect, you can crawl the logfiles and keep track of important events very efficiently by pining them. A typical workflow is filter -> pin -> filter.

Use File -> Open, open with or drag & drop to open logfiles with ClefInspect.

The text filter searches in the message only. It allows for multiple keywords (e.g. users,login,logoff) and quotes ("a comma , here"," do not trim the spaces ").

Events must match all filters to be displayed (pinned events are always displayed).

Use timestamp field to browse to a event for a given time (enter a timestamp + Enter). This does not act as a filter, but just navigates the view to a given time.

• Ctrl+C: Copy selected lines to clipboard (formatted, with the displayed columns)
• Ctrl+Shift+C: Copy selected lines to clipboard as CLEF Events
• Ctrl+P: Pin selected lines
• Ctrl+U: Unpin selected lines
• Ctrl+A (when in the Event list): Select all displayed events
• Ctrl+O: Open a logfile
• Ctrl+W: Close the active tab
• Ctrl+Tab: Switch the active tab

ClefInspect is distributed with a zip. Just extract the zip to a folder of your choice (e.g. ClefInspect in your users directory).

You may want to put a file ClefInspect.defaults.json in the folder of ClefInspect.exe:

{
"clefFeatures": {
	"WriteableConfig": true
},
"viewSettings": {
	"LocalTime": true,
	"OneLineOnly": true,
	"DefaultFilterVisibility": [
	"Level",
	"SourceContext"
	],
	"DefaultColumnVisibility": [
		"ThreadId"
	],
	"DetailViewFraction": 0.33,
	"DetailView": false
},
"session": {
	"Files": [
	"C:\\temp\\a.json",
	"C:\\temp\\b.json"
	]
}
}

I use ClefInspect 1.3 actively, thus i will enhance and fix every now and then. Feel free to report bugs or wishes on github.

Commercial support is available via my employer (see my github profile).