Monitors

A Monitor is a pattern-matched watcher that highlights lines you care about across one or many streams. Think of it as a long-running search: every line that arrives on a subscribed stream is matched against a list of patterns; if any pattern matches, the line is recorded under the Monitor.

Use Monitors to catch:

panic, fatal, OutOfMemory across every service you're watching.
Domain-specific signals like payment.declined, customer.churn.detected.
Latency or status-code thresholds you've baked into log lines.

Creating a Monitor

+ ▸ New Monitor…

Fields:

Name - sidebar label.
Icon - any SF Symbol.
Color - the color the Monitor's match count uses, both in the desktop widget and on the Monitor's sidebar badge. Two modes: Fixed shows a picker - red (a warning), orange (caution), or green (good news); red is the default. By activity derives the color from the recent match rate instead: you set two thresholds and a shared window - amber over N matches, red over M matches, within the last X hours (1-24) - and anything below the amber threshold shows green. The color updates live as the rate climbs and falls, on the card, the badge, and the widget alike, so a wall of Monitors reads as a status board: green means calm, red means look here. In either mode the count is only tinted once there's at least one match; a zero count stays grey.
Patterns - one or more wildcard patterns (same syntax as Stream filters: *, ?, comma-separated).
Actions - what the Monitor does on a match (pick any combination):
- Show macOS notification - LogRaker posts a macOS notification banner each time a line matches this Monitor. Requires notification permission - see Notifications & the dock badge.
- Highlight pattern matches - underlines the matched words within each row of the match list.
- Play sound - plays a sound each time a line matches, independent of notifications so it needs no permission. The popup offers several synthesized alarms - Klaxon, Siren, Air Raid, Warble, Pulse, Sweep - built for the job, since none of the macOS system sounds are real alarms (they're intentionally omitted). ▶︎ previews the selection. The Repeat popup sets how many times it plays per match - Once, 5 times, or Until stopped (loops until you silence it). Prefer your own siren? Drop a custom .aiff/.wav into ~/Library/Sounds and it appears in the popup too. See Silencing alarms.
- Flash the screen - throws a full-screen red alert: a pulsing red panel over a dimmed backdrop, floating above every app on your main display, for matches you can't afford to miss. Independent of the sound, and persistent until dismissed. See Silencing alarms.
Sources - which Streams (or whole Server Groups, or whole Servers) this Monitor subscribes to. A Monitor scoped to a Server Group automatically picks up every Stream under any Server in that group, including ones added later. If you delete one of a Monitor's sources, it's removed from the Monitor automatically. When a Monitor is left with no source to watch - every source deleted, or none added yet - a warning badge (an amber triangle) appears on its sidebar row, since the Monitor can't match anything until you give it a source.

There is no Group field in this sheet - Monitors are grouped from the sidebar. Right-click a Monitor and use Move to Group (the submenu appears once you have at least one Monitor Group), or create the Monitor from a Monitor Group's own New Monitor… and it lands in that group.

Viewing matches

Click the Monitor in the sidebar. The right pane shows a two-column table:

Source pill - color-coded per Stream so a quick scan reveals which service the match came from.
Matched line - the line itself, at full length. Long lines run past the pane's edge; scroll the list horizontally to read the rest (the full text is also shown as a tooltip when you hover over a row).

Double-click any row to teleport to the source. A plain double-click opens that line's Stream in the main window, scrolled to and selecting the matched line; ⌘-double-click opens it in a separate window instead. If the line has already scrolled off the Stream's live buffer, you land on the closest line by time.

Notifications & the dock badge

Two separate signals let you notice matches without watching the window:

Notification banners - per Monitor, via the Show macOS notification toggle. When on, each match posts a standard macOS notification.
Dock-icon badge - a red count on LogRaker's Dock icon summing the new matches across all Monitors (everything since each Monitor's last Reset Count). It's always computed (independent of the per-Monitor toggle).

Both rely on macOS's notification permission for LogRaker, which it asks for once on first launch. If you declined that prompt - or never saw it - neither the banners nor the Dock badge appear, even though LogRaker is sending them: macOS silently drops them.

To enable them, open System Settings ▸ Notifications ▸ LogRaker and turn on Allow Notifications, plus Badge app icon for the Dock count specifically. When the Monitor editor detects they're off, it shows an Open Notification Settings… shortcut right under the notification toggle.

Deleting a Monitor that a widget shows asks for confirmation first, warning that the widget will be left showing 'Monitor not found'. A widget on another Mac shows that state on its own.

Resetting the count

Seen the errors and dealt with them? Reset Count acknowledges them: the Monitor's badge drops to zero and only matches arriving afterwards count as new. Nothing is deleted - the earlier matches stay in the list, dimmed below a Reset divider line that marks the point you acknowledged, so history stays readable while new hits stand out above it.

Ways to reset:

The Reset toolbar button, shown whenever a Monitor is selected (in the main window or a Monitor's own window). It acknowledges everything up to the selected line - the list normally follows the newest match with it selected, so that's a full reset unless you've deliberately selected an older line first. Greyed out while there's nothing new.
Right-click the Monitor in the sidebar ▸ Reset Count - or right-click a Monitor pane inside a layout.
Right-click a Monitor Group ▸ Reset All Counts to reset every Monitor in the group at once.
Right-click a match line ▸ Reset from Here when a full reset is too much: that line and everything older dim as seen, while newer matches keep counting. With several lines selected, the newest one sets the boundary - and picking an already-dimmed line moves the divider back up, un-seeing the rows below it.

Everywhere the count appears - the sidebar badge, the Dock icon, the window title, and the desktop widget - shows the new-match count. A reset also silences that Monitor's looping alarm or screen flash, is undoable (⌘Z), and survives quitting the app.

Silencing alarms & timing

A looping sound (Repeat ▸ Until stopped) and the screen flash both keep going until you stop them. Any of these silences the active alarm:

Click the Monitor - its sidebar row, or its pane inside a layout; that acknowledges it.
The blue Silence button that appears in the toolbar, just right of the +, whenever an alarm is active.
View ▸ Silence Alarms, ⌘⌥., or Esc.
Click the red overlay itself.

While an alarm is active, the Monitor's sidebar row shows a vibrating red bell next to its match count, so you can tell at a glance which Monitor is going off.

Two timing windows keep alarms from becoming obnoxious:

Cooldown - 5 seconds. After a Monitor sounds, it won't sound again for 5 seconds, so a burst of matching lines doesn't machine-gun the speaker. (A loop already running just keeps going.)
Warm-up - 10 seconds. When a Stream first connects it pulls its recent history; for the first 10 seconds of a Stream's output, alarms are suppressed so those old lines don't re-alarm every time you launch the app. The match list and dock badge still update - only the alarm is held off. (Reconnects pull no history, so they're unaffected.)

Live vs. historical

Matches accumulate from the moment the Monitor is created - historical lines from before that point are not retroactively matched. The match list is capped (a few thousand entries) and FIFOs older entries out as new matches arrive.

Monitor Groups

Like Server Groups and Layout Groups, Monitor Groups are just sidebar buckets. Drag Monitors into a group to keep them organized; the group has no effect on what gets matched.

When you collapse a Monitor group, its row shows the combined match count of the monitors hidden inside it - and rings the alarm bell if any of them is alarming - so you can keep groups closed without losing sight of the totals. Expand it again and each Monitor shows its own count.

Select a Monitor Group to see an overview of what's in it: every Monitor with its source count, pattern count, and a Matches badge carrying that Monitor's unseen count in its own color. The badges update live as matches arrive, and clear when you reset a Monitor's count.

To watch several Monitors at once without opening each one, make a Monitor Board - a Layout kind that shows Monitors as widget-style cards and can be opened in its own window. See Monitor Boards.

LogRaker ships a widget for your Mac desktop and Notification Center, so you can keep an eye on your Monitors without the app's window in front of you.

To add it, right-click the desktop (or open Notification Center) and choose Edit Widgets, then find Log Monitors in the gallery. Launch LogRaker at least once first so it appears.

The widget comes in three sizes:

Small - one Monitor: its match count and the time of its last match. Choose which Monitor it shows from the widget's Edit sheet (right-click the widget ▸ Edit Widget ▸ Small size); leave it unset to show the first Monitor in sidebar order.
Medium & Large - a grid of cards, one per Monitor, each showing its name and match count; the Large size (and any card with room) also shows the time of the most recent match. Choose which Monitors appear at each size in the Edit sheet (Medium size / Large size); leave them unset to show your Monitors in sidebar order.

Each Monitor's match count is shown in the Color you pick for it in the Monitor editor - red, orange, or green - so a "good news" Monitor can read green instead of alarm-red. The same color is used for that Monitor's badge in the sidebar.

A Monitor that's currently sounding a looping alarm or flashing shows a red bell in the widget, the same as in the sidebar. Click any Monitor to open LogRaker and jump straight to it.

While LogRaker is running, the widget updates live as matches arrive. Only the app actually watches your logs - the widget just shows what the app last shared with it - so if LogRaker hasn't run for a while (about half an hour), the widget dims and shows a small sleep badge in the corner to signal the numbers may be out of date. Open LogRaker to bring them current. (The counts are the live ones LogRaker keeps while it runs - see Live vs. historical.)