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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:

Creating a Monitor

+ ▸ New Monitor…

Fields:

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.

Adding Sources by dragging

Besides the editor's Sources field, you can drag a Stream, Server, Server Group, or Stream Group from the sidebar straight onto the Monitor. Drop it anywhere in the Monitor's pane - on the match list, on the timeline, on empty space - and it is added as a Source pill in the strip at the top, which lights up as you drag to show where it will land - and what you dropped flies up into its new pill. Dropping something the Monitor already watches changes nothing.

A Monitor with no Sources yet frames its whole pane in a dashed border instead - drop the first Source anywhere inside it, and the strip appears at the top with its first pill.

Each pill carries a checkbox and an ×: clear the checkbox to stop watching that Source without removing it, or click the × to take it off the Monitor. Both are undoable with Cmd+Z.

Viewing matches

Click the Monitor in the sidebar. The right pane shows the same kind of table a Stream does:

Click a column title to sort by it, and again to reverse. While the list is sorted by anything other than Time, a strip above it says so: matches keep arriving and are placed in sorted order, but the list stops scrolling to keep up, since the newest match can sort to anywhere. 'Back to Time Order' returns to the newest-last order and starts following again. The seen/unseen divider only appears in that order too - it marks a boundary in a list running oldest to newest, which a sort does away with; acknowledged matches still read as dimmed wherever they land.

The Filter field's 'Minimum Severity' keeps only the matches at that level or worse. It is offered on a Monitor whose matches carry a severity, and a match that carries none is left out once you set one. Select 'All' to show everything again.

Columns fit their content on their own; drag a column's edge to set its width yourself. Columns reorder and hide from the header's right-click menu, where 'Size Columns to Fit' makes every column fit its content again, and each Monitor remembers its own arrangement.

The toolbar's 'Reload' button rebuilds the list: the Monitor's matches are discarded and every Stream it watches is read again from the beginning of what it currently holds. A match older than that, or one from a Stream that is not running, does not come back - so use it when you want the list re-read, not to tidy it up. ⌘Z puts the old list back.

'Clear' empties the list, reads nothing back, and starts the count fresh. It is the other half of a pair with 'Reset Count', which marks every match as seen and leaves the rows where they are; ⌘Z restores a cleared list.

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.

To read a match in full, select it and press Space, ⌥-click it, or right-click it and choose 'Inspect Line' - see Inspecting a line.

Finding a match

The toolbar's 'Find' button opens a find bar above the match list, and puts it away when you press it again; Edit ▸ Find ▸ 'Find…' opens it too. Every match highlights where it stands, the one you are on is boxed and tinted more strongly, and 'Find Next' and 'Find Previous', the ‹ › buttons, or Return and Shift-Return step between them, and the count beside the ‹ › buttons, like the status bar under the list, shows your place. A hit that sits beyond the pane's right edge is scrolled into view as you step onto it, so a long line hides nothing. esc ends the search.

Find looks at the matched line as the table shows it, and never its timestamp. The comparison and the recent searches under the magnifying glass, and the token pills behind 'Insert', all work as they do in a Stream - see Finding a line.

A Monitor that has not matched anything yet opens the bar just the same, so you can arm a search and have the first hit arrive already highlighted.

Each Monitor's sidebar row summarizes what it is watching at a glance, without opening it:

A Monitor scoped to a whole Server or Server Group covers every Stream under it, so the LED follows Streams added there later. A Monitor with no Source at all shows its amber warning triangle in place of the LED.

Collapse a Monitor Group - or the Ungrouped row - and it rolls the same summary up across every Monitor inside.

Notifications & the dock badge

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

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:

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:

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:

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 Source 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.

Four ways to make one:

All four open the same sheet, which asks for an Icon and a Name, and all four stay disabled until at least one Monitor exists.

Drag a Monitor onto a group's header to put it there, or right-click the Monitor and use 'Move to Group'; drop it on the Monitors header to take it back out. Right-click the group header for 'Edit Group…', to change the name or icon, or 'Delete Group'. Selecting the group's row and pressing Return renames it in place.

When you collapse a Monitor Group, its row summarizes the Monitors hidden inside it - rolling their status LEDs up into one, and ringing the alarm bell if any of them is alarming - so you can keep groups closed without losing sight of what needs attention. Expand it again and each Monitor shows its own.

The group's match badge shows the most urgent color present, and the total for that color alone. A red Monitor on 12 sitting beside a green one on 23 gives the group a red 12: the number you would act on. Counts in different colors are never added together, since the sum would describe a group of matches that does not exist.

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 Dashboard - a Layout kind that shows Monitors as widget-style cards and can be opened in its own window. See Dashboards.

Desktop widget

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:

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.)