Monitoring logs with Hoo WinTail ~ TestingMinded

As a tester you might want to check out the logs of the software under test during System and Integration testing. Monitoring application logs can have several advantages:

Any exception thrown by an application is written to the logs. Searching the logs for exception keywords enables you to retrieve any exception thrown by the application.
Whenever the development team needs more information on the cause or circumstances of a defect, you can attach log extracts to the bug report.
If your software has automatic tasks running in background which are being triggered at moments you can't verify the results, e.g. at night, you can check the logs afterwards.

I am convinced that monitoring logs adds value to the total quality of software applications if applied correctly. Of course you cannot spend hours and hours searching the logs for any errors yourself. Luckily there are some nice tools around these days which do all the work for you.
One tool standing out is Hoo WinTail.

Some extremely powerful features are:

a filter that makes sure only lines with text of your choice are shown
email notification whenever certain text is found
monitoring many files at once
highlight specific text (this enables you to highlight functional waypoints of the application)
easy to see when a log file has been updated
open the original log file in only one click

For more information on Hoo WinTail go to http ://www.hootech.com/WinTail/