SnakeTail

SnakeTail’s purpose is to help you monitor log files – growing log files, as the official description says. You can use SnakeTail to open text and log files, to open event logs (you don’t need admin rights to open them), to save sessions as XML and open them at a later time.

Download an MSI installer, run it, and it will quickly install SnakeTail on your Windows PC. SnakeTail is also available as a portable version. Download a ZIP archive, extract its contents, run the SnakeTail executable, and the SnakeTail application will launch.

SnakeTail has a tabbed interface. Open multiple logs and you will see tabs for each one on the application’s interface. As mentioned above, you can use SnakeTail to open text and log files, event logs, and saved sessions. From the File Menu you can set it so SnakeTail will minimize to the system tray and you can set it so the interface is always on top.

Here are the most interesting entries from SnakeTail’s list of features: monitor text log files and Windows event logs; save session for later, load session file at startup; sentence highlight; use keyboard shortcuts to jump between highlighted sentences; bookmarks; search; filter event logs by using regular expressions; low memory usage; and more.

SnakeTail is free and open source software released under a GNU GPL.

SnakeTail is free, it is easy to use, and it works as advertised – it is a handy Windows tail utility that will help you monitor growing log files.