Hi Everyone!<p>Kubetail is a general-purpose logging dashboard for Kubernetes, optimized for tailing logs across multi-container workloads in real-time. With Kubetail, you can view logs from all the containers in a workload (e.g. Deployment or DaemonSet) merged into a single chronological timeline, delivered to your browser or terminal.<p>I launched Kubetail on HN last year and at that time the top request was to add search. Now I'm happy to say we finally have search available in our latest official release (cli/v0.4.3, helm/v0.10.1). You can check it out in action here:<p><a href="https://www.kubetail.com/demo" rel="nofollow">https://www.kubetail.com/demo</a><p>Kubetail normally fetches logs using the Kubernetes API, which does not have search built-in. To enable search, click the “Install” button in the GUI or run `kubetail cluster install` in the CLI to deploy a DaemonSet that places a Kubetail agent on every node. Each agent runs a custom Rust binary powered by ripgrep; it scans the node’s log files and streams only matching lines to your browser or terminal. You can think of a Kubetail search as "remote grep" for your Kubernetes logs. Now you don’t need to download an entire log file just to grep it locally.<p>Since last year we've also added some other neat features that users find helpful. In particular, we built a simple CLI tool that starts the web dashboard on your desktop:<p><pre><code> # Install
brew install kubetail
# Run
kubetail serve
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We also added a powerful logs sub-command to the CLI that you can use to follow container logs or even fetch all the records in a given time window to analyze them in more detail locally (quick-start):<p><pre><code> # Follow example
$ kubetail logs deployments/web \
--with-ts \
--with-pod \
--follow
# Fetch example
$ kubetail logs deployments/web \
--since 2025-04-20T00:00:00Z \
--until 2025-04-21T00:00:00Z \
--all > logs.txt
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We’ve added a lot more features since last year but these are the ones I wanted to highlight.<p>I hope you like what we're doing with Kubetail! Your feedback is very valuable so please let us know what you think in the comments here or in our Discord chat.<p>Andres
Damn, if you took out the “Kubernetes” part, and made it generalized, it looks like you built something that I have wanted to see for a long time. I think log explorers work best as a GUI, and that they need deep integration with structured logs. Basically I just want the DataDog log explorer but locally, and able to simply intake from some files. Some have tried, but they are always too simple, not parsing out properties of structured logs and building good filtering on top of that. I think setting up Grafana/Loki/Whatever is way too heavy for such a simple ask.<p>Anyway all that is anecdotal, what you made here is really cool!
My personal preference for log tailing is Stern. It doesn't have a web UI but then I've never felt like I needed one.<p><a href="https://github.com/stern/stern">https://github.com/stern/stern</a>
Wow, this is exactly what I’ve been missing—juggling a dozen kubectl logs windows and still losing context. Seeing all container logs merged in real time is a game-changer for debugging multi-pod workloads. Love that it runs locally against the API—no more sending sensitive logs offsite. Big thanks to the author for saving my sanity here!
I don't use kubernetes but the GUI looks great, I'm looking for something sililar for heroku (currently storing logs in papertrail but haven't found a great way to search through achieved logs, especially locally).<p>Great demo video btw. Would you mind detailing which software you used to make it? I'd like to do similarly for some of my projects.
I’ve been using Kubetail since the early days it was released in my homelab Kubernetes cluster. It’s fantastic and incredibly easy to setup and configure (unlike Loki + Grapha or ELk). Very polished.
"Search" feels like a bit of a stretch to me--that suggests that it plays in the same space as OpenSearch or Splunk. There's no index here that I can tell.<p>"Filter" sounds more accurate.
Not to be confused with the other kubetail that also does kube log things.<p><a href="https://github.com/johanhaleby/kubetail">https://github.com/johanhaleby/kubetail</a>