mikkin's overwatch
Mikkin's a swell guy. For reasons we started naming services related to managing our development environments after him. I'm not really sure why, it just happened and who am I to go against such things.
With out diving into too much dotail here's the deal: Running Yammer requires running a lot of services. We use a combination of Vagrant and Dazzel(internal) to make it easy to provision and manage our development environments. We have consistent conventions so it's pretty easy to know where to find logs, etc.
That said, there's a lot of services. A lot of logs. And when something isn't working it can be pretty tedious to figure out where the problem is. It's easy enough to SSH into the VM and tail all the log files but I wanted something easier ...
... Overwatch is basically tail piped over a websocket and displayed in a browser.
It's by no means unique. I found a handful of similar services before I started. Normally I'd just use one of those but I was also looking for a low risk project to experiment with GoLang and so here we are.
notes
If you are using Ubuntu 12.04 with the 3.2.0 Kernel you need to make sure you're at patch 37 or above. Lower patch levels have (or may have) a inotify leak: after subscribing to 128 files you won't be able to subscribe to any more. It's cumulative and applies to commands like tail as well. So that's pretty neat.