ELKTrail: Live Log Tail for Kibana

Real-time log tail for Kibana & Elastic. Stream, search and filter logs in one click. Private, local, no API keys.

Watch your Kibana logs stream in like tail -f, in the Chrome side panel. It keeps streaming while you work in other tabs. ELKTrail: Live Log Tail for Kibana turns any Kibana or Elastic deployment into a fast, dense, live log stream. Kibana Discover is great for investigating. It is not built for watching. ELKTrail is. Created by Mark Liapustin (clizSec). Open Kibana, click the ELKTrail toolbar icon, press Live, and new lines arrive every second. Feedback and bug reports are welcome at support@scamatrix.com. If ELKTrail helps you, a rating or review on this page helps other people find it. WHY ELKTRAIL • Live by default: new lines every second (0.5 s to 30 s) and the view follows the tail • Follows you across tabs: open the side panel and keep watching logs while you work in your code, tickets or docs. Kibana just stays open in a tab • Built for scanning: compact, color-coded lines (time, host, program, level, message) with search matches highlighted • Click to drill down: click any host, program, severity, request ID or email to filter on it instantly • Zero setup: uses your existing Kibana session. No API keys, tokens or config files • Fast with large buffers: up to 20,000 live lines, and smooth scrolling even with tens of thousands of lines loaded SEARCH AS SIMPLE AS GREP • Just type: words, "exact phrases", -exclude, host:web, AND / OR, (groups) • Case-insensitive, matches anywhere in the line. Paste any log fragment and it matches • No match yet? The panel says how far back it searched and keeps watching for new matching lines • No query language to learn (Papertrail-style) • Saved searches: name a search and re-run it in one click • Prefer Kibana syntax? Switch to KQL or Lucene in Settings, exactly like Discover WORKFLOW • Tabs: keep several searches open side by side, rename and reorder them • Your own time range: 15 minutes to 30 days, or a Custom From/To window to search any past day or period • Scroll back: scroll up to load older lines page by page, down to the start of your range, while live lines keep arriving below • Per-tab settings: each tab keeps its own range, buffer, refresh rate, syntax and sound. SET AS DEFAULT makes your setup the default for new tabs • Copy: put every filtered line on the clipboard as clean text for Slack, email or tickets • Expanded or compact lines: in compact view, click a line to open it. It stays open so you can select and copy the text • Sound alerts: optional chime when new logs arrive • Smart schema: auto-detects host, severity, program, message and request-ID fields (ECS, OpenTelemetry, syslog, Heroku and more) • Open in Discover: jump to Kibana Discover with the same data view, time range and search • Two layouts: in-page bottom sheet on Kibana, expandable to the full page, or the Chrome side panel. Drag the floating ELKTrail button anywhere on the page and it stays there. Settings sets its size (small, medium, large) and style (dark, light or a round icon), and puts it back in the corner • What's new: see what changed in each version, in a few plain words • Reconnects on its own: if Chrome puts the Kibana tab to sleep, one click reloads it and the trail picks up where it left off • Choose your Kibana: auto detects the open Kibana tab, or set a fixed Kibana address in Settings so other tabs never switch it PRIVACY BY DESIGN ELKTrail runs locally in your browser and talks only to the Kibana tab you already have open. Logs stay in memory and are never written to disk. No analytics, no telemetry, no external servers. Nothing is sent to ScaMatrix, clizSec or any developer server. Privacy policy: https://scamatrix.com/en/elktrail/privacy WHO IT IS FOR • Developers and SREs watching deploys and incidents in real time • Support and on-call engineers chasing a request ID across services • Security teams watching auth and access logs live • Anyone who misses tail -f but has their logs in Elastic Works with Elastic Cloud (*.aws.elastic.cloud, *.elastic-cloud.com) and local Kibana (localhost). Papertrail is a trademark of SolarWinds. Kibana and Elastic are trademarks of Elasticsearch B.V. ELKTrail is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by either company.