Application Log Viewer/Integration

One of the biggest things that I feel like Juju is missing compared to the container management solutions I’ve used such as Rancher and Portainer is the ability to view the application logs without ssh-ing into the server. Granted, Juju makes it very easy to ssh into the server, but I still have to navigate to the log file on the server after that and that is definitely a lot more work than being able to click a button in the GUI or use a commandline tool to get the logs.

It seems like it would be a feasible and extremely helpful tool if charms could set their log files so that the Juju agent could tail them to the Juju CLI or the Juju GUI, similar to the Juju debug-log, but still quite different because the logs would come from the application itself.

Or, better than tailing a log file, the charm could specify a command to run that would be expected to output the logs to standard out. Maybe that command could, by convention, optionally support extra flags to filter the logs by date, level, etc. . The reason to use a command instead of a log file would be that my log source could be something like the system journal or a docker container and I access those by using a CLI provided by the tool, not just by tailing a file.

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