On Unix and Linux systems, we can use the "tail -f" command to view and monitor the information in the log files generated by the system or software. This is a very useful feature for programmers or system administrators. It's a pity that Windows doesn't have this feature built in. If you need to implement similar functions, you can use a third-party program, Tail4win.

Splunk is a top-level distributed data computing platform for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. It can process various logs or machine data generated by any system, software or device, and provides operations such as real-time data collection, storage, indexing, searching, correlation, visualization, analysis, and reporting in a wide range of scenarios, so as to transform big data into actions and values of the enterprise.

LogFusion is a small but useful log monitoring and viewing tool developed by Binary Fortress Software from Canada. It is designed to help system/network administrators and web/software developers easily load and view various text-based log files (in .log and .txt formats).

Kainet LogViewPro is a comprehensive web log file visual viewer and analyzer from Switzerland. It is able to visualize the content of web server log files, and let administrator make more intuitive view and further analysis to what has happened or is happening on the web server. This is quite beneficial for inspecting the results of marketing activities, finding server errors, locking hacker attacks, using robots to detect data theft behaviors, and more.

To run a website, you must clearly know the visitors and traffics relevant data (including visitor's stay time, location, operating system, web browser, browsed web pages, screen dimension, device type, etc.) of your site by analyzing the log file on your web server, in order to distinctly grasp the future development direction of Internet and your website. Instead of wasting time on manually going through the numerous traffic patterns and logs, you can use Sawmill to achieve this challenging job in a faster way with better results.