> Of course in a perfect world you want to ingest these logs into some better searching tool that lets you run SQL or some other standard query language over th

> Of course in a perfect world you want to ingest these logs into some better searching tool that lets you run SQL or some other standard query language over the set to prune them by date and pull out specific fields but there are times when you'll be hanging on by your nails with nothing to help diagnose the issue except an SSH connection to the server and the log file open in vi. That tool is the Logfile Navigator (https://lnav.org https://lnav.org). It's a TUI that reads plaintext logs, JSON-lines logs, and others. It will collate messages from all the files into a single log view that you can filter and search. The logs are also plumbed through SQLite virtual tables, so you can do fancy queries. When setting up ELK or paying for Splunk/Sumologic is too much, lnav is a pretty good alternative.