I often find myself troubleshooting applications for which I know little about, or that I don't have to troubleshoot often enough (fortunately). I don't want to

I often find myself troubleshooting applications for which I know little about, or that I don't have to troubleshoot often enough (fortunately). I don't want to have to look what fields are available in the log to prepare the proper format string with the fields that I want because... I do not know what I want. I want to go to "/var/log/application" or whatever place the application stores its logs, and cat/tail whatever it is there and seems remotely related to the problem at hand. This is one of the reasons it is painful to troubleshoot problems in Windows using PowerShell, where what you suggested is more or less what needs to be done to parse the event log in a more intelligent way that filtering stuff using the Event Viewer. This shows in the speed and efficiency in solving issues with unix vs. windows systems. But you can say that's just my anecdotal evidence.