100% agree. Don't try to build your own when there are some excellent free (and commercial) ones that are battle-tested. grep, cut, tail, etc. work quite well

100% agree. Don't try to build your own when there are some excellent free (and commercial) ones that are battle-tested. grep, cut, tail, etc. work quite well if you're working on a single machine or small number of machines. The "ELK stack" (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana) is a step up in complexity but gives you much more power than command line tools. There are also some great commercial solutions that abstract away some of that complexity if you don't feel like rolling your own (Scalyr, Splunk, SumoLogic, etc.). But regardless of the path you take, don't reinvent the wheel! (Disclosure - I work for a company that provides one of the commercial solutions above - https://scalyr.com https://scalyr.com)