Color is wonderful.  With color we can immediately recognize patterns, signals, warnings, etc.  By using a utility that color codes your logs and server outputs to highlight errors in red, warnings in yellow, etc. you can be much more efficient about how you monitor and search.

Back in the day we used to use DynamoFilter.exe to color code the output of running ATG on the Dynamo Application Server (DAS).  Now that people no longer use DAS that application is no longer useful.

Today though I found out about the open source project ATGLogColorizer.  This fantastic utility works with JBoss, WebLogic, DAS and WebSphere.  It works on Windows, Mac OSX, Solaris and other UNIX variants.  It even works on Cygwin.

This is how I start JBoss with ATGLogColorizer on Cygwin.

${ATG}/home/bin/startDynamoOnJBOSS.bat -f -run-in-place -c default -m Foo | ATGLogColorizer.exe'

And this is how I start JBoss with ATGLogColorizer on Mac OS X.

${ATG}/home/bin/startDynamoOnJBOSS.sh -f -run-in-place -c default -m Foo | ATGLogColorizer_v1_2_OSX'

Life has become a little better. 🙂

For further reading please see and ATGLogColorizer and ATG Log Colorizer for JBoss.