As promised earlier this week, I’m delighted to offer a new version of my log browser LogUI that provides a Diagnostics Tool to help you understand log folders and discover any problems with them.

Open its window using the Diagnostics Tool command in the Window menu, and you’re offered four tools at the top.

The first, Get Info, performs a simple analysis on the files in the selected diagnostics folder. By default, that’s your current live log, in the path /private/var/db/diagnostics, in your Data volume. After telling you how many log files there are in each of its three main folders, and the number of timesync files, it reports the date and time of the oldest Persist log file, marking the start of the continuous log record, in this case nearly 4 days ago.

You can use these tools on any diagnostics folder you can access through its dialog. This includes Time Machine backups, external boot disks, and other bootable systems. Don’t click on the Open button, though, until you’ve selected the diagnostics folder in the view above.

Locating the diagnostics folder in a Time Machine backup can be interesting, but once you’ve found it, LogUI will happily check it for you.

The Catalogue tool lists all the tracev3 log files in the folders inside diagnostics, starting with those in Persist. It gives each file’s creation and modification timestamps, indicating the range for log entries within them, their size in bytes, and an estimate of the period that file covers.

The Analyse tool extracts information from each of logd‘s statistics files, with the number of log entries broken down in frequency order. If you tick the CSV checkbox, they will be delivered in CSV format, ready to import into other software such as a spreadsheet.

The last of the tools, Save Text, saves the contents of the window to a text file for your records.

Further information about locations used for log files is in this article.

LogUI 1.0 build 74 is now available from here: logui174
from Downloads above, and from its Product Page.

Enjoy!