I have spent enough time looking at application logs to know that finding the actual error is sometimes harder than fixing it.

You run kubectl logs , get hundreds or thousands of lines, and start searching for something useful. If the application logs JSON, the output is technically structured but not particularly pleasant to read in a terminal. If you're debugging a request, you might end up grepping for a request ID and hoping you haven't missed anything important.

I wanted to make that workflow a little less painful, so I built LogLens .

It's a small Java CLI that reads logs from a file or stdin, makes them easier to read, and provides a couple of useful tools for investigating failures.

What does it actually do?

Take a JSON log entry like this:

{ "timestamp" : "2026-08-15T10:24:10.489Z" , "level" : "error" , "trace_id" : "9f2c-a1" , "message" : "Connection to 10.0.3.14:5432 timed out after 30012ms" , "service" : "api" , "status" : 500 }

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