mtail
The facts below are what the maker publishes about mtail, checked and dated. Our editors have not written about it yet.
Plans and prices
From mtail's own pricing page, checked 11 Oct 2026.
| Plan | Price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| mtail | Free | Open-source software under the Apache-2.0 license |
The facts
Each one read from mtail's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- Archive export
- Nochecked 21 Sep 2026
- Containers
- The project can be run with Docker, including as a sidecar that reads an application container’s logs exposed through a volume.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Deployment
- The deployment guide describes running one mtail instance per machine to monitor multiple applications on that machine.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Deployment options
- self-hostedchecked 21 Sep 2026
- Export formats
- Metrics can be scraped over HTTP as JSON or Prometheus format, or pushed periodically to collectd, StatsD, or Graphite.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Live log tailing
- Yeschecked 21 Sep 2026
- Log analysis limit
- mtail is intended for real-time or near-real-time monitoring and does not copy, index, or search logs for data-mining applications.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Log pipelines
- Nochecked 21 Sep 2026
- Metric processing limit
- The programming guide says mtail deliberately does not implement complex mathematical functions and leaves that work to time-series systems such as Prometheus.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Metric programs
- Extraction is controlled by mtail programs that define patterns and actions for processing log lines.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Purpose
- mtail extracts metrics from application logs so they can be exported to a time-series database or calculator for alerting and dashboards.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Security
- The interoperability guide says mtail does not support SSL or HTTP authentication and recommends using a VPN tunnel or reverse proxy to protect access.checked 11 Oct 2026
- State persistence
- mtail is intended to be stateless and does not persist variables or metric values between restarts, deferring long-term storage to a time-series database and collector.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Structured log parsing
- Yeschecked 21 Sep 2026
- Support
- The project README directs questions to GitHub Discussions and a users mailing list, and directs defect reports to GitHub Issues.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Transport security
- The guide says mtail does not provide transport security for logs and recommends using a proper syslog tool to transmit and receive logs over a network.checked 11 Oct 2026
- Use case
- It connects applications that expose internal state only through logs to monitoring systems, without requiring those applications to be patched for instrumentation.checked 11 Oct 2026
Money
- Free plan
- Yeschecked 21 Sep 2026
Where it runs
- Platforms
- The project README says precompiled binaries are available for Windows, OSX, and Linux.checked 11 Oct 2026
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