WTH is addon log so bad

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" (2020)
1

The addon log is fine for some small addons. In case of a addon that spits out a lot of information, the addon log section is really bad. In my case with zigbee2mqtt:

The buffer is too small: The oldest log entry is about 5min old.
There are no filters: Filter out all errors would be really awesome. Filter by keywords would also be nice.
Auto refresh: Just show me the new log entry without pressing refresh all the time. When configuring something (e.g. bind a device with zigbee2mqtt) this would help so much if it does not want to work right away.
Layout of the log: I have long line log entries that are displayed in multiple lines while only half of my display width is beeing used.
Oriantaion of the log: I like that new entries are at the bottom, but to see them is quite troublesome (even with the too short buffer). It’s not really a problem on desktop as you can scroll down quite fast (but its still annoying). It’s more a problem on mobile device where you have to scroll a lot.

2

Learn less and tail on the command line.

3

Use zigbee2mqtt on bare metal instead of the add-on. There are nice text logs in /opt/zigbee2mqtt/data/log , and they stay there as long as you want.

4

Does this solve the problem? The add-ons are storing in the docker logs, and they just don’t go back very far. I have other docker containers that have logs from over a year ago. The supervisor log only goes back a few days, but for me, none of the add-ons go back more than a day.

5

Of course there are other tools, and less/tail is fine when you’re already ssh’d into your server.
Also with the addon you have logs in zigbee2mqtt/log.

But for example, these both solutions suck when you use your phone.

It’s nice to have build in logs, all I’m saying is it could be better.