[stevarino]

Had an industrial plant that used these very dated VBScript based controllers. There was a SQL Server for numeric logs, but nothing for textual logs and therefore no transparency into the system. The textual logs themselves were stored on the devices in a statically sized array, so if the machine rebooted or a lot of logs happened at once (say at interesting times like startup or during errors), it was common to lose any interesting logs.

Spent a while trying to come up with a zero-budget solution for this and during a literal shower thought "Why don't I just tail a log file?" I managed to alter the controllers code to transmit recently written log messages to a minimal server which would just prepend timestamp and origin to the message and append the line to a file. Then each control console would have a Windows-built tail binary that read the file over Samba, wrap it in a batch file that would customize the colors and text a bit, and Plant Tail was born.

The mostly computer-illiterate operators quickly fell in love with it as it provided an amazing degree of transparency to what they were used to and demanded an equivalent utility for all future deployments.

TLDR: Don't rule out simple solutions if you can leverage already existing infrastructure.