Sawmills smart telemetry platform adds Live Tail to help visualize telemetry changes

We’re announcing the release of Live Tail, a real-time log validation and simulation tool designed to help engineering teams preview, safely validate, and fine-tune telemetry changes before and after applying Sawmills’ AI-powered actions, enabling confident deployment without the surprises.

Unlike traditional observability tools, Live Tail shows exactly what’s filtered and what gets through before ingestion, indexing, or billing, giving developers the control they need without sacrificing visibility or speed.

Sawmill already does the hard work for you by analyzing your telemetry in-stream and offering suggestions that you can apply with a single click, without requiring code changes. But for developers who want to visualize what the changes will look like after implementation, Livestream provides an extra visibility checkpoint.

Using Live Tail with Sawmills Smart Insights

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The flow is simple. Sawmills analyzes your data in-stream and provides you with intelligent insights by identifying cost and quality-impacting issues such as redundant logs, noisy metrics, or high-cardinality data. With the implementation of Live Tail, you can visualize the impact of changes before applying them to your pipeline. When you’re ready, you can deploy with a single click inside the Sawmills user interface, negating the need for any code changes.

Real-time simulation and validation

When Sawmills Insights recommends a change, Live Tail lets you instantly simulate its impact. You can:

• Stream raw logs in real time from edge agents
• Simulate filters and processor changes before rollout
• Compare unprocessed and processed data side by side
• See exactly which events will be dropped, transformed, or preserved

This enables teams to validate pipeline configurations without guessing, and without paying ingest or storage fees.

Attribute-level simulation with Live Tail

Configuring telemetry isn’t just about filtering noise. Often, it involves reshaping data. A frequent use case involves adding a new attribute based on existing log fields to make events more queryable or to support alerting. 

With Live Tail and simulation, you can test these transformations in real time.  For example, you might want to:

• Add an error_type field based on values in status_code or message
• Normalize service names based on custom tags
• Derive a new environment field from deployment metadata

Live Tail lets you simulate these changes directly in the stream:

• Review Sawmills suggested transformation rules and apply them live
• Preview the new attribute alongside existing fields
• Verify logic across varied real-world log lines — not just test cases
• Ensure no unexpected edge cases before deployment

This functionality helps teams deploy changes to their pipeline confidently, without ingesting malformed or redundant data into their observability platform. It brings structured, safe iteration to what was previously a trial-and-error process.

See it in action

‍Smarter telemetry workflows that lower your observability costs and improve the quality of your telemetry data

Using this process eliminates guesswork and reduces the risk of unintentionally removing critical telemetry. And Live Tail sits before your observability platform. You get the real-time visibility your team needs, without paying to store every byte.

Live Tail is now available to all Sawmills users. It's designed for teams who want to understand and control their telemetry, not just observe it after the fact. See your data before you pay for it. Schedule a Demo. 

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