Logs and Losing My Mind

The thing is…

Many of us have faced the frustration of trying to debug a personal project, a work assignment, or even something for college, only to run into the same problem: logs that are massive, unreadable, and completely overwhelming. And when you centralize those logs on an observability platform, the cost skyrockets with every extra log you send. You end up getting flooded with unnecessary traffic like:

Dec 24, 2025 16:30:17 ERROR: connection failed 001 128.54.69.12
Dec 24, 2025 16:30:18 ERROR: connection failed 002 128.34.70.12
Dec 24, 2025 16:30:19 ERROR: connection failed 003 128.54.69.12

Repeated data that could be handled just once per event. For instance, with user logins: if five users log in 10 times, you’ll see 10 identical logs reporting their logins and logouts. It’s unnecessary traffic, it clogs bandwidth, and it inflates your bills on whatever hosting or observability service you’re using to store logs.

Enter Goxe. It’s an open-source tool built as a log aggregator. It takes incoming data via UDP on the default port :1729 and normalizes it. Goxe is designed to never stop: after each report, it clears its map of normalized data. With hot-reloading for its configuration, you can start it once and the config file will live in different locations depending on your operating system, following:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest

making it easy to access from any device.

In short, Goxe solves a lot of problems at a very low cost. Being a sidecar binary, its footprint on a server is negligible, and it doesn’t use more than ~20MB of RAM even under continuous load. On my development laptop, I’ve streamed 19k logs per second and only lost 0.3% of data without increasing the kernel buffer. On a proper server, you’d probably forget it’s even running.

I’m not writing this to promote Goxe, but simply to share my excitement and vent a little. What better way to kick off my blog than by talking about a project I’m genuinely proud of? Even if it has fewer stars than the big-name projects out there, I know it can grow with consistent effort.

Thanks for reading. Big love. ❤️