TailBeat
Streams OSLog from any Apple device or Simulator into a window that stays fast at millions of rows — and exposes the same view to a coding agent over MCP.
What it does
TailBeat is Console.app’s job done properly. Pick a process in the sidebar and the whole-system firehose collapses to one app’s lines with no predicate to write; search is a field-and-range query language that tab-completes and narrows as you type; filters you run daily can be saved. Sources sit side by side — a connected iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch or Apple TV, a Simulator, or a saved .logarchive — and memory stays flat into the millions of rows.
TailBeatKit mirrors the Logger API, so swapping import OSLog for import TailBeat leaves every call site alone and each message arrives carrying its file, line, function, category and metadata. Clicking a row jumps to that spot in Xcode. It also plugs into swift-log as a backend.
The part worth the install if you work with coding agents is the MCP server. An agent queries the specific log rows rather than streaming the whole thing — the vendor measures that at 96% fewer tokens — so a change can be verified against what actually ran rather than against an assumption. An agent skill ships alongside it.
Notes
- Subscription: personal is €49 a year or €9 a month, teams €10 per seat per month, after a 7-day trial.
- macOS 26 or later, which is steeper than anything else in this section.
- No Homebrew cask — the
.dmgcomes from the site. - Logs are read locally. Nothing is uploaded, and the MCP server is local too.
Alternative to
| Alternative | Type | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Console.app | Built in | Already installed, and hopeless past a few thousand rows |
log stream and log show | Built in | Scriptable, with predicate syntax to write by hand |
| Xcode’s debug console | Built in | Only while attached, and gone when you stop |
| Bugfender | Subscription | Logs from users’ devices in the field, not from yours |