Installation
Get the single static binary running on Linux or macOS in under a minute.
Quick Start
Write your first query and filter logs in seconds.
Query Language
Learn the full SQL-like syntax: FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, SHOW.
Temporal Correlation
The killer feature — find events that happen near other events in time.
What is Zeal?
Zeal is a single static binary that lets you query log files with a SQL-like language. It auto-detects JSON, logfmt, and plain text formats, has zero dependencies, and is built in Zig for speed.Why Zeal?
grep
Can’t filter by field values, do numeric comparisons, or correlate events.
jq
Great for JSON but can’t handle logfmt or plain text, and has no temporal logic.
zeal
A single consistent query language across all log formats — plus temporal correlation.
Key features
SQL-like syntax
Use
FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, and SHOW just like SQL — no new paradigm to learn.Temporal correlation
WITHIN 5s OF finds events that happened near other events. Powered by binary search.Auto-format detection
JSON, logfmt, and plain text detected automatically from the first line of your file.
2–6x faster than jq
Built in Zig with zero-copy parsing. Benchmarked at 5ms for 10,000 JSON log entries.
Follow mode
--follow tails a file with live filtering — like tail -f, but smarter.Multiple output formats
Human-readable text with ANSI colors, NDJSON for piping, or raw original lines.
Performance
Benchmarked on 10,000 JSON log entries:| Query | zeal | jq | grep |
|---|---|---|---|
Simple filter (level = "error") | 5ms | 16ms | 2ms |
Numeric (status >= 500) | 6ms | 16ms | — |
Compound (level = "error" AND status >= 500) | 5ms | 15ms | — |
CONTAINS "timeout" | 5ms | 32ms | 2ms |
| Count | 6ms | 16ms | 2ms |