I’ve personally used Graylog[1] with success in the past.
However, I’ve had an excellent time with Grafana and have been following their Loki[2] project.
My company uses other solutions, so I haven’t needed it, but the Grafana stack might suit your use case.
I think you just way overshot it.
My attempt at a simple step up would be mounting the logs with sshfs and using your favorite editor.