[chaps]

One thing I've done to identify infrequent log entries within a log file is to remove all numbers from a file and print out a frequency of each. Basically just helps to disregard timestamps (not just at the beginning of the line), line numbers, etc.

  cat file.log | sed 's/[0-9]//g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

This has been incredibly helpful in quickly resolving outages more than once.

[spydum]

Brilliant hack. I've used just about all the tricks from the blog and many of the comments here, but never this one. I've stripped timestamps for sure, but never considered all numerics. Nice one !

[Noumenon72]

I love this tip for all kinds of diffing. I'm so sure I'm going to use it that I already assigned it an alias to strip numbers from whatever's on my Mac clipboard:

    alias numberless="pbpaste | sed 's/[0-9]//g' | pbcopy"

[defrost]

It's probably worth exploring making that a frequency bucketing pipe that dashboards N minute intervals .. so that operators can see any abrupt changes.