improving signal to noise ratio from centralized network syslogs

In addition to that, you can use some fancy awk colour
coding, so you can make it highlight certain lines based
on content.. I use this for my e-mail logs, but I’m sure
it could be adapted:

tail -n 1000 -f /var/log/mail-submission.log | grep smtp.*relay | awk '
    /sent/ {print "\033[32m" $0 "\033[39m"}
    /bounced/ {print "\033[31m" $0 "\033[39m"}
    /deferred/ {print "\033[33m" $0 "\033[39m"}