Redash is a versatile data analytics tool that connects to various data sources, enabling users to query them and create dashboards. With SQL knowledge, it offers flexibility for ad-hoc queries. However, as a developer using it for larger projects, I found Redash challenging to use out of the box. Redash Loader is a solution to one of the biggest problems that I encountered.

Have you ever had a CI job fail, and had to page though masses of logs saying things downloaded, things worked successfully, things installed, etc. before you reach the actual failure point? Have you tried searching for strings like “Error” or “Failure” only to be taken to a line that says “0 Failures” or “0 Errors”, or even worse to a line that says failure, but it’s turns out that it’s normal for that to fail - perhaps it’s part of a test of error trapping code? Sometimes you can find the error quickly by skipping to the bottom and working backwards, but if the error doesn’t quite make sense you have a suspicion that something out of the ordinary may have happened earlier in the build process, but it’s like a needle in a haystack to find it? - Then you need Log diff.