Timbersee is a program very similar to the swatch program. It's used to monitor logfiles for important messages using regular expressions, but differs in that it can watch more than one logfile at a time, and does not fork off extra processes.
In practice, timbersee is a security tool to assist system administrators in weeding through the zealous informational reporting by various programs into the system logs. Many times, problems reported to syslog are "lost in the noise", especially since most administrators don't make it a habit to keep up with all the various logfiles. By allowing the administrator to define which messages are not important, tools like timbersee promote the habit of keeping a watchful eye on one's machines.
# ./configure
# make
# make install