Simple UI, just what you need for log management

I love how it is like having the terminal, but all your logs in one place. tail/grep is really all you need when reading logs, their autorefreshed ui and search does what I need, and having things like email alerts when certain keywords appear on certain servers is a nice feature

Pros

tail -f style by default. No need to refresh the screen to get new events. But also has nice search with special character to exclude terms, time range, etc

Cons

Nothing, all our team needed was a central place to get all our logs from, and papertrail did just that

Used papertrail to log and monitor user devices and app usage.

We gain valuable insight into what our users and doing and experiencing by monitoring these logs. In certain situations where there's a live issues or outage, having live searchable data from our users is absolutely critical. My only gripe with Papertrail is that it's incredibly powerful but IMHO should be more intuitive, or have better training material to assist users in unlocking its full potential. We have a team of three developers who are competent enough to get what they need out of Papertrail, but I worry they may be missing out on some benefits we weren't even aware existed. Having software that you worry is too powerful for you to fully comprehend how your organization could benefit from it is a great problem to have though. Especially when it comes with an affordable price tag. This complaint is more about my own knowledge base and less of an issue with the software.

Pros

Gave us the ability to monitor devices based on usernames, device ID's, app versions, iOS versions, etc. Easy SQL searching and parsing. Gain the ability to create different visualizations based on predefined metrics but also allows for some customization. See user logs immediately as ours were set to upload every 10 seconds.

Cons

Not very user friendly for new users. There's certainly a learning curve to get started. Depending on how your logging has been setup there can also be a lot of noise to sort through, making the overall experience cumbersome. Most of this is due to sheer volume of data being collected, which is a self imposed problem but it'd be nice to get more support regarding how to handle this or having built in tools to filter out duplicate data points. Users have the ability to setup predefined queries which helps cut down on some of unneeded data, but as mentioned there's a steep learning curve and not very much documentation to go off of.

Maintain logs and detect errors instantly

With Papertrail, we are able to gain visibility into our IT infrastructure and better analyze logs to improve troubleshooting as errors arise. It's great to have a centralized hub for logs and advanced monitoring tools at hand with powerful search capabilities.

Pros

Papertrail is packed with tons of features for log management. It has dashboards with an intuitive interface, search filters to find specific logs in a bunch of raw log data, and log archiving to store logs you may want to keep in the future. I especially find their search capability impressive since you can enter various keywords to quickly find what you are looking for and troubleshoot root causes.

Cons

When configuring logs from the server to Papertrail, I wasn't able to enable this on my own. I needed a web developer's help since they are different ways to integrate the logs in Papertrail and I found it to be confusing. I didn't find their online resources to be as helpful either, however, their customer service is responsive and can point you in the right direction.

My review

Pros

Intuitive UI, easy to use and setup. I can integrate papertrail to my app rapidly. It saves me a lot of time for troubleshooting issues.

Cons

Do not have the on premise (Self-Hosted) version.

Nice log aggregator

PaperTrail does the trick for log aggregation, it may not be quite as fully featured as others but the price makes up for it. For basic log aggregation it works well and has a decent search mechanism.

Pros

Good price, overall good general functionality. Product performs well and was easy to setup.

Cons

The search functionality could be beefed up, they have a variety of options but based on the UI it isn't always obvious.