Likelihood to Recommend SolarWinds Loggly is great for capturing and organizing logs from 3rd party sources such as NGINX. Without SolarWinds Loggly it's really difficult to manage the logs overtime, find traffic patterns, and identify issues before they become a problem. Anyone who is routinely searching through massive log files could quickly benefit from the SolarWinds Loggly and it's capabilities.
Read full review As a 3rd party endpoint, SolarWinds Papertrail did exactly what it needed to. My hesitation is on the technical aptitude of the colleague receiving the recommendation, as the overall level of command line skill/understanding would have to be high. Web applications are a great solution here, but MOST of them already provide some sort of logging output. The scenario would definitely be in the situation where logging wasn't readily available in the current solution space. IF something like SolarWinds Papertrail was needed, it's probably the de facto thing that I would recommend.
Read full review Pros Putting our logs in one place and making them searchable. We use AWS, and CloudWatch has always been a little frustrating in this regard (though it has gotten better recently). Deriving metrics from our logs. I think log-based metrics is such a good idea because your logs are the ultimate source for truth in regards to what the hell is going on inside your app. I have really loved the simplicity with which I can just count certain statements and call that a metric because just through the normal course of development certain log statements just naturally become a straightforward recording of an event having occurred. Alerts. I actually have a few complaints about email alerts, but just the way I was able to set them up so easily has been huge. Since we started using Loggly, there have been at least 3 bugs that Loggly exposed that were frankly very bad. And withoutt Loggly or without a user reporting them, we would have never known they were happening! This is stuff I tried to set up in CloudWatch in various ways, but because of my own ignorance or perhaps the complexity/limitations of CloudWatch (or the complexity of my stack?), I wasn't getting the information that I needed until I was able to just tell Loggly to send me an email whenever the word "error" showed up. Read full review Free configuration on how Papertrail will alert you Easy to setup with your server/application Very intuitive and easy to use Fair pricing policy/plan Read full review Cons Not all searches are intuitive. We have to use a log aggregating device to ship our logs to Loggly as our network devices can not connect on an encrypted protocol. I would prefer if we could use some sort of VPN-based connector to ship logs securely. Sometimes when drilled down, it can be difficult to fully reset a search term to back all the way out of a drill down. Read full review The CLI was a bit clunky and required some Linux-y thought to get right (obviously more designed with scripting in mind) Tracking logs in real time (think something like `tail`) wasn't wildly intuitive Accessing/searching archives required a lot of CLI-style pulling/extracting/reg-exing Read full review Likelihood to Renew Management is not open to having an agent sending the data to the cloud instance.
Read full review We are definitely going to continue using Papertrail. It's been a lifesaver.
Read full review Usability Loggly's easy setup, very good customer support, and intuitive interface make Loggly very easy to use. User access management is also very easy as we can tailor the experience for each of our developers to access the information they need without having to wade through other information. While there was a slight learning curve in how to view the logs the way some specifically wanted, everything was possible and quite easy to do.
Read full review It's extremely easy to use. I and new colleagues have never had any issues configuring this tool or setting it up, it works almost out of the box with very simple instructions to follow to configure it to our own environment. I would highly recommend it on that ability alone.
Read full review Support Rating The support team have been great when we have logged tickets or had issues, most of the time it is down to user training, however we have had a couple of bugs that they have been able to iron out for us.
Read full review I honestly have never had the need to use the support team, as we have not run into any issues so far. If we did however, judging from how the tool itself works, I don't doubt that the team would provide excellent support for any issues that we may possibly run into.
Read full review Implementation Rating It has good architecture, which focus on ese of use.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We were using
Zabbix . While it is an open-source solution that you can install for free the following things were limitations of the solution. 1) The scale and uptime of the solution are now your own problem. Since we were hosting at AWS this meant we still had a cost of the AWS solution. 2) The product is complicated from a configuration standpoint. In order to get anything meaningful out of it, you had to invest a lot of time and effort. We did consider NewRelic. I have experience with that product and do think that it is a solid alternative. Ultimately experience with the simplicity and speed of deployment with Loggly encouraged me to suggest using this again.
Read full review CloudWatch, by itself, is terrible at search. CloudWatch Insights works great and has powerful search capabilities, but it's more difficult to set up alerts. Also, because Insights charges per search, you have the potential to accumulate a large bill if you need to do many searches. I like that SolarWinds Papertrail has a known monthly cost.
Read full review Return on Investment Unfortunately, we hit our logging cap on a weekly basis and we lose logs after that. We have lost logs after hitting the maximum during service outages. We have become accustomed to not being able to rely on having them, then things go poorly. Read full review SolarWinds Papertrail cost compared to the benefits it provides is a win. When the logs are flooded, and the monthly limits are reached, the failure to post new logs may be a significant drawback. The great search/filter capabilities is key for speedy and precise debugging of incidents that may happen during testing and operation. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Loggly Screenshots SolarWinds Papertrail Screenshots