Nagios Log Server vs. SolarWinds Papertrail

Nagios Log Server facilitates the ability to search all entries of logs in a quick and easy way. Beyond that, it has allowed us to configure alerts for notification when there are potential threats (may they be security threats or only application-side problems), and to filter the data for audits and compliance.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Papertrail is great if you have multiple separate applications and you want to be able to view and search all the logs in one place. It also works well for alerts based on certain keywords in log entries (for example, ERROR, WARN, etc.) Since only the first four weeks of logs are searchable in Papertrail, it may not work well for use-cases where much older log entries need to remain searchable.

Incentivized

• Log auditing.
• Server monitoring.

Incentivized

• Collects logs from many sources in real time.
• Makes it really easy to filter logs to dig into the logs of many services working simultaneously.
• Alerts triggered on certain search matches.

Incentivized

• A bit hard to install and configure.
• High price.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

We are definitely going to continue using Papertrail. It's been a lifesaver.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Nagios support is decent. Nothing bad to say about them, but nothing extraordinary too. We mostly asked them questions instead of actively asking them to change or fix things for us. The response time is OK, commonly you can get a response in the same day. You can also call, but they are available only during US office hours.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Windows Event Log doesn't have 10% of the capabilities of Nagios Log Server. No real-time alerts, no scheduling, no external plugins or APIs. Nothing. The only advantage is that it is a native Windows application.

Incentivized

I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates that were required to make them usable.

Incentivized

• We could react in way less time to a lot of potential outages since we started using it.

Incentivized

• We are alarmed properly so it makes it easy for us to monitor the server.
• Very easy to debug our apps when something's gone wrong (bug) in the production server.
• Noticed whenever any third party scan was going on our server.

Incentivized