OpenSearch vs. SolarWinds Papertrail

OpenSearch Service presents a cost-effective pricing model, allowing users to pay solely for their usage without being burdened by minimum fees or upfront commitments. Its seamless integration with various AWS services enhances its adaptability for a wide range of data analysis requirements and also I love using it isn't it enough.

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.

Incentivized

• Gives us millisecond response times
• Mainly open-source
• Integration Seamlessly with AWS
• Has a very big community so problems are fixes sooner then later

• 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

Incentivized

• Needs more descriptive documentation
• The UI feels a bit old
• Some functionality still doesn't work correctly

• 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

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

Well as I said, Elastic is behind paywall now and managing OpenSearch through AWS is so seamless that we just love it. It gets updates faster we don't have to manage separate infra and many other settings to work with elastic search and some of the tools that it provides are better then them.

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.

Incentivized

• Well we had 200 ms response times which decreased to 100ms while using OpenSearch
• Easy to use security plugins we dont need external IAM
• Super Easy Integration with many AWS Services such as kinsesi data stream and dynamoDB

• 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.

Incentivized