Fast and easy real-time log aggregation, management, and search
Papertrail is our primary logging service for several web apps and microservices. It does exactly what we need: aggregates logs in …
SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail
Overview
What is SolarWinds Papertrail?
Austin based SolarWinds acquired log management tool Papertrail in April, 2015.
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Pricing
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What is SolarWinds Papertrail?
Austin based SolarWinds acquired log management tool Papertrail in April, 2015.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.papertrail.com/plans
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
What is SolarWinds Loggly?
Loggly is a cloud-based log management service provider. It does not require the use of proprietary software agents to collect log data. The service uses open source technologies, including ElasticSearch, Apache Lucene 4 and Apache Kafka.
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is SolarWinds Papertrail?
SolarWinds® Papertrail® is log management designed by engineers for engineers that supports most every log type, and provides real-time tailing and intuitive search and filter capabilities to simplify troubleshooting and reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). The vendor's value proposition:
- Realtime - Tail and search logs as they happen. Find the event messages you need among the gigabytes of log data, within seconds.
Simple yet powerful - Create flexible log views in a few clicks. Turn related systems into event streams and automatically group new systems using wild cards. Save searches to quickly create alerts and dashboards.
Get started in seconds - Nothing to install. Use any common syslog daemon or our collector to start sending logs to Papertrail and start searching and tailing logs immediately.
Works the way you do - Web browser, command line (CLI) and API access, all with the same easy search format. More than 20 integrations with popular alerting and monitoring solutions and webhooks for easy integration into any environment.
Integrates with APM - Seamlessly integrates with SolarWinds AppOptics to quickly switch between traces, metrics, and logs without losing context.
SolarWinds Papertrail Features
- Supported: Aggregate logs
- Supported: Tail and search logs
- Supported: Receive instant alerts
- Supported: Analyze logs
- Supported: Scale your logs
- Supported: Encrypted logs
- Supported: Filter logs
- Supported: Clone existing alerts
- Supported: Colorize links
- Supported: Utilize command-line client
SolarWinds Papertrail Screenshots
SolarWinds Papertrail Video
Papertrail Overview
SolarWinds Papertrail Integrations
- Amazon CloudWatch
- SolarWinds AppOptics
- Campfire
- Datadog
- Geckoboard
- HipChat (discontinued)
- New Relic
- OpsGenie
- PagerDuty
- Slack
- Splunk On-Call
- Zapier
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
- HoneyBadger
- HostedGraphite
- Librato
- Pushover
- StatHat
SolarWinds Papertrail Competitors
SolarWinds Papertrail Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
SolarWinds Papertrail Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Austin based SolarWinds acquired log management tool Papertrail in April, 2015.
Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise are common alternatives for SolarWinds Papertrail.
The most common users of SolarWinds Papertrail are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
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December 30, 2022
Fast and easy real-time log aggregation, management, and search
Papertrail is our primary logging service for several web apps and microservices. It does exactly what we need: aggregates logs in real-time from various sources and supports fast search capability.
- Real-time tail and search
- Custom alerts and notifications
- Filters incoming logs that match one or more strings or regex
- More precise search results, though maybe I am not using optimal syntax
- Lower cost would be nice
December 28, 2022
Perfectly reasonable alternative to log aggregation if you don't get one out of the box for your web app
I inherited a web application that was based on the Heroku stack (a web app deployment stack which, in turn, was based on AWS but provided a bunch of extra convenience features). Heroku did not provide a log buffer out of the box, which necessitated me to use something like SolarWinds Papertrail in order to be able to track and review logs historically. I am using SolarWinds Papertrail to track multiple logs from multiple environments in one location.
- Log aggregation
- Setup as a logging endpoint
- Full-featured CLI for management
- 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
December 23, 2022
SolarWinds Papertrail offers excellent logging visibility that will benefit the whole team
We use SolarWinds Papertrail for logging across a cluster of servers. Before using SolarWinds Papertrail we didn't have any easy way to aggregate logs across all of our servers. We needed a way to watch what was going on both on individual servers in addition to having cluster-wide visibility. We also needed an easier way to handle monitoring of certain jobs and tasks, which, before, we had custom implementations to handle output logging.
- Live view of log
- Filtering and custom views
- Historical information
- Better json search support
- Regex support
- Message grouping
December 21, 2022
A true Godsend
We use SolarWinds Papertrail to keep all of our branch locations Syslogs in one place. When there is an issue with just about anything, I can login to one pane of glass and look up the issue. This has cut our response time to ticket resolution down by a lot. This allows us to find the issue quickly so then we can concentrate on correcting the issue.
- Central Log Locations
- Log Searches
- Speed of Searches
- Real Time Log View
- More OOB Integrations with more Network Hardware
December 21, 2022
SolarWinds Papertrail is the best deal you can have on log
At our company, we utilize SolarWinds Papertrail to keep track of every log information that our systems generates. With a centered location for logs, we can curate and organize them easily with the filter tools that SolarWinds Papertrail offers. We are also using SolarWinds Papertrail as our main alert system. This allow us to catch issues before they can cause bigger problems. Finally, with the advanced search, it's really easy to track down bugs, issues, and other information with precision.
- Log search
- Alert system
- Log management
- It could have graphs views and counters
December 21, 2022
SolarWinds Papertrail is a must have!
We use SolarWinds Papertrail extensively to collect logs from all our backend services, which helps a lot during the development, testing, and operation of a variety of interconnected services.
- 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.
- Detection of log flooding.
- Improved visibility or easier access to monthly limits and actual usage.
- Improvements integrating with modern JavaScript runtimes (Node, Deno).
December 21, 2022
Happy Papertrails to you!
I deployed a web application on DigitalOcean App Platform. The logs from the applications are sent by DigitalOcean to SolarWinds Papertrail. I use SolarWinds Papertrail to debug customer issues that occasionally occur and to monitor application health.
- Easy to search through logs
- Simple configuration
- Reasonable pricing
- Logs can only be archived to AWS S3 - I would like to store in alternative place
- It's not super easy to download log archives
December 21, 2022
SolarWinds Papertrail is great for log aggregation and alerts.
We use SolarWinds Papertrail for log aggregation and error alerting. Since different applications run on separate servers, it is valuable to have all logs go to one place. SolarWinds Papertrail's search capability works great and makes it very easy to find what you're looking for or seek to a section of the log by time. You can also use the search input to exclude keywords or categories, which is helpful when you want to quickly exclude certain types of log entries. You can also save a search query and use it to get alerted when anything new matches your query. Alerts can be sent in an email or hooked up to Slack or other channels.
- Log aggregation
- Searching and filtering log entries
- Alerts based a search query
- High level reports/stats (example: log entries per day)
December 20, 2022
Great for searching and alerting on your logs
I've used SolarWinds Papertrail for many years to monitor a variety of backend applications, such as data processing servers. The key features for me are the saved search and alerting capabilities. I create numerous saved searches that monitor the logs for various conditions (particularly error conditions) and generate alerts. Depending on the severity of the issue, the alert might come by email or text. I also use alerts to monitor for the absence of certain log messages that might indicate silent failures.
- Fairly simple product yet surprisingly flexible
- Numerous third-party alerting integrations
- Scalable pricing
- Some of the concepts can be confusingly similar, like Log Destinations vs Groups
December 20, 2022
Great for the price, super useful for a wide variety of teams
SolarWinds Papertrail is a great logging platform, especially for Heroku or other PAAS. The UI is extremely simple - it shows logs like tail -f might - but you can get a lot out of it without a ton of setup. The search is very fast, and you can configure log alerts. This allows you to a) be alerted if something happens you aren't expecting, but more importantly, b) add logging to your app and have SolarWinds Papertrail alert you as a way to get basic observability. SolarWinds Papertrail is not a competitor to Datadog or Honeycomb, but is the perfect logging system for a small team, though it certainly scales up quite well. At a previous company, we were using SolarWinds Papertrail almost until we went public at a 1B valuation.
- Logging
- Log Alerting
- Saved Log Searches
- I can't think of anything to be honest
Log tracking, in an environment where we recycle machines quite often. With Papertrail we can have a single place to collect all those logs with confidence.
- Collect logs
- Filter logs
- Create log families
- Exporting logs
- Scraping a log line to remove date and time
November 29, 2022
SolarWinds Papertrail should be on the shortlist for any IT startup that requires logging capabities
We use SolarWinds Papertrail to monitor our multi-service distributed machine learning applications. We use Papertrail for both Kubernetes deployments as well as serverless functions. Papertrail fits with our agile dev-ops engineering practice that makes it easy to debug a complex distributed workflow.
- Searching and grouping information from many sources
- Structured data (JSON attachments)
- Low-latency real-time monitoring
- I'd like to have better control of the UI how log information is presented in the web UI.
- I would like improved workflows to manage alerts together with queries
- Improved support for Kubernetes integration
December 11, 2020
Papertrail is very intuitive to use and very useful when debugging production applications
It's a really good product to monitor your server logs and sends an email alarm to alert you or your team if any anomalies come up in your logs. You could adjust how Papertrail will notice you based on your logs output, so you could make your application output a warning or error log anywhere and Papertrail will make sure whenever it happens, it will come to your attention via email. It's also very useful if you want to know what's happening on your server since it could catch your web server logs as well.
- 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
- More documentation about the tools: feels like we haven't explored everything they have to offer yet.
- Options to integrate with major server providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc) easily.
- SMS alerts
November 22, 2020
The best logging tool of today
SolarWinds Papertrail is used as a monitoring tool for our labs and testing environments. We use it to train on and train new employees in using monitoring tools in different ways. It allows us to see and to show our new members on how best to implement, set up, monitor and use the tools that are common in today's world.
- Easy to use
- Very fast
- Affordable
- The documentation is fine, but it could be improved also.
- Provide some use-cases for testing purposes
- Showcase some popular companies and how they use the software
March 13, 2019
Useful tool to achieve greater clarity of our platform
It is used by the development team to monitor feedback from our APIs.
- Integrates with multiple platforms
- Fast feedback
- Clear interface
- Improved search
March 08, 2019
Easy and centralized log aggregation with Papertrail
We use SolarWinds Papertrail to aggregate logs from our Kubernetes Pods across all Nodes. It is being used mostly by the engineers to get insights into performance issues and other SRE-related metrics. Sometimes it's also used by the Support staff to debug customer's problems by looking into their specific logs.
- Ease of setup.
- Ease of use (overview, filtering).
- Reliability.
- I'd like to have multiple accounts.
- More advanced alerting.
March 04, 2019
Papertrail is very helpful!
We have been mainly using it for viewing our application logs and monitoring our applications. We monitor our applications by setting email alerts, which is very helpful to find and fix an issue at the earliest. This is being used by our tech team for our various applications. We use it through Heroku and also directly for our applications running in the Google Cloud Platform.
- Helps us to check the application logs for debugging/production issues.
- Alerts us to new application errors/exceptions, which helps us to fix issues at the earliest.
- Nothing major. There have been few instances when Papertail was down, impacting our application monitoring. Hope this can be improved.
February 26, 2019
Very easy solution to install, and more importantly use.
We are still in the process of selecting a log management provider. We are looking for a solution that will allow our IT staff to oversee and manage logs from all 25 servers including our SQL and Exchange servers. The solution will hopefully allow our IT staff to focus their efforts on end user support.
- The management console is very easy to use.
- Agent installation is one of the easiest we've tried. You do not need a technical degree to install it.
- We were not provided any "canned" searches to begin our evaluation with.
- Other competing products have a set of "canned" searches to get you started quickly.
April 04, 2018