SolarWinds Papertrail Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.9 out of 10

Score

8.9 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SolarWinds Papertrail are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Live view of log filtering and custom views: Many users have found the live view of log filtering and custom views to be extremely helpful, allowing them to see logs in real-time and easily customize the view to focus on specific information.

Ability to collect logs from multiple sources in real-time: Several reviewers have praised the valuable feature of being able to collect logs from multiple sources in real-time. They appreciate having all the logs in one place, making it easier for them to analyze and troubleshoot issues.

Effective alert system: Users have mentioned that they find Papertrail's alert system to be effective. It triggers alerts based on specific search matches, helping users stay updated on important events or issues.

Reviews

19 Reviews

Fast and easy real-time log aggregation, management, and search

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 30, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Real-time tail and search
Custom alerts and notifications
Filters incoming logs that match one or more strings or regex

Cons

More precise search results, though maybe I am not using optimal syntax
Lower cost would be nice

Likelihood to Recommend

We love Papertrail. It's very easy to set up and use. It has a powerful and flexible alerts/notification engine. Because logs can be verbose and Papertrail isn't the cheapest solution on the market, it's important that you take the extra time to set up log filtering. We tried a few other offerings first, but they were too complex and had a steeper learning curve for non-technical users. Papertrail however was approachable for every team member, including non-technical users.

Conrad Caplin

Head of Product in Engineering at Pronto CX (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Perfectly reasonable alternative to log aggregation if you don't get one out of the box for your web app

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 28, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Log aggregation
Setup as a logging endpoint
Full-featured CLI for management

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Professional Services (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

A true Godsend

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Central Log Locations
Log Searches
Speed of Searches
Real Time Log View

Cons

More OOB Integrations with more Network Hardware

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

SolarWinds Papertrail offers excellent logging visibility that will benefit the whole team

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Live view of log
Filtering and custom views
Historical information

Cons

Better json search support
Regex support
Message grouping

Likelihood to Recommend

It works great for monitoring logs across a cluster of servers. We run a traditional LAMP stack and log jobs that are important to us. We now use SolarWinds Papertrail to handling monitoring of those processes as well as handle custom reporting for things we are actively engaged in debugging/improving in the main application. Since we use Laravel Forge, the installation was super simple, and we didn't have to do anything to make it work beyond the initial setup.

Nick Vahalik

App Team Lead in Information Technology at 1st Phorm (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

SolarWinds Papertrail is the best deal you can have on log

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Log search
Alert system
Log management

Cons

It could have graphs views and counters

Likelihood to Recommend

It's a perfect solution if you want a place to simple store your logs or even if you want to build new functionalities, or make decisions based on logs. It's really simple to implement and works in basically any setup.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

SolarWinds Papertrail is a must have!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

Detection of log flooding.
Improved visibility or easier access to monthly limits and actual usage.
Improvements integrating with modern JavaScript runtimes (Node, Deno).

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Papertrail is ideal to collect logs of all the different backend components running, helping the analysis of such logs during development, testing, and operation of the services provided. It does not replace, i.e., logging everything to files inside each component but having everything in real-time in the same place with a great search/filter engine is key.

Gabriel Montes

VP of Engineering in Engineering at Bloq (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

View profile

Happy Papertrails to you!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Easy to search through logs
Simple configuration
Reasonable pricing

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it's a great product for a small to medium-sized application. Larger organizations might want more feature-rich monitoring.

Verified User

Professional in Engineering (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

SolarWinds Papertrail is great for log aggregation and alerts.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Log aggregation
Searching and filtering log entries
Alerts based a search query

Cons

High level reports/stats (example: log entries per day)

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Executive in Information Technology (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Great for searching and alerting on your logs

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 20, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Fairly simple product yet surprisingly flexible
Numerous third-party alerting integrations
Scalable pricing

Cons

Some of the concepts can be confusingly similar, like Log Destinations vs Groups

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Papertrail is well-suited when you want to proactively monitor your logs and get alerts based on certain log messages or conditions. Using SolarWinds Papertrail is much better than having log files somewhere on a server that you're never going to look at until there's already a problem. In addition to alerts, sending all your logs from various systems to SolarWinds Papertrail allows you to use the SolarWinds Papertrail interface to centrally check what's going on with your servers. I like to keep a tab with SolarWinds Papertrail always open in my browser. I've learned many things about my servers just by having an easier way to check on them.

Verified User

General Manager in Engineering (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Great for the price, super useful for a wide variety of teams

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 20, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Logging
Log Alerting
Saved Log Searches

Cons

I can't think of anything to be honest

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for small to medium-sized teams, managing single or multiple apps, using a PAAS like Heroku. It is probably not the best for a massive team with a ton of different apps across lots of hosting solutions.

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

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