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SolarWinds Papertrail

SolarWinds Papertrail

Overview

What is SolarWinds Papertrail?

Austin based SolarWinds acquired log management tool Papertrail in April, 2015.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

SolarWinds Papertrail is a versatile log management solution that offers a range of use cases for various users. It is extensively used by …
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A true Godsend

10 out of 10
December 21, 2022
Incentivized
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 …
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Awards

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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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What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.

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What is LogicMonitor?

LogicMonitor provides an agentless SaaS-based monitoring platform. LogicMonitor provides prebuilt integrations and an open API, and is designed to provide monitoring across networks, servers, applications, websites, and containers, including insights and reporting capabilities.

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Product Details

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

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SolarWinds Papertrail Video

Papertrail Overview

SolarWinds Papertrail Competitors

SolarWinds Papertrail Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(49)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

SolarWinds Papertrail is a versatile log management solution that offers a range of use cases for various users. It is extensively used by developers, testers, and IT staff to collect and aggregate logs from multiple servers, providing cluster-wide visibility and easy monitoring of individual servers. Users appreciate its ability to gather logs from backend services, aiding in the development, testing, and operation of interconnected services.

The product's flexibility makes it suitable for monitoring multi-service distributed machine learning applications, including Kubernetes deployments and serverless functions. Its compatibility with agile dev-ops engineering practices allows for easy debugging of complex distributed workflows. Furthermore, IT staff can utilize Papertrail to oversee and manage logs from multiple servers, such as SQL and Exchange servers, helping them focus on end-user support. The product's ability to collect logs from frequently recycled machines ensures log tracking confidence in these dynamic environments.

Additionally, SolarWinds Papertrail excels in monitoring server logs and sending email alarms to alert users or teams about anomalies in the logs. It is also valuable for capturing web server logs and providing insights into server activities. Users find it beneficial as a training tool for teaching employees how to implement, set up, monitor, and use common monitoring tools.

The search capability of Papertrail is highly appreciated, making it easy to find specific log entries or exclude certain types of logs. Saved searches and alerts are key features that users rely on to monitor logs for various conditions and generate alerts through email or text notifications. The product serves as a centralized location for curating, organizing, and filtering logs while also functioning as an effective alert system for catching issues before they escalate.

SolarWinds Papertrail's user-friendly logging platform works well with Heroku and other PAAS platforms, offering fast search capabilities and log alerts for basic observability. It is suitable for small teams but can scale up as needed. This product caters to a wide range of use cases, including aggregating logs from Kubernetes Pods, monitoring applications, consolidating Syslogs from multiple branch locations, and managing server logs in personal projects deployed on platforms like Heroku and Google Cloud Platform.

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.

Insufficient Search Capabilities: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the current search capabilities of the software, stating that there is a need for better JSON search support and regex support. They feel that the current search functionalities are not sufficient and desire more precise search results.

High Pricing: Several reviewers have mentioned that they find the cost of the product to be too high. They believe that the pricing should be lower in order to provide a better value for money.

Lack of Comprehensive Documentation: Users have requested more documentation about the tools, indicating that they find the current documentation to be lacking in comprehensive information. They express a desire for detailed and extensive documentation to fully understand and utilize all features of the software effectively.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-19 of 19)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Nick Vahalik | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
December 21, 2022

A true Godsend

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Gabriel Montes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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).
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.
December 21, 2022

Happy Papertrails to you!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
I think it's a great product for a small to medium-sized application. Larger organizations might want more feature-rich monitoring.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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)
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Josep Cedo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Papertrail is an affordable, flexible and convenient way to collect your logs on a single place. Easy to set up. Easy to manage group logs, users, and filters across multiple sources of logs.
Henrik Holst | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Perfect for Cloud deployments where a cloud agnostic / platform independent solution is required.
Low-complexity, easy to get going solution for startups.
Low-cost with easy to understand price model.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It's really good to keep logs of your apps and is fairly easy to configure if you have your own web server. Default integration with Heroku is very useful if you are using Heroku. Probably less useful if using AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Would be good if there's any default integration with those major cloud providers.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
SolarWinds Papertrail is very well suited for use in a test environment due to how fast and easy it is to set up, and it just works. I always tell colleagues to use this when they're running a scenario, or trying to troubleshoot an issue as it really helps in getting it done quickly.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used by the development team to monitor feedback from our APIs.
  • Integrates with multiple platforms
  • Fast feedback
  • Clear interface
  • Improved search
It works well when we need to see a live tail of the current logs coming from our APIs. We can use this locally or in production, and from our own APIs or integrations with 3rd parties, e.g. our CDN provider.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
SolarWinds Papertrail is very well suited for situations where you need to aggregate logs from different sources to a central place without much effort.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
It is very well suited for monitoring applications through logs. Alerts can be set periodically for the interval you desire, and alert emails will be delivered to your inbox based on the conditions of alert. This will help to identify any unexpected errors or exceptions in your application at the earliest stage, aiding you in fixing the issues sooner rather than later.
Scott McGee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
It's by far one of the easiest applications to install. This I think will set them apart from the larger corporate offerings that require an engineering degree to use.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use it in my personal projects with a Heroku add-on for server log management.
  • Simply log with a Heroku add-on
  • Dashboard with customized app groups
  • Search logs
  • Maybe add an app list view to access each app's settings
Is well suited to log from Heroku apps, you can set alerts and group apps in your dashboard.
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