Item: PaperTrail
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PaperTrail

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use PaperTrail to provide cloud logging for several web apps and services, particularly those running on Heroku where PaperTrail is a convenient plugin. In development, PaperTrail helps us build and debug faster. In production, PaperTrail is a reliable tool for storing, managing, and viewing logs across all of our applications.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Powerful and intuitive search syntax
Instant, super-easy setup
Free plan is very useful for development. Paid plans are very reasonably priced.
Easily interface with PaperTrail through browser, CLI, or API

Cons

PaperTrail could improve how they handle hitting plan limits

Return on Investment

Free plan is sufficient for development and small services, and the paid plans are very cheap at low log volume. For us, the price is right with PaperTrail - though I can't speak to how their pricing compares at very high volumes.
Adding cloud-logging to your apps can really speed up development and debugging - the impact to engineering productivity cannot be understated.

Alternatives Considered

LogDNA

We initially selected PaperTrail because they have the best free plan - and now we are happy paid users across many apps. A usable free plan is key for anybody who launches several instances of apps (development, staging, production), micro-services, etc.

Other Software Used

MongoDB, Heroku, IBM Compose

Likelihood to Recommend

There are probably more advanced logging services, however for our needs PaperTrail is more than sufficient. We started using PaperTrail just to keep a record of our logs, and slowly began to use more features. However, we've barely scratched the surface when it comes to alerting capabilities, advanced searches, API, etc.

Comments

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PaperTrail is an effortless cloud-logging solution