1. Home
  2. Document Management Systems
  3. PaperTrail Reviews
  4. User Review of PaperTrail
An Adequate Log Aggregator
February 23, 2019

An Adequate Log Aggregator

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PaperTrail

My organization uses PaperTrail to collect logs from our micro-services. It is easy for engineers to debug issues with PaperTrail when they can use correlation IDs to access all of the logs for a request across different services in one console. Occasionally, we use PaperTrail to create alerts for certain log events.
  • PaperTrail is less expensive than many of its competitors.
  • PaperTrail is very easy to set up; you can start collecting logs in no time.
  • It is easy to configure email alerts and Slack integrations with PaperTrail.
  • It is hard to search for all of the contexts that occur around a query. I've had to download logs from PaperTrail and use grep.
  • Live tailing is fine, but searching old logs can be very slow.
  • PaperTrail does not offer any analytics features.
  • PaperTrail helps our engineers to debug problems faster.
  • PaperTrail allows our engineers to focus on building features rather than configuring and maintaining log aggregation infrastructure.
Amazon CloudWatch logging is integrated with most Amazon products out-of-the-box. Both offer web consoles for searching logs, and both are fully-managed and can be configured easily. We chose PaperTrail because some of our services run on Heroku. We would have chosen PaperTrail even if this weren't the case because its search capabilities are better.
PaperTrail's live-tailing performance is adequate and searches over the recent history load quickly. Searching over long periods of time can be extremely slow, however.
PaperTrail is extremely easy to use. Engineers can open the web console and begin tailing or searching logs. Simple searches are very intuitive; you may need to consult their documentation to write more complex queries. It is also very easy to configure alerts for specific log events. Configuring log collection with PaperTrail is simple.
It is very easy to integrate PaperTrail with AWS and Heroku. Heroku offers an add-on for PaperTrail. Some AWS products, such as ECS, can send logs directly to PaperTrail. The products that can't can send logs to Amazon CloudWatch, which can then be forwarded to Papertrail. Papertrail's Slack integration was easy to configure.
PaperTrail is great for collecting logs from several auto-scaling micro-services. It is fully-managed and inexpensive. It will allow you to view all of the logs associated with a request across all services in one place. PaperTrail even allows you to create simple alerts for log events. PaperTrail is not ideal if you need advanced search or analytics capabilities.