Papertrail

What is Papertrail?

Papertrail is a hosted log management service from SolarWinds for developers and operations teams that want to centralize and search logs. The vendor has marketed it as a web developer's source of truth since 2011.

Key features of Papertrail

• Log management: a consolidated log viewer that links logs to the rest of your stack.
• Log ingestion: centralizes logs from multiple sources with live tailing.
• Log groups and access control: segment logs by app, environment or host and protect sensitive data.
• Search alerts: turn saved searches into alerts with instant or daily-summary notifications.
• Encrypted logging: encrypted log transport.
• Long-term archive: archives stored as downloadable text files in Amazon S3.
• REST API: programmatic access to logs.

How Papertrail works

Servers and apps send logs to Papertrail, where they appear in a live tail and can be searched. Searches typically cover the last 3 to 7 days, and older data is available through archives. Usage is measured in gigabytes, counting each message's length plus 50 bytes of metadata.

Who uses Papertrail?

Papertrail is used by developers and small to mid-size engineering teams that want simple, hosted log search without running their own stack. A customer testimonial on the site mentions Heroku.

Papertrail pricing

Papertrail lists a Log Management plan starting at $5.00 per GB per month, with unlimited systems and users. When a plan limit is reached, logs can stop or continue as usage-based service at up to 200 percent extra and a 30 percent higher price per GB. One GB is about 6.6 million 100-character messages. A 30-day free trial with 100 GB of usage is available without a credit card.

Papertrail integrations

The vendor names a REST API and search alerts that notify team communication tools, and mentions Heroku in a customer testimonial. It does not list further integrations on its homepage.

Papertrail alternatives

Sumo Logic is a larger cloud log and security analytics platform. Sentry focuses on error and performance monitoring rather than general logs. Grafana offers open-source dashboards and a logging backend (Loki), and Datadog is a broad monitoring suite. Papertrail differs by keeping to simple log aggregation, live tail and search.