UI

Verified User in Information Technology and Services

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/31/2018

"A great "Simple" log collection tool"

4/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

Easy to hook up to most apps. Was set up to use in a Ruby on Rails application within minutes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

The interface can be somewhat clunky or slow at times. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering PaperTrail:

I would recommend using PaperTrail to most application users. While not perfect, it will allow for simple log parsing and search. The alternative, which is basic shell access to logs or a having a devops team to create a logging system, will not be as simple or cost-effective. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is PaperTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?

To use a centralized log vendor that would not require me to log into application servers to review logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

LM

Lucas M.

Web Developer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

10/18/2016

"Complete logging stash & aggregation"

5/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

Simple to setup, easy to use, search is a great, save search for future use is very helpful. Log filter based on regexp is a good way to dump unintended date into your logs. Clickable dashboard is good for real time filter, good for group application or heroku process. Archive log to S3 is a nice feature. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

Search context is not very useful, if you like search for some data and need to see whats comes before or after that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

RM

Rob M.

Director of Software Development

Health, Wellness and Fitness

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

5/12/2016

"An "ok" log collection tool"

3.5/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

* slack integration

* email alerts

* saved searches that create alerts. For example, alert about " deadlock occurred" is useful to get in your inbox/slack channel

* easy to setup/use

* browser interface Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

* papertrail monthly limit stops collecting data, instead of simply dropping the older data

* very difficult to search for all instances of "X" in the logs, followed by browsing around the area related to "X" every where. Instead, papertrail lets you look at one instance of "X", but then forgets the search condition.

* forces you to create a saved search when you were just trying to have an adhoc search

* it's tended to be unreliable, at times we find ourselves simply logging into the server in question and grabbing the logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering PaperTrail:

Probably should look around for competitors, it's not a worlds best product, but it's not bad either. At about $100/month, its kinda expensive for what it is. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is PaperTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?

makes it easier to track down problems by looking in server logs, thus saving ops time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

TL

Tyler L.

Web Developer

Internet

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/14/2016

"Searchable, instant logs from multiple servers"

5/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

The ability to search system log files across a large number of servers quickly and filter the results based on keywords or server "groups".

The alerting functionality is also awesome. For example, you can setup an alert when someone logs into a server via SSH, or if a certain users public key was accepted for SSH login.

Also very useful for searching for exploit attempts. Searching for program:httpd "O:"" will yield results for attempts to exploit this Joomla exploit: https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/12/remote-command-execution-vulnerability-in-joomla.html

Searching for "program:httpd "() {"" yields Shellshock exploit attempts.

Very useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

Longer log retention for search across all plans. All plans include an archive of your logs for 1 year, which is sufficient for most. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering PaperTrail:

They have a plan that's free forever. It only includes a week of archives and the last 48 hours of logs are searchable. Pretty decent for free. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is PaperTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?

Monitoring for exploit attempts, making sure that the proper people are the only ones logging into systems, weather it's SSH or MySQL. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

KV

Kevin V.

Software Architect

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/7/2016

"Very useful log aggregration"

4.5/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

PaperTrail handles log aggregation well and the price is great. It may not be as full featured as other log aggregators like Splunk, however the price is substantially less. It gets the job done well for basic log aggregation. PaperTrail also has a fantastic support team that has delivered every time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

The search facility is functional but could be improved, it could stand for more search options than just a string text box.. selecting multiple machines, etc. The product itself functions well overall but I don't see many product updates or new features. The feature set from my perspective has been about the same since our initial implementation. It could use some smart analysis of log events and determine prolific issues as well as the ability to filter out events that are deemed less important. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering PaperTrail:

Papertrail is rsyslog compatible so it's relatively easy to use with something like NXLog. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is PaperTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?

PaperTrail aggregates logs and is generally easy to setup. It's completely solved the problem of having to jump on different machines to see what's going on. Now it's just a matter of hopping onto Papertrail, which has saved a tremendous amount of time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

DN

Dave N.

Director of DevOps

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

4/5/2016

"Does what it says on the tin"

5/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

Papertrail is one of these "simple but powerful" services that does what it says on the tin and "just works". It's very easy to send logs from 1 system or 1000 systems to Papertrail and then intelligently search the logs or trigger alerts.

The search functionality in particular is very simple to use and understand and being able to save searches or send the results to external tools like Slack is very helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

The alerting, while very good, could be better. It's good at finding specific patterns or a number of events but cannot easily be used for trending (ie. alert me when things go outside of a defined or determined normal) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering PaperTrail:

Papertrail and the people behind it are fantastic. It's easy to setup yet powerful to use and the support team is top notch.

I would recommend on the Linux side using nxlog to gather and send logs to papertrail. It's incredibly flexible and reliable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is PaperTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Papertrail to centralize logs from all of our servers. In a cloud environment where auto-scaling is utilized, logging onto a machine to view logs is just not possible. Papertrail allows us to centralize all logs and then give access to people who need them. We can also alert on specific log messages or an amount of log volume (ie. notify me when web app AVC has 50 HTTP 500 errors in a 1 minute period) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

UL

Verified User in Leisure, Travel & Tourism

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/20/2016

"Use it everyday"

5/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

Best thing in the whole world. I use it everyday to track down bugs and get alerts about issues in my application. I can't tell you how many times I was able to find a bug quicker because of papertrails kick as searching features. Also love the fact that I can set the timezone since we have a dispersed team. Makes my like so much better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

I wish they had a tool that helped me load in old logs and search for them. It's really difficult to find things in old logs in a .txt file Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PS

Parag S.

President

Internet

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/13/2016

"Use papertrail for logging for our web app"

4.5/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

How instant it is and how easy it was to set up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

I believe the integrations could be a bit more streamlined and would be nice if it was easier with multiple deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

UC

Verified User in Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

3/2/2016

"Papertrail is the first add-on I provision on any new Heroku app"

4/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

Papertrail is simple, straightforward and relatively powerful. More than any other logging service I've used, I find Papertrail to strike the right balance between usability and complexity when I need to manage or review my logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

Papertrail doesn't leave a lot to criticize – they could probably update the UI a bit, but that's a pretty trivial issue in the grand scheme of things. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering PaperTrail:

If you can deal with a more simplified alert condition system, Papertrail has a lot going for it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is PaperTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?

Papertrail is a great way to get a handle on Heroku's app logging, set simple log alerts, and search/archive logs permanently. Simply as a service to archive our logs to S3, Papertrail has been invaluable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

YA

Ygor A.

CTO & Co-founder

Research

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/13/2016

"Good log aggregator. Lacks analysis."

3/5

What do you like best about PaperTrail?

The log aggregation, search and live tailing works flawlessly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about PaperTrail?

It doesn't have any analytics capabilities which is a huge disadvantage near the competitors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering PaperTrail:

If all you need is log aggregation, search and live tailing, go for it. If you need analytics, Papertrail is not the choice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is PaperTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are a mobile crowdsourcing startup with 300000 users in brazil and apps for both iOS and Android. Paper trail is used to aggregate and search all logs generated by all our servers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.