A log management tool enables organizations to handle the entire log management process in an easy way. It features real-time anomaly detection and handles all the logs generated by apps, systems, users, or networks. Given the fact there are many log management tools in the market, picking one could be challenging. In this blog, we’ll deep dive into the key features of SolarWinds® Loggly® and Papertrail™ which will enable you to zero in on a tool quickly.
Papertrail
Papertrail is a time-saving log management tool including lightning fast search, team-wide access, and long term archiving options. It’s easy to set up and lets the users gain visibility into systems typically within minutes. Papertrail provides a smooth and intuitive user interface and contains charts and analytics exports along with monitoring webhooks. It also aggregates the app logs, text logs, and syslogs in one place and helps eliminate the need for digging through multiple log files and directories. Papertrail helps users gain valuable information to troubleshoot issues even before they start impacting the end users.
Loggly
Loggly is designed to be a scalable SaaS solution helping organizations get valuable insights about their log data. Some standard use cases of Loggly revolve around troubleshooting application or server issues, transaction correlation, alerting, deployment monitoring, and application analysis. It provides fast searching over massive amounts of log data and aggregates and analyzes logs from multiple sources such as NGINX, Docker, node, and PHP, to name a few. It’s capable of working on Linux, Windows, and macOS, and includes Logstash, Fluentd, Windows systems logs, and Rsyslog TLS as its log agents.
Papertrail vs. Loggly
Log Archiving
Loggly provides only a limited log archiving facility because the feature is available only for pro and enterprise levels. It writes logs in batches every half hour and only keeps the copies till the time users subscribe to Loggly and uses S3 cmd. While there’s a data export feature allowing users to create reports, charts, and analysis, they can be stored only in raw, CSV, or JSON format. Against this, Papertrail provides a more detailed view of the archives for a much longer duration. Papertrail stores these archives in a tab-separated (.tsv) format, and these TSV files are compressed to gzip to reduce size. The archiving feature in Papertrail is also capable of showing duplicate and similar messages, and it’s logs are downloadable from archives using the HTTP API key whose URL format is easy and predictable. Users can even retrieve multiple archives or a single archive as per requirement. It also gives the flexibility of downloading single or numerous archives by using the date tool, and helps to find entries in a particular archive and sync multiple archives from the Papertrail S3 bucket to any custom bucket.
Data Analysis and Reporting
The Loggly cloud-based service automatically structures and summarizes the log data along with connecting it to the tools the organization uses daily. It’s ready-to-use dashboards give users a performance indicator and also provide the flexibility of incorporating charts and data collected via multiple sources. Loggly also lets users share one or more dashboards between organizational teams along with controlling its visibility and editing feature. Against this, Papertrail is fast to set up and gives a more expanded perspective as it’s capable of aggregating app logs, text logs, and syslogs at a single location. Users can also tail and search on a real-time basis by using a browser, API, or command lines. It also helps detect the trends and provides an instant alert to users while its lightning search feature lets you search through hours of logs typically within seconds. Papertrail log velocity analysis also helps detect patterns and anomalies to quicken the process of troubleshooting. This tool gives visibility to non-technical staff in an organization as it requires no RDP/SSH access or knowledge and can be more useful for organizations than its counterpart.
Event Viewer
Event or log viewer is a core functionality of Papertrail and consists of a live tail to show events as they happen. These logs can be paused and resumed. Papertrail event viewer is integrated with search and works in the same way as Google search along with facilitating in saving some necessary searches, which may be used again. Alerts can also be created for these essential searches, and these searches are displayed on the team-wide dashboard. It’s time seek feature allows users to seek on a particular time or date across the searchable history. Another feature this tool offers is the ability to turn pieces of log messages into clickable elements along with filtering out noisy logs. Against this, Loggly automatically views the logs as they’re received and then extracts data out of it to provide users with a result but fails to give a more in-depth view into the events.
Conclusion
Finding a tool to cater to your needs can be challenging. Thus, it’s recommended users check out the free trial versions of these tools before deciding. Loggly offers free trial for 30 days, and Papertrail has a free plan log monitoring plan. Papertrail makes log management much easier through its features like the remote syslog, search and tail, notification, and webhooks in the form of HTTP alerts designed to come every minute and HTTP notifications coming every hour or day. Papertrail also includes advanced log monitoring capabilities and an intuitive and easy-to-set-up interface with real-time event and search capabilities. Its log colorization feature also makes it a convenient tool for log management. Check out the tools and pricing and make your log management more efficient today.