Papertrail

Papertrail is a cloud-hosted log management service that provides frustration-free log aggregation, search, and analysis for applications, servers, and cloud services. Acquired by SolarWinds in 2014, Papertrail has established itself as one of the simplest and most reliable log management solutions, known for its ease of setup that can be completed in minutes. The service accepts syslog traffic over TCP, UDP, and TLS, as well as HTTP-based log shipping from application APIs, with native integration for Heroku, Loggly, rsync, and dozens of application frameworks. Papertrail's standout feature is its near-instant full-text search across terabytes of log data: users can search millions of events in under a second using natural language queries, boolean operators, regular expressions, and time-range filtering. The live tail feature provides real-time streaming of log events as they arrive, grouped by source, with color-coded highlighting for errors and warnings. Alerting capabilities include threshold-based alerts (trigger when X events occur in Y minutes), anomaly detection, webhook integrations for PagerDuty, Slack, Librato, Datadog, and custom HTTP endpoints, and saved searches with optional email summaries. Papertrail supports log archiving to Amazon S3 for long-term retention, system-level grouping and filtering by hostname, severity, facility, and program name, and a REST API for programmatic access to log search results. Pricing follows a simple model based on log volume, starting at 8 dollars per month for 1GB of monthly log ingestion, with annual plans offering cost savings.