Explore Centralized Logging Through Papertrail

Papertrail #

The first centralized logging solution we’ll explore is Papertrail. We’ll use it as a representative of a logging-as-a-service solution that can save us from installing and, more importantly, maintaining a self-hosted alternative.

Papertrail features live trailing, filtering by timestamps, powerful search queries, pretty colors, and quite a few other things that might (or might not) be essential when skimming through logs produced inside our clusters.

Register at PaperTrail #

The first thing we need to do is to register or, if this is not the first time you tried Papertrail, log in.

open "https://papertrailapp.com/"

Please follow the instructions to register, or log in if you already have a user in their system.

You will be glad to find out that Papertrail provides a free plan that allows storage of 50 MB of logs searchable for one day, as well as a full year of downloadable archives. That should be more than enough for running the examples we are about to explore. If you have a relatively small cluster, that should keep you going indefinitely. Their prices are reasonable, even if your cluster is bigger and you have more monthly logs than 50 MB. Arguably, they are so cheap that we can say it provides a better return on investment than if we’d run an alternative solution inside our own cluster. After all, nothing is free. Even self-hosted solutions based on open source create costs in maintenance time as well as in computing power.

For now, what matters is that the examples we’ll run with Papertrail will be well within their free plan.

If you have a small operation, Papertrail will work well. But, if you have many applications and a bigger cluster, you might be wondering whether Papertrail scales to suit your needs. Worry not. One of their customers is GitHub, and they are likely bigger than you are. Papertrail can handle ...