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 ...