I haven't used any other software for logging from starting of my career. I am using this one, and I think I don't need to explore any other as this provides me with all thing that fulfilled all my use cases.
The ability to customize logging levels and manage log files is superior to other products we have looked at; due to this we selected to go with log4j.
I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates …
SolarWinds Papertrail is easier to set up, and in my opinion, its UI is quicker for searching specific logs. LogDNA (now Mezmo) have advantage in the UI look and in the power to create charts and counters.
CloudWatch, by itself, is terrible at search. CloudWatch Insights works great and has powerful search capabilities, but it's more difficult to set up alerts. Also, because Insights charges per search, you have the potential to accumulate a large bill if you need to do many …
As a way to just read your logs in a stream, aggregated across apps, it does that better than Datadog or Honeycomb. While DataDog does have a logging product, Honeycomb does not, so Honeycomb + SolarWinds Papertrail could be useful.
Papertrail offers a much easier to use solution than Azure. We were able to integrate it into our applications without much work and the solution works robustly. Papertrail offers traditional logging services, only, but we have used sysdig monitor together with papertrail and …
I much prefer SolarWinds Papertrail as it just makes things so much easier to read and follow through than other tools. It's much faster, and so much easier to set up and get into a running state. It takes us on average maybe 5-10 minutes to configure our apps to send log data.
AWS user interface and user experience is not really great, its really hard to trace logs on their console. Papertrail offers so much better user experience for us, its also very easy to setup alarm on Papertrail whenever something's gone wrong. I personally choose Papertrail …
We have used other services such as Coralogix before but love SolarWinds Papertrail for its ease of use and not-too-bloated features. This also makes our engineers and other staff use it more often.
We have used Papertrail right from day 1 of our startup. We didn't find any major drawbacks for us to check/evaluate anything else. Part of the reason is also that we started with Heroku and Papertrail was available as an add on for Heroku.
Log4j is perfect to use in applications where you suspect you have a need to troubleshoot the application in a running environment and don’t know in advance exactly which parts of the application you want to troubleshoot. It’s a bit unnecessary in really small applications since the extra dependency can cause more issues than benefits.
SolarWinds Papertrail is great if you have multiple separate applications and you want to be able to view and search all the logs in one place. It also works well for alerts based on certain keywords in log entries (for example, ERROR, WARN, etc.) Since only the first four weeks of logs are searchable in Papertrail, it may not work well for use-cases where much older log entries need to remain searchable.
It's extremely easy to use. I and new colleagues have never had any issues configuring this tool or setting it up, it works almost out of the box with very simple instructions to follow to configure it to our own environment. I would highly recommend it on that ability alone.
I honestly have never had the need to use the support team, as we have not run into any issues so far. If we did however, judging from how the tool itself works, I don't doubt that the team would provide excellent support for any issues that we may possibly run into.
I haven't used any other software for logging from starting of my career. I am using this one, and I think I don't need to explore any other as this provides me with all thing that fulfilled all my use cases.
I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates that were required to make them usable.