Frustration-free log management, plus a lot more

I’ve been a huge fan of Papertrail ever since I discovered it, probably about a year ago or so. I use it mostly to monitor server logs. I currently have two servers setup to send syslog messages to Papertrail.

The Papertrail Events dashboard can be a bit overwhelming at first, but the provided search is powerful and allows you to finely control which log messages you see and which you don’t.

You can even setup saved searches to fire when a specific event occurs. For example, I have a saved search that searches for the following:
Accepted publickey for tyler

When that message shows up in Papertrail, it means that I logged in, or that someone else has logged in using my SSH key. This can be quite handy, especially if you’re a one man shop like me and are usually the only person that has SSH or SFTP access to a server.

Getting a DigitalOcean VPS added to Papertrail, especially if it’s running Debian or Ubuntu, is super easy. It just requires that you modify /etc/rsyslog.conf and add a line to the end of the file that will send a copy of the system logs to Papertrail.

Papertrail can monitor application logs, too, such as Apache httpd logs and MySQL server logs, although that takes a bit more configuration to get working properly.

If nothing else, it’s just nice having system logs aggregated in one central place, where everything is easy to search through, making it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re an admin for one server or hundreds of servers, Papertrail could turn out to be one of your favorite tools. It’s definitely one of my favorites.

I suggest you give Papertrail a try, can’t hurt, they even have a plan that’s free forever. It’s definitely a great service for monitoring server logs.

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