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Papertrail

Frustration-free log management with live tailing for infrastructure issues.

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Papertrail is a hosted log management service that collects logs from multiple sources into a single searchable viewer, helping teams find and fix issues without switching between fragmented tools. It has been available to developers since 2011.

Core capabilities include live tailing with real-time regex filtering, log grouping and access control to segment data by app, environment, or host, saved-search alerts with custom notifications, and long-term archiving. Ingestion supports syslog, log4j, and text files, with automatic parsing of timestamps and log levels. The web-based viewer offers persistent shareable URLs, infinite backfill, and a REST API. Archives are stored as downloadable text files copied to Amazon S3 and can be analyzed with tools such as Redshift, Athena, and Hadoop on EMR.

Papertrail is packaged as a usage-based plan billed per GB of log transfer per month, with unlimited systems and users included. Logs can stop at the plan limit or continue as usage-based overage at a higher per-GB rate. A free trial is available with 30 days and 100 GB of usage included, requiring no credit card.

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