Papertrail vs Flume
When comparing Papertrail vs Flume, the Slant community recommends Papertrail for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Papertrail is ranked 5th while Flume is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Papertrail is:
To set Papertrail up, use NXLog, or simply direct logs to a URL provided by Papertrail. No proprietary agent.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy set-up process
To set Papertrail up, use NXLog, or simply direct logs to a URL provided by Papertrail. No proprietary agent.
Pro Simple interface
The default view is mostly taken up by log events with a small row at the bottom for entering a search query, setting date range, accessing saved searches and enabling or disabling real-time logging.
Pro Event and search updates can be viewed in real-time
By default log events and searches in Papertrail are updated in real-time.
Pro Logs can be colorized via third-party software
Logs can be colorized by installing Stylish, a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that overrides CSS stylesheets, and writing a custom stylesheet.
Papertrail's log entries have various attributes that can be used to change css properties for specific programs or systems, or based on message contents.
Logs can also be colorized within the actual logs by adding ANSI escape codes (will override user-specific colorization).
Pro Flume is transactional (no lost when duplicating streams), and can be backuped by Kafka
Pro Hadoop integration
Flume was created to efficiently move log data to Apache Hadoop's HDFS.
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under Apache 2.0.
Cons
Con Expensive
Averages out at $8/GB/mo, which feels exorbitant.
Con Ridiculous free plan
Unfortunately, compared with other competitors, their free plan comes with only 50MB/month.
Con No built-in graphing
Papertrail can integrate with Librato Metrics and StatHat to graph event occurrence count over time, but there's no built-in way to visualize data.
Con Antiquated interface
The interface is simple, yet it is slow and hard to work with.
Con Hard to manage
Since Flume cannot do multiplex connections, it's extremely hard to manage. It's essentially one socket per log type.