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When comparing Papertrail vs Kafka, 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 Kafka is ranked 8th. 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
Question Ranking
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 Optimized for performance
Kafka is optimized for supporting a huge number of users.
Pro Native mirroring support
Kafka has native support for mirroring.
Pro Native compression support
Kafka has native support for compression.
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 Java is a resource hog
Java is a resource hog, making this far too slow unless you have money to throw at multiple servers with 1/2TB of ram.
Con Need Zookeeper
Kafka can only work with Zookeeper
