Papertrail vs Rocana
When comparing Papertrail vs Rocana, 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 Rocana is ranked 15th. 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 Great "out-of-the-box" analytics
Beyond simple rules-based alerting, Rocana Ops creates statistical models for each of the metrics you want to track and evaluates as data streams in to provide nearly instantaneous feedback on how your systems are performing. Unique WARN (Weighted Analytic Risk Notifications) Scores indicate components that are trending to the good or bad. Users can create custom metrics, which get evaluated just the same as "out-of-the-box" metrics.
Pro Highly scalable
Collect and analyze multiple TBs of data per day, built on Hadoop components Rocana Ops is a highly-distributed system offering massive scalability using commodity hardware. Rocana has customers collecting 10+ TBs of log data per day.
Rocana One free option provides up to 1TB of daily data volume for free.
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 Expensive
Appears to be an expensive solution.
Con Doesn't run on a laptop
Well, maybe you can squeeze Rocana Ops on a laptop, but it is designed as a highly-distributed, fault-tolerant system and requires a Hadoop distro as the underlying platform.