When comparing Papertrail vs Logsniffer, 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 Logsniffer is ranked 27th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Monitoring and alerting
Scans logs in real-time using powerful search routines and publishes identified events to several channels. Storing events in an Elasticsearch index enables extensive analysis.
Pro UI first approach
Everything can be managed by the great UI: Configuring logs, start/stop alerts etc.
Pro Endless scrolling through logs – forward and backward
There is no need to adjust time filter ranges etc. to scroll up or down in the sequence of log messages.
Pro Lightweight on-premise app
All-in-one bundled web application, 30MB with a low memory footprint. Only Java is required.
Pro Real-time log tailing
Logs are accessed and tailed directly from files in real-time.
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.