Papertrail

What is Papertrail?

Papertrail is a hosted log management tool built around one core idea: tail and search logs from every part of your stack in one place, in real time, without setting up an ELK stack or wiring together a bunch of infrastructure yourself. You point your servers, containers, or apps at it via syslog or an agent, and it gives you live tailing, full-text search, and basic alerting. It's aimed at teams who want centralized logs working in minutes, not a heavyweight observability platform.

Key features

• Live tail across multiple log sources in a single searchable stream
• Full-text search with boolean operators and saved searches
• Alerting rules that can notify you via email, Slack, or other integrations when a log pattern shows up
• Simple setup via syslog, a lightweight agent, or common platform integrations (Heroku, Docker, etc.)
• Archiving to S3-compatible storage for longer retention than the live search window

Who it's for

A good fit for small to mid-size teams who want centralized, searchable logs without adopting a full observability stack, especially if you're already deep in Heroku or a similarly simple deploy setup. If you need distributed tracing, metrics correlation, or APM-style deep dives alongside logs, you'll outgrow it and want a fuller observability platform instead.

Pricing

Tiered plans based on log volume and retention length, with a free tier for very low volume. Check the tool's site for current limits and rates.