I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates …
SolarWinds Papertrail is easier to set up, and in my opinion, its UI is quicker for searching specific logs. LogDNA (now Mezmo) have advantage in the UI look and in the power to create charts and counters.
CloudWatch, by itself, is terrible at search. CloudWatch Insights works great and has powerful search capabilities, but it's more difficult to set up alerts. Also, because Insights charges per search, you have the potential to accumulate a large bill if you need to do many …
As a way to just read your logs in a stream, aggregated across apps, it does that better than Datadog or Honeycomb. While Datadog does have a logging product, Honeycomb does not, so Honeycomb + SolarWinds Papertrail could be useful.
Papertrail offers a much easier to use solution than Azure. We were able to integrate it into our applications without much work and the solution works robustly. Papertrail offers traditional logging services, only, but we have used Sysdig Monitor together with papertrail and …
AWS user interface and user experience is not really great, its really hard to trace logs on their console. Papertrail offers so much better user experience for us, its also very easy to setup alarm on Papertrail whenever something's gone wrong. I personally choose Papertrail …
I much prefer SolarWinds Papertrail as it just makes things so much easier to read and follow through than other tools. It's much faster, and so much easier to set up and get into a running state. It takes us on average maybe 5-10 minutes to configure our apps to send log data.
We have used other services such as Coralogix before but love SolarWinds Papertrail for its ease of use and not-too-bloated features. This also makes our engineers and other staff use it more often.
We have used Papertrail right from day 1 of our startup. We didn't find any major drawbacks for us to check/evaluate anything else. Part of the reason is also that we started with Heroku and Papertrail was available as an add on for Heroku.
As a 3rd party endpoint, SolarWinds Papertrail did exactly what it needed to. My hesitation is on the technical aptitude of the colleague receiving the recommendation, as the overall level of command line skill/understanding would have to be high. Web applications are a great solution here, but MOST of them already provide some sort of logging output. The scenario would definitely be in the situation where logging wasn't readily available in the current solution space. IF something like SolarWinds Papertrail was needed, it's probably the de facto thing that I would recommend.
It's extremely easy to use. I and new colleagues have never had any issues configuring this tool or setting it up, it works almost out of the box with very simple instructions to follow to configure it to our own environment. I would highly recommend it on that ability alone.
I honestly have never had the need to use the support team, as we have not run into any issues so far. If we did however, judging from how the tool itself works, I don't doubt that the team would provide excellent support for any issues that we may possibly run into.
CloudWatch, by itself, is terrible at search. CloudWatch Insights works great and has powerful search capabilities, but it's more difficult to set up alerts. Also, because Insights charges per search, you have the potential to accumulate a large bill if you need to do many searches. I like that SolarWinds Papertrail has a known monthly cost.