Make Your Logs Work for You

The days of logging in to servers and manually viewing log files are over. SolarWinds® Papertrail™ aggregates logs from applications, devices, and platforms to a central location.

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FEATURED TECHNOLOGY

Troubleshoot Fast and Enjoy It

SolarWinds® Papertrail™ provides cloud-based log management that seamlessly aggregates logs from applications, servers, network devices, services, platforms, and much more.

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FEATURED CAPABILITIES

Aggregate and Search Any Log

SolarWinds® Papertrail™ provides lightning-fast search, live tail, flexible system groups, team-wide access, and integration with popular communications platforms like PagerDuty and Slack to help you quickly track down customer problems, debug app requests, or troubleshoot slow database queries.

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FEATURED LANGUAGES

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APM Integration Feature List

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Collect Logs: Hosting Services > Engine Yard

Engine Yard

Introduction

Engine Yard is a Platform-as-a-Service for deploying and scaling applications on EC2. Here’s how to aggregate system and app logs from Engine Yard Cloud servers, including chef deploy logs, Rails request logs, and Unix syslog.

Setup: chef recipe

Engine Yard Cloud uses chef for most configuration, and makes it easy to create custom chef recipes. A recipe for Papertrail is available from the official ey-cloud-recipes repo.

This cookbook installs and sets up Papertrail’s tiny remote_syslog2 daemon (details), which reads and aggregates syslog and app logs in realtime. It also installs the syslog-ng server, a more feature-rich syslogd than is included in the standard EY Gentoo image.

Using the cookbook

  • enable it via the steps shown in Engine Yard’s doc
  • retrieve your Papertrail account settings from the Add Systems page
  • edit default.rb and change these options to reflect the details discovered in step two, and the logs you want to collect

Setup: Manual

If you don’t use chef, and just want to test on a single server, or can’t modify your chef recipes, you can setup EY-managed servers manually using Papertrail’s standard instructions.

From Papertrail’s Dashboard, click Add Systems and follow Papertrail’s Linux setup instructions to edit the system syslog configuration. The instructions also cover how to manually install remote_syslog2 for app logs.

Troubleshooting

Can’t deploy syslog-ng on Gentoo Linux using the Engine Yard chef recipe

When you try to run a deployment, you see the following error message:

ERROR: package[app-admin/syslog-ng] (/etc/chef-custom/recipes/cookbooks/papertrail/recipes/default.rb line 44) had an error:
emerge -g --color n --nospinner --quiet =app-admin/syslog-ng-3.3.5 returned 1, expected 0 
---- Begin output of emerge -g --color n --nospinner --quiet =app-admin/syslog-ng-3.3.5

This is caused by a bug in the enable_package resource. emerge_package doesn’t unmask the syslog-ng package, which prevents it from being installed. To fix it, download and apply the updated version of enable_package.rb from the emerge cookbook here.

Replace the emerge/definitions/enable_package.rb in your own cookbook repo with this patched file. If the emerge cookbook is not already included in main/recipes/default.rb, add it. The result will be un-masking syslog-ng so that it can be installed.

The scripts are not supported under any SolarWinds support program or service. The scripts are provided AS IS without warranty of any kind. SolarWinds further disclaims all warranties including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability or of fitness for a particular purpose. The risk arising out of the use or performance of the scripts and documentation stays with you. In no event shall SolarWinds or anyone else involved in the creation, production, or delivery of the scripts be liable for any damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business information, or other pecuniary loss) arising out of the use of or inability to use the scripts or documentation.