Papertrail’s log viewer now supports switching groups. We’re always looking for small tweaks that make a big impact on our own, and hopefully, your workflow. Thanks to Ben Fyvie for suggesting this.
Here’s how it works. In the event viewer, the upper left corner has changed to show the current group or sender:
Click it to see all groups:
Choose the one you want to change to. The active search and seeked-to time are retained.
Here’s how this tiny change helped me this morning. I was troubleshooting a problem by looking at Papertrail’s own Web servers group. I’d already seeked to a time and then searched to find the HTTP logs I was interested in. They led me squarely to a problem with logs from another part of our stack.
Instead of reloading the event viewer on another group and going through that again, I just changed to the group I wanted. Papertrail retained my search and time, so the log messages that I cared about were already highlighted. I was able to continue troubleshooting without losing my train of thought.
This is common in my troubleshooting process, whether it’s changing from production logs to staging ones (to see whether the same error occurred there), or from the server logs of an API request to the client’s logs. Now context stays with me.
Also, when I need to see both side-by-side, the dropdown lets me open a different group in a new browser tab. Finally, my saved searches are more useful now that they’re easy to use with any group.
Thanks to Ben for this idea. Is there a small tweak that would improve your workflow? We want to know. Enjoy!