Hey, it’s another issue of The Papertrail Occasional. If there’s a theme this time around, it’s “Logs, when and how you want them.” Not too verbosely:
1. Search alerts
2. Painless date/time finder
3. Colors
4. Custom styling
5. Automatic group membership
6. Easy app log encryption
.. plus customer creativity (Rails, chef, puppet), a bit of horn-tooting, and our new support chat room.
1. SEARCH ALERTS. Send important log messages to a monitoring system email alias, Campfire chat room, or your HTTP URL with Papertrail’s new search alerts. Get notified immediately, every hour, or daily.
Check out screenshots in the blog post, see alert handlers in the papertrail-services git repo, or write an alert handler using JSON webhook docs.
2. PAINLESS DATE/TIME FINDER. Know when something happened? Get there faster with a (much!) smarter date and time finder. Type or paste almost any common timestamp or relative date and It Should Just Work (TM).
Read how we mixed Date.js and elbow grease in last week’s blog announcement.
3. COLORS. NOT TOO MANY. Want more contrast in your logs? Papertrail’s log viewer can now colorize the system and program links. We tried to add contrast without creating a technicolor clown car. Not knocking clowns.
See a screenshot and flip it on in log colorization setup.
4. CUSTOM STYLING. Maybe you want a certain program or system to be bright red. Or a smaller font. Or you really do want a clown car theme.
Customize the log viewer with your own CSS, the Stylish browser extension, and our nimble friends “Copy” and “Paste,” all in custom log styles.
5. AUTOMATIC GROUP MEMBERSHIP. Our trek towards effortless setup continues: systems can join a Papertrail group based on where they log to. Use one destination for Production and one for Staging (or West and East) to skip a manual step.
And a few tweaks: groups support more than one system wildcard (like: www*, *myapp*). After all systems have started logging, flip a switch to stop accepting new systems.
Set a default group in logging settings or learn more about access control in the blog post.
6. EASY APP LOG ENCRYPTION. On-the-wire encryption with one command. Papertrail’s remote_syslog collector now supports TLS. Run “gem install remote_syslog” then start it with the ”—tls” argument.
Instructions on Add System cover how to transmit any log file with encryption.
Not to be outdone, CUSTOMER CREATIVITY. A few recent creations:
- 1-line Rails log (via Sam Stokes and Rapportive)
- Add PID to Rails logs (via Andre Arko and Plex)
And thanks to W. Andrew Loe and Onehub, Mike Heffner and Librato, and Donald Piret and Roomorama for contributing chef and puppet recipes. They’re all on Add System.
And 4 lines of HORN-TOOTING:
- we’re the geekiest Startup of the Week in recent memory
- our own Eric Lindvall guest blogs for New Relic on Extending New Relic Custom Parameters
- people love us on Twitter
That’s all for now. Logging off,
Troy, for Papertrail
