AWS CloudTrail vs Papertrail

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AWS CloudTrail

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Papertrail

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AWS CloudTrail vs Papertrail: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here, we will compare the key differences between AWS CloudTrail and Papertrail. Both CloudTrail and Papertrail are monitoring services, but they have distinct features and capabilities that set them apart.

  1. Data Collection: AWS CloudTrail collects and logs all API activity within your AWS account, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and SDKs. It provides a complete audit trail of all activity, capturing details such as the identity of the user, the time of the action, and the source IP address. On the other hand, Papertrail is a centralized log management service that collects and aggregates logs from various sources like servers, applications, and cloud platforms. It offers more flexibility in terms of log sources compared to CloudTrail.

  2. Focus and Integration: AWS CloudTrail is primarily designed for monitoring and auditing AWS resources and services. It integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as CloudWatch, allowing you to set up alerts and triggers based on CloudTrail events. It provides a detailed history of activity within your AWS environment. Conversely, Papertrail is a general-purpose log management tool that supports logging from various sources, including AWS, but is not limited to it. It can be integrated with different technologies and platforms to centralize logs from multiple sources.

  3. Retention and Storage: AWS CloudTrail automatically stores log files in an S3 bucket, eliminating the need for managing log storage infrastructure. The retention period can be configured, and CloudTrail supports encrypted storage for improved security. Papertrail, on the other hand, provides a highly scalable and searchable log storage. It retains logs according to the chosen plan and allows for easy retrieval and analysis of log data.

  4. Search and Analysis: CloudTrail offers powerful capabilities for searching and analyzing log data, enabling you to identify specific events or patterns of activity. It provides an easy-to-use query interface and allows you to set up alerts based on specific criteria. Papertrail also offers search and filtering options, allowing you to search across logs in real-time, apply filters, and perform complex queries. It provides a user-friendly interface for log analysis.

  5. Log Format and Customization: AWS CloudTrail logs are stored in a proprietary JSON format, capturing the details of each event. The structure and contents of the logs are predefined by AWS, and you cannot customize the log format. On the other hand, Papertrail supports various log formats, including plain text, JSON, and Syslog. It provides flexibility in parsing and customizing log data to match your specific requirements.

  6. Alerting and Notifications: AWS CloudTrail supports integration with Amazon CloudWatch, enabling you to set up alerts and notifications based on specific events or patterns. You can define metric filters to trigger alarms or send notifications to other AWS services. Papertrail also offers alerting capabilities, allowing you to set up alerts based on log events. It supports various notification channels, such as email, SMS, and integrations with services like PagerDuty and Slack.

In summary, AWS CloudTrail is focused on monitoring and auditing activities within the AWS environment, providing a detailed audit trail of API activity. Papertrail, on the other hand, is a more general-purpose log management service that collects and centralizes logs from various sources, offering search, analysis, and alerting capabilities.

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Pros of AWS CloudTrail
Pros of Papertrail
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Very powerful
  • 2
    Backup to S3
  • 85
    Log search
  • 43
    Easy log aggregation across multiple machines
  • 43
    Integrates with Heroku
  • 37
    Simple interface
  • 26
    Backup to S3
  • 19
    Easy setup, independent of existing logging setup
  • 15
    Heroku add-on
  • 3
    Command line interface
  • 1
    Alerting
  • 1
    Good for Startups

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Cons of AWS CloudTrail
Cons of Papertrail
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 2
      Expensive
    • 1
      External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging

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    What is AWS CloudTrail?

    With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

    What is Papertrail?

    Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

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    What companies use AWS CloudTrail?
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    See which teams inside your own company are using AWS CloudTrail or Papertrail.
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    What tools integrate with AWS CloudTrail?
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    What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail and Papertrail?
    AWS Config
    AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
    AWS X-Ray
    It helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With this, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. It provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    Logstash
    Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.
    Logback
    It is intended as a successor to the popular log4j project. It is divided into three modules, logback-core, logback-classic and logback-access. The logback-core module lays the groundwork for the other two modules, logback-classic natively implements the SLF4J API so that you can readily switch back and forth between logback and other logging frameworks and logback-access module integrates with Servlet containers, such as Tomcat and Jetty, to provide HTTP-access log functionality.
    See all alternatives