While it's not -hard- to login to your servers and check each log file it can quickly become a burden with log files kept in different locations, slightly different syntax for each and perhaps more than one server to dig through. Depending on your business you are probably not doing this everyday so the fact that you can setup Papertrail once and are then able to search through it in one location is a huge time saver in the long run. Papertrail has some competition in this space but i like the singular goal of this app and it has a good price to value comparison as well. It just works which is basically all you can ask from an app like this.