The ongoing partnership between Papertrail and DigitalOcean led to the development of the Papertrail software as a service (SaaS) add-on in the DigitalOcean Marketplace. With the add-on, developers can add powerful, simple, and scalable Papertrail log management to their DigitalOcean infrastructure in seconds.
In two earlier posts, we reviewed how the add-on helps teams simplify and centralize log management. In this post, we’ll look at how the add-on helps solve the problem of configuring logging to meet the needs of different environments like development, QA, staging, and production.
Create views optimized for environments and teams
Logging is essential across all environments, but specific logging needs vary greatly from one environment to the next. For example, log levels in development environments often need to be set to DEBUG or TRACE. In production, that same level of verbosity can be a security risk. Similarly, tech stacks may vary across environments (for example, if you’re working on a new feature branch) and influence how developers view their logs.
Environments aren’t the only aspect that necessitates varied logging needs. QA engineers, developers, UX designers, and customer support may all have different logging use cases. Customizing log views can help teams determine what they need to see and prevent them from accessing what they shouldn’t see.
With the Papertrail SaaS add-on, you can leverage groups and user roles to define custom views and access rights to give team members the necessary visibility (but not more).
Support CI/CD and automated testing
Even though automated promotion of builds from one environment to another is a typical CI/CD workflow, differences between environments can sometimes cause CI/CD pipelines to break. Containers significantly reduce “it works on my machine” issues across development and production environments. However, not all workloads are containerized, and differences in environments still exist.
As code is deployed to a new environment, fine-tuned logging can help teams detect issues faster, improve automated testing, and gain more confidence in the quality of their releases.
The Papertrail add-on helps support CI/CD and automated testing in several ways, including:
Sending alerts based on specific error messages: Papertrail enables DevOps teams to create alerts that notify the right team members if a specific error or message pattern is logged.
Using inactivity alerts to detect when something does NOT happen: In some cases, the absence of an expected log record can be a bigger problem than an error message. Inactivity alerts enable automatic notifications if a system doesn’t log anything within a specific timeframe.
Creating custom log views based on environment data: Log views based on categories like application, microservice, location, and cluster allow teams to narrow down exactly what failed, helping them streamline the troubleshooting process.
Automating issue remediation with custom webhooks: Automation is a key aspect of CI/CD. Papertrail allows teams to leverage custom webhooks based on log triggers to automate workflows, such as rolling back a failed deployment.
Integrations that help reduce MTTR and increase visibility
Uptime is vital for production systems.
Visibility is vital for maintaining uptime.
Effective log management is vital for visibility.
With the right log management integrations, teams can reduce the time it takes to recover from an incident (also known as Mean Time to Recover, or MTTR) and achieve granular visibility across their infrastructure.
The challenge is that many modern microservice-based architectures are complex, and it can be difficult to maintain visibility across components. Papertrail helps developers solve this problem with a robust set of integrations. These integrations allow teams to fine-tune their log management strategy and make it easy to drill down to troubleshoot issues across environments.
Some examples of Papertrail integrations designed to make DevOps teams more effective include:
rkubelog for Kubernetes: Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source project—that fetches logs from all the services running in the K8 cluster, tags them, and forwards them directly to Papertrail. The Papertrail rkubelog integration simplifies K8s log management and makes aggregating and extracting insights from K8s logs seamless.
AppOptics for distributed traces: Distributed traces are essential to debugging complex microservice issues quickly. Papertrail can integrate with AppOptics to simplify logging distributed traces.
Notification integrations for collaboration and ops platforms: Papertrail helps you notify DevOps engineers within their systems, such as Slack, PagerDuty, and VictorOps, to collaborate and track incidents.
Try the Papertrail DigitalOcean add-on for free!
The Papertrail add-on for DigitalOcean helps DevOps teams address the challenges of logging across multiple environments without undue complexity. Get started in seconds. If you’re interested in test-driving the solution, you can try the Papertrail add-on in the DO marketplace for free!
