We’ve collected a number of small improvements to Papertrail’s log viewer that I’m really excited to ship.
Don’t lose track of what you were looking at
We’ve changed the seeking behavior so it stays with you through many searches, until you hit the “x” button in the date selector:
As we used Papertrail to track down issues, we’d often have both a search query as well as a timestamp or ballpark time. We wanted our chosen date to stick around as we continued to refine our queries to zero in on a problem. Having to repeatedly seek back to the interesting date became a hassle.
And to make skimming easier, there’s a new indicator by the log messages nearest to yuor chosen date:
Get back to realtime faster
The tail indicator arrow in the bottom right corner has evolved. When viewing older logs, just click it to return to realtime logs for the same search:
In realtime mode, it can still be used to pause new messages (as can scrolling up).
Load times
Part of making logs fun is making the browsing and seeking as lightweight as possible, so troubleshooting is less of an intentional decision and more of a casual exploration. When you spot an interesting event that just occurred, it should feel effortless to pause the viewer, read and potentially investigate the problem, and just as quickly, return to realtime messages.
To that end, it’s now faster to return to realtime logs. The viewer is more aggressive about fetching realtime logs when you’ve scrolled up to view older logs.
Cleaning up those URLs
Shorter URLs are prettier URLs, and to that end we’ve taken away some of the extra parameters. RIP, parameters:
