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Manage Logs > Mapping senders to groups

Mapping senders to groups

Background

Papertrail supports a few ways to map senders to groups (like “Production”, “Staging”, “us-west-1”, and “Web apps”), depending on how descriptive the senders’ names are, how many senders exist, how frequently they change, and how you prefer to manage configuration information.

Simpler environments

While we love automation, with a small number of senders (2-10) that rarely change, it’s probably overkill. Consider spending 5 minutes to create groups and add the systems manually. Revisit or automate when the number of systems increases or dynamic provisioning is involved.

More complex environments

Senders with descriptive names

When senders’ names are descriptive enough to indicate group membership, like www32.prod, use Papertrail’s dynamic group membership. Create groups and provide name wildcard(s), like *prod* or www*. See How are senders named? for more on how systems get their names.

Senders without descriptive names

Consider choosing descriptive sender names

While most loggers default to using the system hostname as a log identifier, and Papertrail honors that, you can easily define a name that is different than the system hostname.

If your provisioning process knows more than the hostname, consider having the provisioning process generate log configs, or even system hostnames, with more informative names. Regardless of how you use Papertrail, this is often useful to do on its own.

If that’s not feasible, there are several convenient options for managing group membership that don’t require a meaningful hostname.

I prefer simple

Create a Papertrail log destination per group. On the Destination Settings page, select the target group (like “Production” or “Staging”) under Add new systems to a group?. Have the senders for that group log to that log destination.

I prefer full-featured

When new senders are provisioned, have them run the papertrail-join-group command-line app.

This works great with automated deployment processes like Chef, Puppet, and VM instance bootstrap scripts. It also means that senders can easily join multiple groups, and that group information is kept in the same place as your other configuration/deployment information.

Related: Amazon EC2

Let me control everything

Make calls to Papertrail’s HTTP API. While papertrail-cli wraps the API in command-line tools, you can invoke the API calls directly as well. See Manage Systems, especially Register and Join Group.

Combine these

Many of the techniques mentioned here can be used together. For example, log destinations might map to groups, but the destinations could still be configured using an automated deployment system like puppet.

How are senders named?

See How are senders named?

Removing a sender

See Adding and removing senders.

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