I don’t want to write a whole thing about a company that became worse because I don’t want it to become a genre of this blog. Why am I adding to the sum of Internet drama and being such a hater. But I just gotta say (here I go) that…

My recent experience with Papertrail has been so profoundly disappointing.

Papertrail used to be a completely reasonable choice when running a Heroku app back in the 2010s - you added them through the Heroku Marketplace, they started ingesting logs for all of your apps, and you could configure email and Slack alerts. They did that reliably. You could login and search your logs. They offered a positive, stress-free experience.

The troubles truly started after their acquisition by SolarWinds. The confused messaging they sent about this transition, (also, the inexplicable uselessness of it - I just want a place to store my logs, man!), the fact that you couldn’t really predict which login page to use and would ping-pong between “SolarWinds Papertrail” and “Papertrail”, … papercuts all the way down.

I also remember that fun moment when I tried to upgrade my logging capacity and received a crazy-looking automated 2-page email that started off with “The activation key for your license is on the licenses tab.” Dude, what?

In the following support thread, their customer support asked me “I would like to know if you were able to upgrade your subscription.” I think??

It’s all good. But no, it’s not actually. What prompted me to write this (I’m tired) is that a past customer of mine, a paying large-ish Papertrail customer for the last many years, was simultaneously told that they had to immediately migrate away from Papertrail to SolarWinds Papertrail (not for any useful reason), and while trying to negotiate which plan would work for them, this same customer was told:

Your organization was suspended because your current subscription plan expired.

If you wish to restore your organization, please contact SolarWinds Sales.

Are you all for real.

So yeah, I’m in the market for a reliable, syslog-compatible, logging company.

Does anyone know of one? Thank you.