IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA is well suited if you are using other IBM cloud product ecosystems. It's very mature and supports HIPAA-compliant configurations if you need to store PI/PHI data. We particularly use it for audit requirements but understand the limitation with the retention period is for 30 days only. Also you need to configure if your IBM cloud service doesn't have any log collection or report tool. Log collection agents are widely supported for most of infrastructure in cloud.
SolarWinds Papertrail is great if you have multiple separate applications and you want to be able to view and search all the logs in one place. It also works well for alerts based on certain keywords in log entries (for example, ERROR, WARN, etc.) Since only the first four weeks of logs are searchable in Papertrail, it may not work well for use-cases where much older log entries need to remain searchable.
It's extremely easy to use. I and new colleagues have never had any issues configuring this tool or setting it up, it works almost out of the box with very simple instructions to follow to configure it to our own environment. I would highly recommend it on that ability alone.
I honestly have never had the need to use the support team, as we have not run into any issues so far. If we did however, judging from how the tool itself works, I don't doubt that the team would provide excellent support for any issues that we may possibly run into.
If you use other IBM product ecosystems, IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA is the obvious choice, as it supports seamless integration and better access control with IBM cloud access group setups. IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA was flexible and has wide support for various infrastructure implementations and is also controlled by the same IAM access setup. It can be configured for any IBM cloud services or platform logs or for infrastructure by installing the agent.
I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates that were required to make them usable.
Most of IBM cloud services support easier integration for log analysis.
We are able to achieve compliance with various audit log reports, which improves governance and control over various cloud resources we have.
Also IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA helps in troubleshooting and analysis for application logs in real time. This helps with improved issue resolution timings.
