January 17, 2023
“Papertrail enables us to compare messages from one site to another simultaneously and quickly identify issues by turning on systems logging from multiple sites at once and then sending them to a fixed IP address.” - Terence Fleming, Director, ThinkWireless
About ThinkWireless Limited
Based in Auckland, New Zealand, ThinkWireless is a regional provider of enterprise wireless networking services. Founded in 2011, the modest-sized but agile managed service provider (MSP) has earned a reputation for technical know-how and reliability in keeping their customers’ high availability wired and wireless networks secure and operational.
Challenge
It became clear the firm’s managers needed to gather significantly more information from outage events than the existing remote network management systems could provide.
They deemed it essential to have visibility of the log files from as many customer devices as possible to help ensure good quality service. With his experience in the remote management of wired and wireless infrastructures scattered across the vast expanse of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Ocean, ThinkWireless founder and director Terence Fleming took on the search for a cost-effective remote log management software.
Solution
After pilot tests of log management utilities, Fleming contacted a SolarWinds customer success specialist in Sydney. Among the contenders were SolarWinds® Log Analyzer, SolarWinds Papertrail
, and SolarWinds Loggly®.
“My years of experience as a Wi-Fi support technician told me to look at whatever would give us the most detailed log data and offer the highest degree of flexibility in parsing and examining it,” Fleming recalls. “Papertrail seemed to fit the bill better than anything else.”
In particular, the cloud-ready nature of Papertrail held strong appeal.
“Most of our client sites only have half a dozen people, with no on-site servers, and it was problematic to collect syslog locally,” he says. “That’s why cloud-based log management tools are preferable, so you can both turn on and manage the syslog remotely at scale.”
Product Mix
IT Environment: On-premises, hybrid cloud, colocation
Benefits
Choosing to oversee the installation of Papertrail personally, Fleming drew upon his years as an engineer designing wireless networks. Having been involved in the earliest Wi-Fi implementations in the Asia-Pacific market in the early 2000s, he knew the importance of the availability of log files for scrutinizing performance.
“Support guys in our industry absolutely need to look at the logs to see why customers are having disconnects,” Fleming states. “As a support technician, particularly when your customer has a problem, you turn on verbose logging to maximize visibility, then go to the tech support of the vendor providing the equipment.
“What Papertrail does extremely well is it allows you to turn on syslogging from a dozen sites simultaneously. If only one or two client sites have a problem, Papertrail allows you to discount irrelevant error messages from all sites and focus on the error messages that only come from the problem sites. That helps speed up troubleshooting and get to the root cause more quickly.
“The ability to send syslog in clear text to a fixed IP address as well as encrypted data to an FQDN permits a wide variety of devices to be supported.”
In discussing the value delivered by Papertrail, Fleming praises the ability to aggregate logs and create saved searches combined with alerts on the cloud-based solution’s dashboard.
“Being able to view logs and analyze events makes a real difference, especially given the ability to search the logs for anomalies,” he adds. “This functionality is very helpful to support technicians and our management.”
Fleming says the end-to-end log management in Papertrail provides additional oversight to help close the loop when problems arise. Specifically, log archiving is routinely used to identify sources of service interruptions and prevent future outages.
“The archiving capability is valuable in going back in time to troubleshoot,” Fleming states. “We can download everything, see the logs over time, and pick the period when the incident happened. Using the filters in Microsoft® Excel®, it’s possible to find all the relevant logs and spot issues.
“Uptime is everything in our industry, and we need to be proactive in every way possible,” he says. “Papertrail enables us to compare messages from one site to another simultaneously and quickly identify issues by turning on systems logging from multiple sites at once and then sending them to a fixed IP address.”
