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NOTE: this is considered EXPERIMENTAL and is not yet recommended for production systems.

docker-plugin-papertail

This is a plugin for Docker to both send logs to and read logs from Papertrail

What is it?

Once configured, it will send your Docker logs to Papertrail, buffer logs in the event of network disconnect as well as enable reading of remote logs from Papertrail through docker logs CLI.

Why not the docker syslog driver?

• This plugin adds little resilience. The data is persisted until it is sent to Papertrail.
• Logs can be read from papertrail using docker logs. It also supports docker logs follow and tail options.

How to use it?

Prerequisites:

• You will need a papertrail account.
• After you setup an account, you can grab the url to send logs to and the paper trail token.
• You should have docker installed on your machine (preferably docker version 1.17+)

Install the plugin:

docker plugin install solarwinds/papertrail-plugin

The plugin needs to use the host network for sending logs to paper trail. Please accept the permission.

Plugin "solarwinds/papertrail-plugin" is requesting the following privileges:
 - network: [host]
Do you grant the above permissions? [y/N] y

Once installed, we need to configure docker to use the plugin.

Configuration options available are:

• papertrail-url: This is the papertrail url to send the logs to
• papertrail-token: The papertrail token used to fetch the logs
• papertrail-log-retention: Max duration for which the logs will be persisted in the event of the service not being reachable. Examples of accepted values: 24h, 10m, 20s, etc. The default value is 24h.
• papertrail-max-diskusage: Max disk usage in percentage for persisting logs beyond which older logs will be discarded. For example: 5, 10, 12, etc. The default value is 5.

If you want to configure a specific container to use the driver, you can use the "--log-driver" and "--log-opt" options to docker run like this example below:

docker run --rm --log-driver solarwinds/papertrail-plugin --log-opt papertrail-url=logsX.papertrailapp.com:XXXXX \
    --log-opt papertrail-token=adbdyxendkkxk ubuntu bash -c 'while true; do date +%s%N | sha256sum | base64 | head -c 32 ; echo " - Hello world"; sleep 10; done'

To configure the Docker daemon to default to this logging driver, set the value of log-driver to "solarwinds/papertrail-plugin" of the logging driver in the daemon.json file, which is located in /etc/docker/ on Linux hosts or C:\ProgramData\docker\config\ on Windows server hosts. The following example explicitly sets the default logging driver to solarwinds/papertrail-plugin:

{
  "log-driver": "solarwinds/papertrail-plugin",
  "log-opts": {
    "papertrail-url": "logsX.papertrailapp.com:XXXXX",
    "papertrail-token": "adbdyxendkkxk",
    "papertrail-log-retention": "4h",
    "papertrail-max-diskusage": "10"
  }
}

For viewing the logs:

docker logs "container name"

Tail the logs:

docker logs -f "container name"

Only view the last N lines:

docker logs --tail N "container name"

Start tailing from the last N lines:

docker logs --tail N -f "container name"

Questions/Comments?

Please open an issue, we'd love to hear from you. As a SolarWinds Innovation Project, this plugin is supported in a best-effort fashion.