Hidden among your normal, everyday logs are any number of unexpected events and anomalies. These events can provide key insights when troubleshooting problems, tracing transactions, or monitoring performance and behavior. However, finding them can be challenging, especially if you’re unsure of what, or how, to look for them. Searching for unexpected events involves more than just searching for keywords like “error” or “critical”.

Teams switching from a monolithic application architecture to microservices often face a jarring realization: their time-tested troubleshooting techniques don’t work as effectively. A microservice consists of many independent, distributed, and ephemeral services with varying capabilities for monitoring and logging. Techniques such as stack traces are effective troubleshooting tools in monoliths, but only paint a small portion of the big picture in a microservice-based application.

If you’ve visited the SolarWinds® Papertrail™ event viewer this week, you may have noticed it’s roomier. There’s less scrolling needed and more of the log line appears on the screen. You may be wondering what changed. Based on suggestions from user feedback, we streamlined the navigation and tucked it into the top bar. This change lets the logs message fill the entire screen width and lets you see more of the log message, with less scrolling.

At SolarWinds® Papertrail™, we know that when you’re combing through lines and lines of long event messages, every pixel matters. That’s why in the new Papertrail event viewer, we introduced the ability to hide the application chrome. Hiding the application chrome, or ‘presentation mode,’ removes the header and navigation menus and maximizes your screen real estate. So far the feedback on this new option has been great.