IBM Cloud is deprecating Kibana as a method to view Cloud Foundry logs. Moving forward, they are recommending LogDNA as a 3rd-party service. That’s cool. The process of logging Cloud Foundry is simple enough anyway.

With the general CF CLI, you would:

  1. Create a user-provided service with cf cups DRAIN-NAME -l SYSLOG-URL.
  2. Bind an app to the created service instance with name DRAIN-NAME as follows cf bind-service APP-NAME DRAIN-NAME.

Simple right? Yea, it’s supposed to, but there was no way I could get this working with LogDNA. After giving up all hope, I tried their support team, LogDNA’s support team since it’s a 3rd-party service. Supposedly I should have gotten an e-mail or a ticket 2 days ago. Nope, nothing yet.

A Google Search revealed Papertrail. Their free plan gives you live preview, 7-day archive, 48-hour search and alerting. Compared to LogDNA on IBM Cloud, that sort of deal starts at $1.50USD/GB-month. That’s insanely good with Papertrail!

Setting up with Papertrail was simple and straightforward. Those 2 commands above; Cloud Foundry on IBM Cloud, Papertrail receiving the logs with no fuss!