I’m starting development of a new product for which I will need to log a lot of data (i.e. 1 data operation every second. (Yes, I realize this is a ton of data. Thankfully, I currently have plenty (millions) of excess data operations on my account) using a Particle M-SoM (DeviceOS 6.3.3) and transmit that data back to my office over a cell connection. The exact format of this data has yet to be determined. Thus, for now, I would like to simply use the built in Particle logger and manually inspect the data logs as things are being developed. The RemoteLogRK library seems like the perfect solution to my problem. However, from what I can tell Papertrail no longer supports unencrypted UDP connections (the instructions are outdated - Papertrail no longer provides a server and port and instead requires auth tokens, etc.). This caused me to have several questions which I will ask here:
Should I be using unencrypted UDP? Obviously security is important/preferred, but perhaps not required during testing/development. I will need to send a lot of data so the lower overhead of UDP is preferred.
Can a Particle M-SoM even handle the overhead of encrypting/sending packets once per second?
If I can’t use Papertrail due to their updated requirements, which alternative would you recommend that is compatible with the RemoteLogRK library? Or is there un updated library I could look at instead?
One thing I forgot to address. With UDP packet delivery is not guaranteed. This is somewhat acceptable for what I’m doing, but if there is a way to use the RemoteLogRK library while ensuring every single log is delivered, that would be much preferred.
As far as I can tell SolarWinds PaperTrail still works with UDP. I use it for all of my devices, and it's still working. The instructions for configuring it are still here: How to Configure Remote Syslog. In the new Solarwinds Papertrail user interface, at the top of live log view is +Setup Logging and you can set up port logging there.
However, the RemoteLogRK library works with any UDP syslog service. I quick search turned up several options, but I haven't tried any of them.
Just got a response from Papertrail’s customer service team. Here is their response:
“Just so you’re aware, Papertrail has reached its end of life, and all Papertrail users are being moved over to SolarWinds Observability Logs (the platform your trial account is on now). That’s why things may look a bit different from the older Papertrail documentation.”
Rick, it sounds like you have a legacy papertrail account, but new papertrail accounts are now redirected to a different service that doesn’t support UDP.
I guess I’ll need to find a new cloud based UDP syslog service. Does anyone have any recommendations for something simple and cheap?
I did have a legacy Papertrail account, but think I'm accessing it from Solarwinds Observability now. Click on Getting Started in the upper left then Log Sources - Add Logs. The port option is still there and if you click through UDP Plain Text is as well.
But there are no other options to choose from. I tried using http://syslog.collector.na-01.cloud.solarwinds.com/ as the host name and 6514 as the port, but I see no option to specify the incoming IP address. Nor do I know what that would be for for a cell connection. Furthermore, it looks like the new observability account requires an auth token.
I really don’t think the UDP option exists for new users. I would love to use papertrail as it seems like the simplest and cheapest option after doing some research, but I’m not seeing a way forward. What am I missing?
For those coming after me, Rick’s RemoteLogRK library does support publishing via Particle webhooks which can still be connected to Papertrail via TCP with an auth token etc.
UDP as shown in the tutorial is no longer available for new Papertrail users.
