Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Q3 was a big quarter for Papertrail. You can now ask questions about your logs in plain English, explore structured logs by field, inspect any single log event in detail, and archive to your own S3 bucket with a setup that keeps you in control of access. We also shipped a round of smaller improvements that make sending logs and searching them faster and smoother. Here is a quick overview. The two Preview features have their own deep-dive articles, linked below.

Open the Dashboard Library on a Logs stack that already receives Nginx logs and a few cards come up ticked with a green Data detected badge. Others in the same pack sit there unticked. That isn't random. Before it shows you anything, the Library checks what your stack actually holds and pre-selects only the dashboards it expects to fill.

We set out to understand how customers were using Coralogix from outside the web app. Olly answers questions about a system in plain language. Coding agents query logs, examine traces, read metrics and configure the platform through the Coralogix CLI and MCP server. We wanted to see how much of this was becoming part of everyday work. In the week of 20–26 October, 39% of Coralogix sessions included Olly, the CLI or MCP.

From the first alert to the root cause, without leaving the page. TL;DR: Investigating an incident is a series of quick questions, each one leading to the next. Until now, Explore made you stop between questions to translate them into syntax, switch modes or rebuild a chart. The new Explore lets you go straight from one question to the next: one workspace, any dataset, any team, any way you like to ask. Here’s what that looks like on a real night on call.

Open architecture, explainable AI, and full context Elastic was named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave: AIOps Platforms, Q4 2026, which evaluated 10 providers across 24 criteria. Forrester gave Elastic the highest possible scores in five criteria: algorithmic trust and explainability, observability as code (OaC) and GitOps alignment, AI stack and semantic observability, sovereign deployment and data isolation, and pricing flexibility and transparency.

Sending server logs to Papertrail over Syslog takes one setup command, and running it needs admin access: sudo on Linux, or Administrator rights on Windows. If you started a free trial but don’t have that access here are instructions to get your logs flowing. Copy your setup command, send it to a teammate who has admin access using one of the ready-made messages below, and your logs can be streaming in Papertrail within minutes of them running the script. This post walks you through those steps.

Scope: this guide covers tools for tracing and evaluating the LLM apps and agents your team builds. If you also want the second meaning of AI observability, where AI agents investigate production incidents, read our guide to the best AI observability tools of 2026.