[freehunter]

Seconding Papertrail. I don't love it but it works and it's cheap enough and I don't need to love every tool I use.

I do constantly wonder if there's a logging/searching solution small and lightweight enough to fit on the cheapest DO droplet. $7/gb/mo on Papertrail vs $5/mo with a 25GB SSD? That'd be a no-brainer, but ELK and Graylog won't run with that low of hardware.

[RhodesianHunter]

Depends on how risky you're willing to be with your log data. Something like what you're describing could lose all of your data with a single instance or hard drive failure while a saas like Paper trail has your data replicated across data centers.