title: Which tool to collect and display application traces and exceptions?
body: <p>We're developping a big Java application and starting to set up application monitoring, because we're detecting problems too late, and because parsing log files is boring.</p>
  
  <p>We already set up a POC on Graphite and JMXTrans. 
  It's working fine and we're starting to have some interesting graphs.</p>
  
  <p>But I'm now wondering if we should use graphs for everything we'd like to trace. I think it would be fine to have messages somewhere, and basically, I'd like to go in log file only as a last chance to debug a problem. If I'm getting exceptions in production, I'd like to be warned automatically and know what's the problem is about. </p>
  
  <p>I found <a href="http://sentry.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html" rel="nofollow">Sentry</a> which is a webapp that collects traces from clients, and <a href="https://github.com/etsy/logster" rel="nofollow">logster</a>, that parses log files and send lines matching some patterns to Graphite. </p>
  
  <p>I think the philosophy of the first one is better. Basically, I'd like to dissociate what is traced from how it's going to be traced. We could use a logging facade like SLF4J, and then dispatch traces according to levels or some others rules (patterns in exception for instances) to log files, a NoSQLDB, dedicated tools like Sentry or Graphite, etc.</p>
  
  <p>So basically,what are you using for application monitoring?</p>