My name is Josh Reschke. I am a software engineer and the sole developer behind Trailonix. I never thought I’d end up writing a logging platform, but in my near 10 years of working as a software engineer, just about every job I’ve held had horrible logging habits. Logs were always scattered across random servers—some in files, some in databases, some just > /dev/null. And nobody ever looks at any of those logs. Who would, when you don’t even remember where they are or whether you’re even logging?
Then we had the brilliant idea of “solving” this issue by sending ourselves emails for all these logs we wrote… boy was that the worst idea anyone ever had. Suddenly we were drowning in thousands of emails a day. Nothing is worse than coming into the office in the morning, logging into yo…
My name is Josh Reschke. I am a software engineer and the sole developer behind Trailonix. I never thought I’d end up writing a logging platform, but in my near 10 years of working as a software engineer, just about every job I’ve held had horrible logging habits. Logs were always scattered across random servers—some in files, some in databases, some just > /dev/null. And nobody ever looks at any of those logs. Who would, when you don’t even remember where they are or whether you’re even logging?
Then we had the brilliant idea of “solving” this issue by sending ourselves emails for all these logs we wrote… boy was that the worst idea anyone ever had. Suddenly we were drowning in thousands of emails a day. Nothing is worse than coming into the office in the morning, logging into your computer, and seeing 100+ emails about how “IMAP was unreachable at 2am,” “user didn’t enter 2FA fast enough,” or my personal favorite, “unknown error.” Any actual issues end up buried in the mess and we just completely ignore them, deleting every single email as fast as possible. The only good thing that ever came out of it was “accidentally” deleting that “super important” meeting request.
And the worst part: when you received an alert about a real problem, you were usually already working on it—while hearing ding… ding… ding… as a new alert email arrived every second.
Of course we looked at commercial tools to solve this, but they always seemed to be overkill for something so simple, or so incredibly complicated that it felt like learning a new language when all you wanted to do was insert a damn log. On top of that, they were always way too expensive and somehow had licensing schemes that felt straight out of Microsoft’s darkest timeline.
After a while, it felt like I was just smashing my head against a brick wall.
So I built Trailonix.
What Trailonix Actually Does
Trailonix is, at its core, a log ingestor with flexible alerting. It has one simple API endpoint for consuming logs—clean JSON with optional metadata when you need additional context. That’s it.
{
"eventType": "user_login",
"userId": "user_12345",
"resource": "authentication",
"metadata": {
"login_method": "email",
"success": true,
"mfa_enabled": false,
"session_id": "sess_abc123"
},
"ipAddress": "192.168.1.50",
"userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)",
"createdDate": "2025-11-17T03:24:00Z"
}
If you want to POST a log inside your application—easy. If you want to tail a log file and POST each line—also easy. Auth is a simple API key: one call and you’re in.
Alerts are equally simple:
- Create a rule
- Set conditions and thresholds
- Set a suppression window
- Decide who gets notified Because suppression exists, no more alert fatigue. This setup alone solved most of my problems.
Logging in the Real World Is Way Worse Than Anyone Admits
In my experience, logs are treated like a “break glass in case of emergency” system. Because of that, logs go unseen, unchecked, and forgotten. When you actually need them, nobody remembers where they are or whether they were even working.
Alerting usually goes something like this:
- Monitor everything… just in case
- Generate hundreds of emails
- Immediately start ignoring all of them
- Miss the one alert that actually mattered This is the definition of alert fatigue. When your inbox sounds like a slot machine, you start filtering it out. There’s nothing worse than returning from a long weekend to 300 emails.
Trailonix fixes this because you can:
- Alert only if something happens 5 times in 5 minutes
- Send just 1 alert in a 15-minute window
- Alert only if metadata shows an admin performed the action
- Suppress alerts firing 10 times a second while you fix the issue It completely eliminated alert fatigue for me.
My Home Lab Uses Trailonix and It Works Perfectly
Trailonix runs in my home lab. My setup includes:
- 4 servers
- 5 VMs
- Multiple Docker containers I’ve written simple scripts to tail my syslog and POST each line to Trailonix. I do the same for my game server logs. I’ve added POST calls directly into some of my applications. Because the API is simple, everything about integrating it is easy. No agents, no plugins, none of that junk. This simplicity was deliberate.
A Real Example: Trailonix Warned Me of a Failing Drive Before It Died
This actually happened not long ago. My media server has a 5-drive RAID array. After a while, I started noticing playback degradation and some clearly corrupted media. Everything pointed to a drive issue—but SMART showed nothing, RAID showed nothing, nothing screamed “replace a drive.”
So I wrote a script to pull RAID health and individual drive stats and send them to Trailonix. Immediately, one drive stood out: it had commandTimeouts while the others did not. I added an alert for it and didn’t have to wait long for it to increment.
{
"drives": [
{
"uuid": "ZJV2G3K0",
"model": "ST12000VX0017-2GV116",
"device": "/dev/sdb",
"serial": "ZJV2G3K0",
"temperature": 39,
"commandTimeout": 13
},
...
]
}
CommandTimeout increments are an early warning sign of drive failure—often before SMART errors appear. That alone was enough justification to pull the drive and retire it with dignity (target practice).
Without Trailonix, I would’ve missed this entirely, and the drive would have continued silently corrupting data until total failure.
Simplicity Is a Feature, Not an Accident
Over the years I’ve seen plenty of developers overcomplicate systems simply because they can. Then they wonder why nobody can read their code and why they hit the bug count high score.
To me, simplicity is a philosophy.
Trailonix is intentionally simple—a micro-app that does one thing and does it well:
- Collect logs
- Let you search & download logs
- Alert you when something matters No bloated dashboards. No irrelevant metrics. No feature creep.
Simple systems are easier to manage and easier to trust. I’d argue they’re more powerful because you actually use them.
And simple doesn’t mean insecure—data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and passwords/tokens/secrets are encrypted.
The Nerd Stuff - The Stack
Here’s the fun part:
- Backend: C# — extremely fast, async-first, and I’ve used it for over a decade.
- Frontend: Angular — powerful, familiar, and reliable.
- Database: PostgreSQL — because it’s awesome.
- Hosting: DigitalOcean — simple, stable, and scalable. We store logs in a monthly partitioned table. Anything older than 90 days is offloaded to S3 (DigitalOcean Spaces) as daily CSVs.
Vertical scaling is a single click. Horizontal load balancing is planned for the future, but there’s no point in overcomplicating things yet.
Why Postgres? I spent years in MySQL and hated it. I tried Postgres out of curiosity and immediately loved how powerful, fast, and flexible it was. Partitioning + indexing + S3 cold storage gives me the best of both worlds: fast queries and cheap long-term storage.
If your interested in a deep dive of our stack, check out the stack post.
What Trailonix Is Not
Yeah, I built it and I’d love for you to use it, but this part matters:
- It’s not trying to replace Datadog, Splunk, or the other giants
- It’s not an APM
- It’s not a metrics/analytics system
- It’s not built for enterprises with compliance requirements (yet) Trailonix is for:
- Home labs
- Small to medium-sized apps/businesses
- Anyone who wants simple centralized logging Trailonix can scale, but the goal isn’t to chase massive enterprise customers that require every compliance under the sun. The goal is to stay simple and if you want simple, give it a try. If you need more than Trailonix offers, use the big guys—no offense taken.
I Built Trailonix Because It Solved My Problems. I Made It Public Because I Can’t Be the Only One
I use Trailonix daily. Even if I don’t log into the interface, I rest easy knowing it’s watching my logs and will let me know when something actually happens.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “yeah, that sounds like my setup,” then you’re exactly the person I built this for.
What’s Coming Next
A few things on the roadmap:
- Alerting rules on arrays inside metadata
- Alerts for things that don’t happen (missing heartbeat/health checks)
- A real-time log tailer in the UI
- More QoL improvements without adding complexity No bloat. No feature creep. Just focus.
The Team
While I’m the sole developer who built Trailonix, we do have three others worth mentioning. Austin is our systems manager—he’s the guy you blame when servers go down. Conor is our business manager—he handles what call “Conor work”. Jacob is my brother, who recently started his development journey and has been shadowing me on new features.
If you want “what happens when something explodes,” see the backups and disaster recovery post.
If you’re still reading, thank you. And if you try Trailonix, we’d love your feedback.