TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Graylog

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AGraylog, headquartered in Houston, offers their eponymous platform for centralized log management that helps users find meaning in data faster so as to take action immediately. Graylog is available via Enterprise and Cloud plans, but also has a Small Business Plan, and an Open (free) plan with limited features.N/A

    IBM Instana

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/AInstana, an IBM company since the December 2020 acquisition, provides APM services for SOA, microservices, containerized applications and Kubernetes, and cloud native applications, as well as discovery and monitoring for IT assets.

    $75

    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)

    Pricing
    GraylogIBM Instana
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Essentials
    $20
    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
    Standard
    $75
    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
    Self-Hosted
    $93.80
    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    GraylogIBM Instana
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    GraylogIBM Instana
    Monitoring Tasks
    Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of Graylog and IBM Instana
    Feature
    Graylog
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Instana
    7.6
    3 Ratings
    9% below category average
    Remote monitoring00 Ratings9.14 Ratings
    Network device monitoring00 Ratings5.54 Ratings
    Multiple Server Monitoring00 Ratings8.94 Ratings
    Multi-device monitoring00 Ratings5.54 Ratings
    Automated alerts and notifications00 Ratings9.14 Ratings
    Management Tasks
    Comparison of Management Tasks features of Graylog and IBM Instana
    Feature
    Graylog
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Instana
    5.5
    1 Ratings
    23% below category average
    Software and hardware inventory00 Ratings6.42 Ratings
    Policy-based automation00 Ratings4.52 Ratings
    Reporting
    Comparison of Reporting features of Graylog and IBM Instana
    Feature
    Graylog
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Instana
    6.5
    3 Ratings
    20% below category average
    Performance data reports00 Ratings8.34 Ratings
    Customizable reporting00 Ratings4.52 Ratings
    Data visualization00 Ratings8.83 Ratings
    Risk analysis00 Ratings4.52 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    GraylogIBM Instana
    Small Businesses
    SolarWinds Papertrail
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score7.6 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server
    Score8.1 out of 10
    LogicMonitor
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SolarWinds Loggly
    Score7.7 out of 10
    ManageEngine Site24x7
    Score10 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    GraylogIBM Instana
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (8 ratings)
    7.8
    (60 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    3.6
    (3 ratings)
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    GraylogIBM Instana
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Graylog
    For small companies, Graylog is the best solution possible. It's easy to configure and "just works." Above everything else, it's free. The only thing I hold against it is the fact that it's Linux-based. [This] makes sense because Elasticsearch is Linux-based. But Linux adds a layer of complexity that we don't need for something basic as a logging server. I'm pretty sure that we would have had a logging server years earlier if I had to convince quite a few decision-making people to go ahead with it anyway.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Well-suited for an org with a large application base, where many microservices are created and destroyed daily. IBM Instana doesn't require any manual configuration, so deploying the Instana agents takes very little time. Data capture from IBM Instana is highly granular and can detect even short spikes lasting a few seconds. Not suitable for legacy applications where there will be rarely any changes. They can use a simpler monitoring mechanism. Also, highly dense data capturing can sometimes overload the information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Graylog
    • Graylog does a great job of its core function: log aggregation, retention, and searching.
    • Graylog has a very flexible configuration. The backend for storage is Elasticsearch and MongoDB is used to store the configuration. You have to option to make your configuration as simple as possible by storing everything on one box, or you can scale everything out horizontally by using a cluster of Elasticsearch nodes and MongoDB servers with several Graylog servers pointed to all the necessary nodes.
    • Graylog does a good job of abstracting away a fair portion of Elasticsearch index management (sharding, creation, deletion, rotation, etc).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • Can monitor application(s) and system(s) with very large throughput of transactions by the second ( it gets everything !!!)
    • Provide strong drill down for your applications and will tell you where the points of failure of an application's is ( servers , network , Databases , etc you name it )
    • Very easy to set up and have it up and running when using the SaaS solution. There's an on premise solution which works just as well but requires more effort and preparation from an infrastructure point of view for your teams to implement.
    • Continuously improve their features and their agents auto-update and keep up. All while not interfering with your applications.
    • Let's you create your own dashboards and visualizations that can be tailored for different kind of users with the data collected.
    • Create your own events and smart alerts so you can know on the spot if something is happening or is likely to happen that needs addressing on your applications / systems
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Graylog
    • Configuration can be hard to understand
    • More quickly and easy ways to search for data
    • Auto-categorization of log entries would be excellent
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • It's very difficult to create custom dashboards, only a handful of scenarios can be visualized to dashboards.
    • Extracting information from Instana to further analysis into excel for example is something that can be improved. Using an API to get data is very limiting.
    • Open telemetry features which allow to send application data to Instana is not working as documented.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Graylog
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    Instana has been able to fulfill our all requirement and provide out of box solution for multiple component like AWS RDS Monitoring and real time alerting setup on basis of that. it is also easy to integrate with other open-source alerting and monitoring tools which makes it easier to incorporate into our solutions
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Graylog
    Graylog is easy to deploy. The tricky part is to configure all hosts that are going to send their log data to Graylog, considering the retention period of this data, it will need a lot of disk space to store it. Its rotation works fine. It is very simple to navigate and explore the data you send to it, and very easy to filter and export them too.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    IBM Instana totally alters our monitoring approach since it increases the stability of the system and simplifies the process of problem solving. And since it helps to lower the degree of alert exhaustion that we experience, it is a total game changer for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Graylog
    Community support does not give simple straightforward answers; simply search up Graylog Issues and look at some of the responses on the forums. The documentation is your only hope if you are on the free version, as you can NOT purchase only support. The few times I have worked with Graylog Enterprise support they were great though.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    IBM instana support team is good but when we ask them for support, they keep asking same thing again and again and mostly there is no solution
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Graylog
    In terms of log aggregation, the free product fully stacks up with the competitors listed. Full control over the data ingests for flexible configuration. Graylog even better on that front than AlienVault USM because you cannot configure the variable mapping. We haven't used the threat exchange stuff or correlation. But with regex searches, we have created function dashboards that show threat theater pictures of our network based on logs from our firewall.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Instana is much more robust and modern compared to our previous product which was AppDynamics. We compared Dynatrace and Datadog and they were very similar in many aspects. The licensing simplicity with Instana and our existing relationship with IBM made it a much more enticing option and accelerated the adoption timeline
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Graylog
    • Able to offer monitoring services to new and existing clients to increase revenue
    • Staff have increased billing percentage
    • Potential to expand security services
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • Increase up time by early failure identification and performance optimization based on findings in Instana.
    • Enhance user experience by mapping user issues with backend failures
    • Automated actions help fixing known issues without human intervention
    • increase support team efficiency by root cause analysis which decrease the incident solving time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots