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    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)

    Zabbix

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AZabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.N/A
    Pricing
    GraylogIBM InstanaZabbix
    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)
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    GraylogIBM InstanaZabbix
    Free Trial
    NoYesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    GraylogIBM InstanaZabbix
    Considered Multiple Products
    Graylog
    Chose Graylog
    Graylog has the simplest deployment, and it is ready to work in a few clicks. Although we also use Grafana and Zabbix in our environment, the role of processing log data is better suited to Graylog. In our case, we use Graylog to process and analyze web application logs, such …
    Incentivized
    IBM
    Chose IBM Instana
    because of support and better agents for non containeraized workloads, virtual machines and lpars
    Incentivized
    Zabbix
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    86%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    61 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    15 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    86%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    53 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    15 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    7 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    61 Answers
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    14 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    83%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    40 Answers
    90%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    9 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    83%
    Implementation went as expected
    5 Answers
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    47 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    Features
    GraylogIBM InstanaZabbix
    Monitoring Tasks
    Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of Graylog and IBM Instana and Zabbix
    Feature
    Graylog
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Instana
    7.6
    3 Ratings
    9% below category average
    Zabbix
    -
    Ratings
    Remote monitoring00 Ratings9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network device monitoring00 Ratings5.54 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multiple Server Monitoring00 Ratings8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multi-device monitoring00 Ratings5.54 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automated alerts and notifications00 Ratings9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
    Management Tasks
    Comparison of Management Tasks features of Graylog and IBM Instana and Zabbix
    Feature
    Graylog
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Instana
    5.5
    1 Ratings
    23% below category average
    Zabbix
    -
    Ratings
    Software and hardware inventory00 Ratings6.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based automation00 Ratings4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting
    Comparison of Reporting features of Graylog and IBM Instana and Zabbix
    Feature
    Graylog
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Instana
    6.5
    3 Ratings
    20% below category average
    Zabbix
    -
    Ratings
    Performance data reports00 Ratings8.34 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable reporting00 Ratings4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data visualization00 Ratings8.83 Ratings00 Ratings
    Risk analysis00 Ratings4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    GraylogIBM InstanaZabbix
    Small Businesses
    SolarWinds Papertrail
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score7.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server
    Score8.1 out of 10
    LogicMonitor
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Icinga
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SolarWinds Loggly
    Score7.7 out of 10
    ManageEngine Site24x7
    Score10 out of 10
    HPE OneView
    Score6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    GraylogIBM InstanaZabbix
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (8 ratings)
    7.8
    (60 ratings)
    8.3
    (28 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    8.6
    (4 ratings)
    Support Rating
    3.6
    (3 ratings)
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    GraylogIBM InstanaZabbix
    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
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    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
    Zabbix
    Zabbix is great for monitoring your servers and seeing alerts when the system uses too much CPU or memory. This allowed the system Engineer to be proactive and add resources to these systems to avoid interrupting the services. Especially servers running operations applications and services. This is one of the best usages for Zabbix.
    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
    Zabbix
    • Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
    • Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
    • Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
    • Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
    • Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    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
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    Zabbix
    • Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
    • More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
    • The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Zabbix
    It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    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
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    Zabbix
    I think every organization, especially the IT department, needs a tool like this. I know of another product like Zabbix that gives a similar or the same solution, but its range makes it very useful. You can see almost all the device info in one place: disk usage, disk space, network usage, etc.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    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
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    Zabbix
    The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Graylog
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Zabbix
    We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    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
    Zabbix
    We're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process. Zabbix is a way more flexible and has free integrations to a wide range of technologies. It is also more 'user friendly' and easy to manage.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    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
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    Zabbix
    • Good ROI when trying to get ahead of network related problems instead of waiting for users to complain
    • Good ROI when doing upgrades or exploratory work on a neglected network
    • Good ROI when showing usage trends to management showing higher actual usage versus what was thought to be happening
    Read full review
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