Graylog, 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
SolarWinds Loggly
Score 9.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Loggly is a cloud-based log management service provider. It does not require the use of proprietary software agents to collect log data. The service uses open source technologies, including ElasticSearch, Apache Lucene 4 and Apache Kafka.
$79
per month/billed annually
Pricing
Graylog
SolarWinds Loggly
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$79
per month/billed annually
Pro
$159
per month/billed annually
Enterprise
$279
per month/billed annually
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Graylog
SolarWinds Loggly
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Free trial for Standard and Pro plans for 14 days with all features.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Graylog
SolarWinds Loggly
Considered Both Products
Graylog
No answer on this topic
SolarWinds Loggly
Verified User
Engineer
Chose SolarWinds Loggly
Price and ease of deployment were huge factors in our decision to use Loggly. Loggly is actually within reach for most companies while also being very easy to setup. Elasticsearch, for instance, had wildly outdated documentation when I was previewing all these tools so I was …
Graylog would also have met our requirements, but since we then needed to run a virtual machine (with huge disk space) and also needed more work for setup and maintenance, our calculations resulted in Loggly being more cost effective. Icinga is not made for log file monitoring …
SolarWinds Loggly integrates well with other SOlarWinds products, and that is ultimately why we chose to use Loggly. LogDNA was fine for our needs, but costly for only providing logging.
Loggly was a mistake. We selected it to get a cheap vendor-hosted solution up and running quickly but have come to regret the decision and should have spent the effort to set up the right tool from the beginning.
We chose Loggly because we found it to be a good balance between costs, functionality, and available documentation/integrations. Logentries and PaperTrail were pretty closely tied for second place at the time. All 3 of the main contenders have been bought out by other companies …
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.
SolarWinds Loggly is great for capturing and organizing logs from 3rd party sources such as NGINX. Without SolarWinds Loggly it's really difficult to manage the logs overtime, find traffic patterns, and identify issues before they become a problem. Anyone who is routinely searching through massive log files could quickly benefit from the SolarWinds Loggly and it's capabilities.
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).
Putting our logs in one place and making them searchable. We use AWS, and CloudWatch has always been a little frustrating in this regard (though it has gotten better recently).
Deriving metrics from our logs. I think log-based metrics is such a good idea because your logs are the ultimate source for truth in regards to what the hell is going on inside your app. I have really loved the simplicity with which I can just count certain statements and call that a metric because just through the normal course of development certain log statements just naturally become a straightforward recording of an event having occurred.
Alerts. I actually have a few complaints about email alerts, but just the way I was able to set them up so easily has been huge. Since we started using Loggly, there have been at least 3 bugs that Loggly exposed that were frankly very bad. And withoutt Loggly or without a user reporting them, we would have never known they were happening! This is stuff I tried to set up in CloudWatch in various ways, but because of my own ignorance or perhaps the complexity/limitations of CloudWatch (or the complexity of my stack?), I wasn't getting the information that I needed until I was able to just tell Loggly to send me an email whenever the word "error" showed up.
We have to use a log aggregating device to ship our logs to Loggly as our network devices can not connect on an encrypted protocol. I would prefer if we could use some sort of VPN-based connector to ship logs securely.
Sometimes when drilled down, it can be difficult to fully reset a search term to back all the way out of a drill down.
Loggly's easy setup, very good customer support, and intuitive interface make Loggly very easy to use. User access management is also very easy as we can tailor the experience for each of our developers to access the information they need without having to wade through other information. While there was a slight learning curve in how to view the logs the way some specifically wanted, everything was possible and quite easy to do.
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.
The support team have been great when we have logged tickets or had issues, most of the time it is down to user training, however we have had a couple of bugs that they have been able to iron out for us.
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.
We were using Zabbix. While it is an open-source solution that you can install for free the following things were limitations of the solution. 1) The scale and uptime of the solution are now your own problem. Since we were hosting at AWS this meant we still had a cost of the AWS solution. 2) The product is complicated from a configuration standpoint. In order to get anything meaningful out of it, you had to invest a lot of time and effort. We did consider NewRelic. I have experience with that product and do think that it is a solid alternative. Ultimately experience with the simplicity and speed of deployment with Loggly encouraged me to suggest using this again.
Graylog is just less expensive than some other options which meant it fit into our budget otherwise we might not be able to justify a higher cost.
Being able to track issues that we normally couldn't track using other tools is a bonus to help us know of any issues we have and can fix before an outage or failure that could potentially cost money.
We have had to spend more time than I would like to understand and customize Graylog which has taken time away from other tasks and projects.
Unfortunately, we hit our logging cap on a weekly basis and we lose logs after that.
We have lost logs after hitting the maximum during service outages. We have become accustomed to not being able to rely on having them, then things go poorly.
