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.
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Microsoft Sentinel
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Microsoft Sentinel (formerly Azure Sentinel) is designed as a birds-eye view across the enterprise. It is presented as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.
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.
Specifically for Microsoft Sentinel, it's going to have what's next to no value if you're not on Azure. You have to be in as your customer. If you want greater insight into what is going on in your cloud environment, turn Microsoft Sentinel on, but focus on where you enable it. You're not going to turn it on to see everything because it's not like focus on the areas where you are at risk or you believe you're at risk or something that you're, depending on your environment, do you have multiple subscriptions? Do you have a Microsoft Sentinel subscription that you just turned on, but it's not getting the visibility, and then you can alert on stuff that goes out of trend, etc.?
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).
Strong integration with the Microsoft security ecosystem allows seamless connection to services such as Microsoft Defender, Microsoft 365, and Azure. This makes it easy to bring together identity, endpoint, and cloud signals to support investigation and detection scenarios.
Effective correlation of alerts and incidents in collaboration with Microsoft Defender XDR helps combine related signals into higher‑fidelity incidents. This reduces noise and improves visibility into attack context, making investigations more efficient.
High scalability for data ingestion and processing enables large volumes of security telemetry to be handled efficiently.
I think it's primarily going to be cost, since Microsoft Sentinel uses Microsoft Log Analytics as its base, right? So storing the logs and log retention is very expensive. That might result in users not adopting it as quickly. Second, I think Copilot for security can just do summarization and not many remediation tasks. In the future, we would like to see Copilot create many playbooks, including all box playbooks, to remediate many security issues.
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.
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.
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.
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.
Microsoft Sentinel excels in cloud-native scalability, Microsoft ecosystem integration, and AI-driven threat detection with UEBA and Fusion rules, offering faster deployment and lower costs (48% cheaper per Forrester) than Splunk, QRadar, Exabeam, SentinelOne, Securonix, and Wazuh. It lags in third-party integrations and syslog parsing. Organizations choose Microsoft Sentinel for its cost-effectiveness, automation, and Microsoft synergy, especially in Azure-heavy environments, though Splunk and Exabeam lead in flexibility and UEBA, respectively.
As any cybersecurity product, this has to be more with risk to avoid loss in case of a ransomware that more than relate to a productivity increase. Maybe the impact could be that instead of having people that are checking 24/7 the dashboard, you could implement Sentinel and have less people checking that or people with less expertise. So the saving will be a minor but will be a saving in the cost of your team.
