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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Nagios Log Server
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Nagios Log Server provides centralized log management, monitoring and analysis software.
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.
Nagios Log Server facilitates the ability to search all entries of logs in a quick and easy way. Beyond that, it has allowed us to configure alerts for notification when there are potential threats (may they be security threats or only application-side problems), and to filter the data for audits and compliance.
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).
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.
Nagios support is decent. Nothing bad to say about them, but nothing extraordinary too. We mostly asked them questions instead of actively asking them to change or fix things for us. The response time is OK, commonly you can get a response in the same day. You can also call, but they are available only during US office hours.
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.
Windows Event Log doesn't have 10% of the capabilities of Nagios Log Server. No real-time alerts, no scheduling, no external plugins or APIs. Nothing. The only advantage is that it is a native Windows application.
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.
