Graylog vs. PaperTrail

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

It is very easy to use. We utilize it to save and show the logs for as many apps as we want. You can use it as an addon on Heroku.

Incentivized

• 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

• PaperTrail is less expensive than many of its competitors.
• PaperTrail is very easy to set up; you can start collecting logs in no time.
• It is easy to configure email alerts and Slack integrations with PaperTrail.

Incentivized

• Support for more log sources
• Event alerts/emails - Some cases where unable to separate data from multiple clients, and no easy fix
• API - Limits results to 10,000 and can cause server to lockup on queries that exceed the limit

Incentivized

• Interface is aging and in need of a re-write. It's functional, but not all that nice to work with
• While the logs are near-real-time, they could greatly improve the speed at which logs are available in the UI
• Pricing plans are not all that competitive with newer offerings with other companies

Incentivized

PaperTrail has become a basic app for me to save and see app logs. It is very easy to use, very intuitive and easy to customize. The feature I like most is that we can use it with several apps at same time.

Incentivized

PaperTrail's live-tailing performance is adequate and searches over the recent history load quickly. Searching over long periods of time can be extremely slow, however.

Incentivized

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

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

I only used Logz.io for a very brief time. It seemed a bit more difficult to setup than Papertrail.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Free plan is sufficient for development and small services, and the paid plans are very cheap at low log volume. For us, the price is right with PaperTrail - though I can't speak to how their pricing compares at very high volumes.
• Adding cloud-logging to your apps can really speed up development and debugging - the impact to engineering productivity cannot be understated.

Incentivized