Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Great for standard web application performance monitoring, analytics and error reporting. Shows line level code errors, gives insight into performance issues (plugins, API issues, etc.). Automation and scheduled scanning in production gives client visibility into 'after deployment' value. Also lets a relatively small number of developers keep tabs on a handful of different site/applications without needing a bunch of tools. The UI is pretty complicated and can be overwhelming for new users. Documentation could be better for the learning curve,
Read full review Pros 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). Read full review Great web interface. Lots of data available in a really clean format, with filtering options and more. Per-user exception tracking. User is complaining about something being broken? Look up their account ID in Sentry and you can see if they've run into any exceptions (with device information included, of course). Source map uploading. Took a little while to figure this out but now we have our deploy script upload sourcemaps to Sentry on each deployment, meaning we get to see stack traces that aren't obfuscated! Very generous free tier – 10,000 events per month. We're nowhere near that yet. Read full review Cons 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 Read full review Alert Configuration. Would be really helpful to have multiple logical groupings within the "If" section of a single configurable alert. Alert Copying. Being able to copy an alert from one project to another would be super beneficial. Alert Tags. Better UI around how we select which tags are getting sent with each alert instead of a tiny text box. Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We used
Rollbar but didn't like the configuration its not easy. And also doesn't support wide features like Sentry although its a cheaper option but doesn't have the dash-boarding like Sentry and its was not easy to integrate webhooks for different purposes. Somehow many people in company where not able to understand
Rollbar dashboard who were very much used to Sentry.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review It helped stabilize our system in the beginning We had to take it down later due to internal reasons and majorly because of cost-cutting process If someone has a unstable system and have no way to figure out what to do, can use sentry at least temporarily along with some other APM to fix their system faster Read full review ScreenShots