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 organizations that need to centralize different types of logging across integration, qa, sandbox and production environments. Would be less impactful for organizations that don't have complex logging needs.
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 Providing in-depth insights A related content feature which really helps us to figure out which service is breaking the infrastructure. The Log explorer which helps us to explore the entire log and pin point the errors/issues. Fast and powerful log investigation 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 Integrating the system with Slack channels Saving the logs in different cloud provider Viewing the logs at more fine grained level based on user roles and permissions Read full review Likelihood to Renew I'm a Splunk specialist, and I'm involved in its use and improvement.
Read full review Usability It gives access to data features for every level of users: from managers and executives to Analysts, each one with the correct level of observation and analysis.
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 Splunk support is very quick and efficient. Pre-sale specialists are very skilled and available.
Read full review Implementation Rating Follow a training before starting.
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 I had not considered other products because Splunk Log Observer was in use in my company before I started working there.
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 Significantly reduced the MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), which in turn has improved the end-user experience tremendously. Meets compliance requirements of security policies, audit, regulation, and forensics. Helps us to track/manage the resource usage on our cloud instances which has a direct implication on the recurring cost. Read full review ScreenShots