Graylog vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

If you already have a basic understanding of Elasticsearch and/or MongoDB, Graylog will be a great fit when it comes to log aggregation. It will be a decent option even if you don't have any experience but have the time and willingness to roll up your sleeves that learning those tools will require. Graylog supports plugins to extend functionality for things like SNMP traps, telemetry collection, and solar flares. As is the case with most software with plugins, if the core functionality for which you are looking (i.e. not logging) is based on a plugin, Graylog probably isn't for you. The majority of the plugins in the marketplace are developed by third-parties looking to solve their specific use case so bug fixes and new features are not a given.

Incentivized

Solarwinds SEM is great for generating reports for investigation purposes. Once you set up the connectors you can walk away and the product runs without needing maintenance. It was however pretty difficult to create the reports and alerts when now starting out and it can be very intimidating for new users.

Incentivized

• Very fast process of hugh amounts of information
• Easy to built dashboards with rich visual display
• Intuitive filter string auto-complete
• Alerts based on differents scenarios and triggers

Incentivized

• SolarWinds easily provides the much needed visibily into changes in an Active Directory (AD) environment. Email alerting can be configured to alert a team if an account is locked out, disabled by another users, or if users and/or computers accounts are created.
• SolarWinds allowed a searchable audit feature. Microsoft Windows can be configured to log many different parts of a system, but search those logs can be difficult. SEM allows you to search for specific users or events.

Incentivized

• Configuration can be hard to understand
• More quickly and easy ways to search for data
• Auto-categorization of log entries would be excellent

Incentivized

• Compared to other SIEMs, there are features that are missing. Machine learning, automatic event correlation, ability to correlate multiple sources together.
• The UI is clunky, and the *New* event log analyzer page felt really disjointed from the rest of the product.
• In my experience, the dashboards were almost unusable. They persisted across login per device, and even then they sometimes would reset and go back to the ''Getting Started'' look.

Incentivized

It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM

Incentivized

Graylog is more on the technical side of user interface, with a steep learning curve that can be challenging for non-tech people. Once its logic is understood, however, its great to use and people have no issues to find the information they need. It's configuration is also not that easy, however this we consider impossible to avoid in spite of the type of service it does

Incentivized

It is very good - but you get what you pay for. The intent is not for a Fortune 500 that needs more "heavy lifting" with SolarWinds Security Event Manager & for whom the price tag is not (much of) a consideration.

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

The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material.

Incentivized

Azure Monitor is not exactly what I mean, but I couldn't find Azure Application Insights. Anyway, for a large organization, Azure makes more sense than using Graylog because a lot of logging will already be inside Azure. And you don't want to have two "central" logging locations. But Azure is chaos and highly "not intuitive." So for small and mid-size organizations, Graylog is still the better option.

Incentivized

The compare well against the others - the pricing models for all but Splunk (free version) are based on EPS/TB consumed... the problem they pose is guesstimating the price tag per month. SolarWinds Security Event Manager gets around that.

Incentivized

• Able to offer monitoring services to new and existing clients to increase revenue
• Staff have increased billing percentage
• Potential to expand security services

Incentivized

• It saves a lot of time when we had issues trying to figure out where the user account lockout was coming from.
• With it being an affordable SIEM, we are able to have the ability to do the actions associated with a SIEM and the advantages of not “breaking the bank account”.

Incentivized