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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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Score 8.1 out of 10
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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
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Pricing
Graylog
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Graylog
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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SAM pricing starts at $2,995.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Graylog
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Features
Graylog
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
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.
For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
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).
Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.
We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.
Graylog is easy to deploy. The tricky part is to configure all hosts that are going to send their log data to Graylog, considering the retention period of this data, it will need a lot of disk space to store it. Its rotation works fine. It is very simple to navigate and explore the data you send to it, and very easy to filter and export them too.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.
The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.
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.
I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.
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.
It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.
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.
Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time.
We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting.
