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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Splunk SOAR
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Splunk now offers a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform via its acquisition of Phantom. Splunk Security Orchestration and Automation (Splunk SOAR) provides playbook automation and is available as a standalone solution.
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.
Our company has very complex and dynamic security operations because of the large number of security tools and systems that we need to manage and coordinate. Moreover, it helps us to meet many regulatory and compliance requirements because it helps us to automate and document our security operations. We also use it to streamline our security operations and improve our response to potential threats.
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).
A lack of instruction It can be difficult to contact the support staff. Limited experience from current users.
It takes some effort to set up and learn new technology at first. More assistance is required from the support staff. The product's price needs to go down.
As we already have a lot of clients being catered with Splunk SOAR and because Splunk SOAR is robust and efficient, we are already using it, and we have understood the product to a certain extent, I feel we are personally more enticed to use and scale it to a lot of business.
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.
Building playbooks through the visual editor is fine for basic tasks, but once you start chaining complex logic or integrating 3rd party APIs you hit a wall that requires deep scripting knowledge.
We are able to automate almost every one of our use cases, even our threat-hunting, and threat intel procedures. We have 20+ playbooks and cover almost everything, even searching logs into Splunk, looking into TIP and external systems, enrichment, and collecting evidence for analysts; it can perform concurrent playbooks running.
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.
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.
Splunk Phantom integrates well with Splunk ES and has many integrations. One thing that I liked about XSOAR as compared to Phantom is that it has an "app-store" where you can download not only app integrations (similar to Phantom) but Playbooks and dashboards as well.
The playbooks are valuable. They are the core component. Being able to implement and build a code process to work through and scale out what we want to do is valuable
Before its use, analyzing each email would take at least 15 to 20 minutes, with some complex cases taking up to 30 minutes...With the automation provided by Splunk Phantom, we could significantly reduce the amount of time and human effort required to complete this task
