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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Retrace
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Retrace (formerly APM+) is a lightweight Application Performance Management solution. Retrace gives developers continuous, real-time analysis through a combination of code-level visibility with in-line log and error data. Retrace helps identify top performance offenders by analyzing top page requests, top SQL queries, and top external web services.
$99
up to 3 servers, 500,000 traces, and 1,000,000 logs
Pricing
Graylog
Retrace
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essentials
$99
up to 3 servers, 500,000 traces, and 1,000,000 logs
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.
If I need to change a logo design on the invoice, the new logo is slightly larger or smaller so the type below the logo is in a different area than before. In this case, you would need to load the new version of the document into APM Plus and redo the mapping of the field areas to properly grab the information needed to process the document. Without doing this, the document could fail or go to the wrong archive based on the fields.
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).
To set up the fields that APM Plus monitors, you need to map each field area on each document.
APM Plus could use a way to link the documents back into the finance or business software so you can find the document under the PO, Sales Order, Invoice, etc.
APM Plus setup is only for the professionals. There are many areas that need tweaking on setup, having a better default setup would lessen the learning curve to set it up for use.
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.
It is a very impressive tool which doesn't overwhelm you with unnecessary data. They have combination of tools that haven't seen by any other company which makes it a very powerful tool
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.
APM Plus has freed up users from having to manually attach documents to each place they are sending it. APM Plus will do it automatically.
APM Plus provides a searchable archive to re-visit sent documents with customers and vendors. Having to reprint a document you risk the potential that something has changed since it was last printed.
APM Plus does need IT staff for adjustments and to review sending problems. Not for an average user.
