We compared Graylog and Grafana Loki based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Graylog and Grafana Loki both offer efficient log management solutions with positive feedback on customer support and reasonable pricing. Graylog focuses on powerful search functionality, ease of use, and extensive customization options, while Grafana Loki excels in log storage and searching capabilities. Graylog users praise its scalability and efficient data handling, while Grafana Loki users appreciate its integration with Grafana tools and ease of setup. Graylog users report improvements in log management, troubleshooting, and security, while Grafana Loki users highlight its cost-effectiveness and efficiency. Both platforms have areas for improvement, with Graylog users suggesting enhancements in search functionality and speed, user interface, scalability, stability, and documentation, while Grafana Loki users recommend improved query capabilities, documentation, scalability, alerting, and integration with external tools for better log aggregation and visualization.
Features: Graylog stands out for its powerful search functionality, extensive customization options, and robust alerting capabilities. Users also appreciate its scalability and efficient handling of large data volumes. On the other hand, Grafana Loki is highly regarded for its efficient and scalable log storage and searching capabilities. Users also appreciate its seamless integration with other Grafana tools and easy setup process.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Graylog is praised for its ease and straightforwardness, allowing for a smooth installation process. Users also express satisfaction with its licensing options. Similarly, Grafana Loki is deemed reasonably priced, with a straightforward and hassle-free setup cost, and fair and accommodating licensing options., Graylog has been praised for its positive contributions to ROI, including improved log management, enhanced troubleshooting, and cost savings. On the other hand, Grafana Loki is favored for its cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and seamless integration with Grafana, proving its worth in optimizing operational processes.
Room for Improvement: Graylog: Users recommend improvements to search functionality and speed, a more intuitive user interface, enhanced scalability and stability, better documentation, and comprehensive tutorials. Grafana Loki: Users seek enhanced query capabilities, better documentation, improved scalability and performance, enhanced alerting capabilities, and integration with external monitoring tools. Continuous development is emphasized.
Deployment and customer support: Based on user reviews, implementing Graylog generally takes 3 months for deployment and an additional week for setup. On the other hand, Grafana Loki's deployment and setup phases can also take around 3 months, but some users were able to accomplish both in just a week., Graylog has received positive feedback for its prompt and knowledgeable customer service. Users appreciate the effective solutions provided by the helpful and responsive team. In comparison, Grafana Loki's customer service offers extensive guidance and satisfactory assistance, valued by users for its responsiveness.
The summary above is based on 18 interviews we conducted recently with Graylog and Grafana Loki users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The best feature of Grafana Loki is that it integrates well with our other tool."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"We had a well-structured dashboard with a functional query. However, an issue arose when the Kubernetes pod restarted. The statistics from our Grafana query would reset, dropping to zero and starting anew. This was particularly noticeable with linear graphs, which are expected to show consistent growth."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"We ran into problems with Elasticsearch throwing a circuit-breaking exception due to field data size being too large. It turned out that the heap size directly impacted this size in a high-throughput environment, causing unexplained instability in Graylog. We were able to troubleshoot on the Elasticsearch size, but we should have been able to reference some minimum requirements for Graylog to know that our settings weren't sufficient."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
"I would like to see a date and time in the Graylog Grok patterns so that I can save time when searching for a log. I like how the streams and the search query work, but adding a date and time will allow me to pull out a log in a milli-second."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature."
"Elasticsearch recommendations for tuning could be better. Graylog doesn't have direct support for running the system inside of Kubernetes, so it can be challenging to fill in the gaps and set up containers in a way that is both performant and stable."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
Grafana Loki is ranked 13th in Log Management with 12 reviews while Graylog is ranked 11th in Log Management with 18 reviews. Grafana Loki is rated 8.0, while Graylog is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Grafana Loki writes "Effective for Logging, recovery from node failures is fast and single UI supports metrics, logs, and even tracing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Graylog writes "Great detailed search features and easy Java integration, but needs improvement in integration with Python". Grafana Loki is most compared with Wazuh, syslog-ng, Splunk Enterprise Security, Fortinet FortiAnalyzer and Datadog, whereas Graylog is most compared with Wazuh, syslog-ng, Splunk Enterprise Security, Fortinet FortiAnalyzer and Elastic Security. See our Grafana Loki vs. Graylog report.
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