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Elastic Observability vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Log Management
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 1.4%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.7%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
Ivan Kokalovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates backend service monitoring with efficient log retrieval and API flexibility
Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline. It boosts the knowledge of sales and customer support teams by allowing them to see the backend operations without needing to read the code. Its API is flexible for visualization, and its powerful search engine efficiently handles large volumes of log data. Moreover, its stability, fast search capabilities, and compatibility with languages like ANSI SQL enhance its utility in IT infrastructure.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The architecture and system's stability are simple."
"We can view and connect different sources to the dashboard using it."
"The solution has been stable in our usage."
"The price is very less expensive compared to the other solutions."
"The Elastic User Interface framework lets us do custom development when needed. You need to have some Javascript knowledge. We need that knowledge to develop new custom tests."
"It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it."
"Elastic provides built-in features for queries and report generation. It's a very good tool for monitoring integration capabilities."
"The solution allows us to dig deep into data."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"Graylog is very handy."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline."
 

Cons

"Elastic Observability is an excellent product for monitoring and visibility, but it lacks predictive analytics. Most solutions are aligned with the AIOps requirements, but this piece is missing in Elastic and should be included."
"There is room for improvement regarding its APM capabilities."
"Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low."
"Elastic Observability needs to improve the retrieval of logs and metrics from all the instances."
"I am familiar with Azure Monitor, which I find more user-friendly compared to Elastic, which is a very technical tool."
"The solution would be better if it was capable of more automation, especially in a monitoring capacity or for the response to abnormalities."
"The cost must be made more transparent."
"The solution needs to use more AI. Once the product onboards AI, users would more effectively be able to track endpoints for specific messages."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature.​"
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"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."
"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."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."
"We have been using the open-source version."
"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Educational Organization
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing. However, sizing and licensing information could be clearer.
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
Of course, maintenance is necessary, as with any software, requiring updates with the latest features and security enhancements. It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like netw...
What do you like most about Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.