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.
"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 log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."
"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."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"The product must improve its UI."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"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."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"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."
"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."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"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."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"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."
"More customization is always useful."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
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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