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.
N/A
SolarWinds Loggly
Score 5.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Loggly is a cloud-based log management service provider. It does not require the use of proprietary software agents to collect log data. The service uses open source technologies, including ElasticSearch, Apache Lucene 4 and Apache Kafka.
$79
per month/billed annually
Pricing
Graylog
SolarWinds Loggly
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$79
per month/billed annually
Pro
$159
per month/billed annually
Enterprise
$279
per month/billed annually
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Graylog
SolarWinds Loggly
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Free trial for Standard and Pro plans for 14 days with all features.
If you already have a basic understanding of Elasticsearch and/or MongoDB, Graylog will be a great fit when it comes to log aggregation. It will be a decent option even if you don't have any experience but have the time and willingness to roll up your sleeves that learning those tools will require. Graylog supports plugins to extend functionality for things like SNMP traps, telemetry collection, and solar flares. As is the case with most software with plugins, if the core functionality for which you are looking (i.e. not logging) is based on a plugin, Graylog probably isn't for you. The majority of the plugins in the marketplace are developed by third-parties looking to solve their specific use case so bug fixes and new features are not a given.
SolarWinds Loggly is great for capturing and organizing logs from 3rd party sources such as NGINX. Without SolarWinds Loggly it's really difficult to manage the logs overtime, find traffic patterns, and identify issues before they become a problem. Anyone who is routinely searching through massive log files could quickly benefit from the SolarWinds Loggly and it's capabilities.
Modern: Loggly is modern: Dashboards, realtime information and the ability speak many different data sources and environments makes it an attractive choice
Configurability: Loggly gets log parsing right: by allowing you to in real time- filtering of log data, tagging and identifying data sources
DevOps friendly: Loggly is very Componentized: You can have an instance of Loggly running that will Monitor your Linux instance, in addition to all of it's services, as an example. Also, you can start/stop Loggly, without affecting your other components
Once the logging limit is exceeded, there are no logs period. Unexpectedly noisy logs often correlate with services misbehaving and potentially leading to disruption. An outage is an awful time to lose visibility into the entire system of apps. Some ways to bridge this gap would be appreciated.
Filtering by tags is not intuitive in the web interface. You may believe that you are performing the same search and filter as last time since the tags entered are the same, however, this is often not the case. The reliable way to know that you have the same filter is to bookmark the URL. This lack of ease in usability results in devs using Loggly less than they could and implementing logs less effectively during development time (since they don't consider themselves likely to view them anyway).
Would like to see a way to onboard our less experienced devs to using Loggly effectively.
Loggly's easy setup, very good customer support, and intuitive interface make Loggly very easy to use. User access management is also very easy as we can tailor the experience for each of our developers to access the information they need without having to wade through other information. While there was a slight learning curve in how to view the logs the way some specifically wanted, everything was possible and quite easy to do.
I am still unhappy with the pricing model for the enterprise. Graylog competes against the likes of IBM and Splunk, but your still the new kid on the block. To price Graylog enterprise at 50k for 20GB ingest an unrealistic data. It would require multiple facets of Graylog to be stood up and only forward pruned logs to the paid version.
The support team have been great when we have logged tickets or had issues, most of the time it is down to user training, however we have had a couple of bugs that they have been able to iron out for us.
Azure Monitor is not exactly what I mean, but I couldn't find Azure Application Insights. Anyway, for a large organization, Azure makes more sense than using Graylog because a lot of logging will already be inside Azure. And you don't want to have two "central" logging locations. But Azure is chaos and highly "not intuitive." So for small and mid-size organizations, Graylog is still the better option.
I actually couldn't get anybody from Datadog to engage with me, the main problem we had was that our devices couldn't connect to an encrypted port, but we didn't want to send our logs in plain text over the internet. We implemented an on-net log aggregator which then connects to Loggly over encrypted UDP. In theory Loggly made this particularly easy providing configuration snippets for most of the common log services (e.g. rSyslog, syslog-ng). Unfortunately the documentation was out of date and none of the provided configs worked, fortunately they were close enough that combined with our own syslog-ng experience we were able to get it up and going relatively painlessly. The choice then of going with Loggly, backed by an industry favourite in Solarwinds was a no brainer.
Loggly has alerted us to several bugs, ranging from major to small to "would have been a major problem under load."
It's great having our disparate logs collected and the alerts we have set up around them let us know recently that somebody used an incorrect document to generate a mass email. Users were trying to log in with the link provided but getting 401s and I have an alert configured to tell me about high numbers of 4xx errors.
Metrics and alerts around metrics have given us peace of mind that automated fulfillment systems aren't going off the rails and costing us hundreds of dollars.
