Graylog vs. SolarWinds Papertrail

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.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Papertrail is great if you have multiple separate applications and you want to be able to view and search all the logs in one place. It also works well for alerts based on certain keywords in log entries (for example, ERROR, WARN, etc.) Since only the first four weeks of logs are searchable in Papertrail, it may not work well for use-cases where much older log entries need to remain searchable.

Incentivized

• The free edition is extraordinarily powerful.
• Log searching is quick.
• The web interface is sleek, and the install is relatively quick.

Incentivized

• Collects logs from many sources in real time.
• Makes it really easy to filter logs to dig into the logs of many services working simultaneously.
• Alerts triggered on certain search matches.

Incentivized

• The graphs and visualizations are limited on the dashboard if there were more options it would be better for different kinds of data.

Incentivized

• The CLI was a bit clunky and required some Linux-y thought to get right (obviously more designed with scripting in mind)
• Tracking logs in real time (think something like `tail`) wasn't wildly intuitive
• Accessing/searching archives required a lot of CLI-style pulling/extracting/reg-exing

Incentivized

We are definitely going to continue using Papertrail. It's been a lifesaver.

Incentivized

It's extremely easy to use. I and new colleagues have never had any issues configuring this tool or setting it up, it works almost out of the box with very simple instructions to follow to configure it to our own environment. I would highly recommend it on that ability alone.

Incentivized

From a product perspective, it's an 8.

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.

Incentivized

I honestly have never had the need to use the support team, as we have not run into any issues so far. If we did however, judging from how the tool itself works, I don't doubt that the team would provide excellent support for any issues that we may possibly run into.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates that were required to make them usable.

Incentivized

• Able to offer monitoring services to new and existing clients to increase revenue
• Staff have increased billing percentage
• Potential to expand security services

Incentivized

• We are alarmed properly so it makes it easy for us to monitor the server.
• Very easy to debug our apps when something's gone wrong (bug) in the production server.
• Noticed whenever any third party scan was going on our server.

Incentivized