We performed a comparison between Graylog and syslog-ng based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Log Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"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."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"The ability to extract and store the logs is the most valuable feature of syslog-ng."
"Syslog-ng has a separate config file in addition to the core configuration."
"Syslog-ng has built-in features that we can use to create alerts for a SIEM solution. It isn't a true SIEM solution, but it's sufficient for the time being."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the use of compound search for searching logs at a specific time, by a specific user, or specific behavior."
"Syslog-ng provides easy access to all my logs. It helps me show managers and other clients precisely where an incident occurred. I also like it because you can integrate syslog-ng with multiple solutions to allow real-time monitoring."
"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 would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"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."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"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."
"There is always the potential for additional integration and protocol extensions."
"Syslog-ng has built-in features that we can use to create alerts for a SIEM solution. It isn't a true SIEM solution, but it's sufficient for the time being."
"The filtering has room for improvement."
"It's hard to find people who know how to use syslog-ng. I often find problems with configurations, and solutions aren't integrated correctly with syslog-ng. For example, there might be data with extra decimals, or the collector agents are incorrectly named. It isn't a problem with the solution; it's a lack of professionals."
"There is room for improvement in terms of observability."
Graylog is ranked 11th in Log Management with 18 reviews while syslog-ng is ranked 18th in Log Management with 5 reviews. Graylog is rated 8.0, while syslog-ng is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Graylog writes "Great detailed search features and easy Java integration, but needs improvement in integration with Python". On the other hand, the top reviewer of syslog-ng writes "It's a user-friendly open-source solution that can replace or augment a commercial product in some cases". Graylog is most compared with Grafana Loki, Wazuh, Splunk Enterprise Security, Fortinet FortiAnalyzer and Elastic Security, whereas syslog-ng is most compared with SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server, Grafana Loki, Logstash, Elastic Security and Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. See our Graylog vs. syslog-ng report.
See our list of best Log Management vendors.
We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.