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.
"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 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 most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."
"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."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"Open source and user friendly."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"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."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"More customization is always useful."
"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."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"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."
"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-"
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
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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