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Cribl vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 26, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
37th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (36th), Data Integration (37th), Cloud Data Integration (23rd), Data Preparation Tools (6th)
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 0.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.3%, up from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Jai Chudasama - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 6, 2024
Provides data normalization and routes the same data to different destinations but lacks documentation
We employed a hybrid strategy, setting up Cribl Cloud as the head node in their environment. For data processing, we used worker nodes within the client’s environment, which are closer to the data sources. This setup allowed us to process data locally before sending it to our destination. For cloud assets, such as SaaS applications like Salesforce, we used the cloud-hosted Cribl instance to handle that information. Meanwhile, the on-premises data was processed by the hybrid worker nodes. We encountered delays due to third-party issues, extending the timeline to six to seven months. Without these issues, it likely would have taken around three months, depending on the speed of obtaining API keys, authorizations from networking teams, and other factors. Under ideal circumstances, a three-month timeframe would be more accurate. You need to maintain the pipeline, which includes data processing, before it reaches its destination. When onboarding new data, managing and rotating API keys as needed is important. Maintaining these aspects ensures faster and more efficient deployments. If you want to reduce log ingestion or route data to multiple destinations, consider using an on-premises or cloud solution. Your choice will depend on your organization’s network constraints. For example, if critical assets on your network need to connect to the internet, your network team might have restrictions. Weigh the benefits of cloud versus on-premises options to determine what best fits your needs.
Andrey Mostovykh - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 27, 2022
Real-time analysis, easy setup, and open source
We stopped using it for analytics because of its price, and at the moment, we are using it mostly for log centralization. If you use it with high traffic for analytical purposes, as well as for the logs, the infrastructure costs are unbelievable. Graylog is a great product backed by Elasticsearch as the storage and query engine. It is just an interface on top of Elasticsearch and some Elasticsearch management. The indexes that are kept in Elasticsearch are managed by Graylog software. Elasticsearch is a decent product, but it's very infrastructure-heavy. It requires lots of resources, and if you make a mistake with provisioning, you are likely to not get a cluster back. We had a couple of outages like that, and we hated that. So, we ended up over-provisioning resources just to avoid such situations from happening. If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much. That may be my Norwegian take on it, but the engineering resources are expensive. It's better to just provision the infrastructure. Overall, the product is great, and the features are just fine, but the infrastructure cost is what is killing it. The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if they can improve the infrastructure cost with the way Elasticsearch is. If they keep using Elasticsearch, maybe there are some opportunities there, or they can support other backends with cheaper storage. They could have a different backend to replace Elasticsearch or do some tweaks to Elasticsearch to reduce the costs. There could be partial parsing of logs or parsing on demand so that when you write data through Graylog to Elasticsearch, it doesn't need to crunch in every detail requiring that much CPU.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Cribl offers other valuable features. For instance, you can replay data from an edge device, store your daily data in a stream, and replay specific event data into Splunk if a security incident occurs"
"The product's most valuable features include the internal management of events, coding perspective, data processing, and serialization."
"The platform's most valuable feature is the ability to transform data in real-time within the pipeline without sending it to a destination."
"Cribl uses tags to help manage and standardize data from different sources. For example, if we have an F5 firewall as a data source, we create a "pack" specifically for F5. This pack transforms and standardizes the F5 data into a consistent schema, making it easier to use across various security teams."
"Cribl offers easy plugin configurations and source collection settings, allowing us to collect logs from any source."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"Allowing us to set up alerts and integrate with platforms we already use, such as Slack and OpsGenie to alert users of these errors proactively, is also a very useful feature."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"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."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
 

Cons

"Cribl could improve by offering easier integrations with enterprise products, similar to what Splunk provides."
"We faced an issue that might be a bug or a problem with the data sources. Since Cribl Stream operates with sources and destinations, collecting, transforming, standardizing, and reducing data before sending it to its destination, the problem could have originated from the server or the sources."
"There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status."
"Cribl doesn't have as many packs available"
"The sys logging could be enhanced to make it easier to identify errors, especially when dealing with multiple functions."
"More customization is always useful."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"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."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
Compared to other enterprise solutions, Cribl tends to be more cost-effective. While other major players can be quite expensive, especially as data volumes increase over time, Cribl offers a fair p...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
Cribl has simplified many aspects of the onboarding process, but there's still room for improvement. Currently, no other tools in the market truly compete with Cribl in its niche. Splunk is trying ...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
We were one of the first customers when Cribl launched. Around 10% to 20% of Cribl had already been implemented when I joined. My role involved expanding it to 100% of our incoming logs being proce...
What do you like most about Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
Since it's a free tool, I don't have much to say. Troubleshooting is important to me. The initial setup is complex. I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: August 2024.
801,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.