Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is 2.2%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.2%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Boaz Katabazi - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables flexible and comprehensive reporting across all syslog-enabled devices
I mainly use it for reporting. It also integrates other security solutions around. It can report onto anything that has a syslog on the network. It doesn't have to be a Fortinet product. It integrates within FortiGate and you can find the reports there. It's a very flexible and rich tool, providing custom reports along with default reports.
Andrey Mostovykh - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"The IBS (Intent Based Segmentation) and application web filtering are the most valuable aspects of the solution."
"This makes it easy to configure and use. I would recommend it to anyone."
"The product works well with other products."
"Log collection is the most valuable. The UI looks great. It has a very good look and feel. We don't have the need to use solid state drives. We use mechanic drives, and we don't see any performance issues, so basically, it is doing fine."
"Log View is the most valuable part for us, as we can view logs from different Fortigates on a single GUI."
"Storage in SSD helps in generating customized reports."
"FortiAnalyzer has a robust ability to find a compromised host on your network, and when you identify a compromised host, you can address it."
"There are a lot of monitoring features available."
"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."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"Open source and user friendly."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"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."
"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
 

Cons

"The UI can be more user-friendly for new users."
"The deployment of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is not complex, but integrating it with firewalls can take some time, depending on the number of firewalls."
"Their pricing model is not the best and needs work."
"The solution should be more price competitive."
"The cloud version can be expensive. If the customers could get the resources to store the logs on-premises, it would be much better."
"The setup of the solution can be improved because it is currently complex."
"The solution lacks business intelligence features. It's much too basic."
"We are concerned about the compliance of our policy and institutional philosophy."
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"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 would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When comparing with other solutions such as Checkpoint and Cisco, Fortinet is priced well."
"I believe that these devices were procured with a five-year maintenance and support license up front. I work at a university, so the vendor provides a considerable higher ed discount."
"Compared to other products, the price is a little bit high."
"The price is not expensive when compared to other solutions like Palo Alto."
"It is expensive for small business customers. It is only available for customers with a high number of firewalls to manage or to report. If a customer has only five boxes of FortiGate, the price of FortiAnalyzer can be more than the five boxes. So, we can't easily put this solution for small business customers."
"I won't say the solution is too costly since it is available at a fair price."
"It is not very expensive when customers understand the value of this product and the importance of the information that it provides for security."
"The enterprise version of this solution is costly. We have considered FortiAuthenticator for network control, but the pricing was focused on the larger companies and didn't suit our needs as a smaller business."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"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."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"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."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"We're using the Community edition."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
The reporting features, which offer customization, real-time insights, and compliance support, are particularly noteworthy aspects.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
I am a technical engineer, so I am not privy to pricing details.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
Sometimes, there is a problem with CPU consumption, where one process consumes 100%, and I need to restart FortiAnalyzer to fix this. I am not familiar with the processes of scalability.
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?
When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

General Directorate of Information Technology
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiAnalyzer vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.