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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
7.7
Number of Reviews
94
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 April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is 2.0%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% 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

"Its robust security and performance are the two main features. We also use the log reporting feature."
"There are customizable workflows that you can work with. You can automate certain tasks in FortiAnaylzer in the incidents and events sections."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to gather logs and generate reports."
"We use the solution for enterprise firewalls, URL filtering, and SD-WAN."
"The most valuable features are customizing reports, and the ability to drill down to display critical information in real-time."
"t integrates within FortiGate and you can find the reports there."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer are the GUI and there is automation that can be done with playbooks and mini-books."
"The solution provides good standardized reports and is easy to troubleshoot."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"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."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"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."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
 

Cons

"I would like to see an improvement in the technical support. Stronger authentication will also be a plus."
"If Fortinet could introduce some firewalling or maybe FortiAnalyzer on the cloud, that would be interesting because I've never seen it on a cloud."
"The UI can be more user-friendly for new users."
"The integration with other vendors for log collection could be enhanced."
"One thing we struggled with FortiAnalyzer was integration with SIEM. We also had issues with the new threats and APTs. There were false positives, so we needed to have some ratings related to false positives."
"It should have customized reports as well. While it currently has them, you need to write a script which is not straightforward."
"FortiAnalyzer only integrates with Fortinet solutions. That is a limitation because many organizations use multiple vendors. It's often a mixture of Cisco network hardware and equipment from other vendors, such as switches, access points, etc."
"The support could be better for Fortinet FortiAnalyzer here in Mexico."
"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."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"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."
"Elasticsearch recommendations for tuning could be better. Graylog doesn't have direct support for running the system inside of Kubernetes, so it can be challenging to fill in the gaps and set up containers in a way that is both performant and stable."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"FortiAnalyzer was in the product itself, but two years ago they split it from Fortinet. We paid the license two years ago."
"The cost and pricing should be in accordance with the calculation of log storage capacity for a time period required for historical analysis."
"The product’s price is much better than its competitors."
"The price is not expensive when compared to other solutions like Palo Alto."
"The price is quite expensive. Fortinet products are very expensive. That is something which they should also look at, because if you compare Fortinet product to, say, Sophos for example, Fortinet is really high and that's the only thing which is a drawback for most users."
"All Fortinet programs come at a good price."
"In other countries, the product may seem cheap, but in Vietnam, the costs are high."
"I do not know the price of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. I did not pay for it, but I know the price of other Fortinet products. They are not cheap. I am from Poland. We have Zloty, not Euro, so for us, everything is expensive."
"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."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"We're using the Community edition."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"I use the free version of 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."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
University
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: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.