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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
7.6
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

"One of the most valuable features is the ability to analyze data in real-time using AR features to pull data from the industrial DB. You can know what is going on and see in milliseconds where the network is underperforming."
"The log analysis and reporting are both quite good."
"The scalability is good. It is also good in the cluster nodes. You can make multiple FortiAnalyzer clusters groups, and you can distribute the logs between these FortiAnalyzer nodes. In other words, you can expand the scale."
"Log View is the most valuable part for us, as we can view logs from different Fortigates on a single GUI."
"We use this functionality every day, and obtain reports on things like how many people are using the VPN, which websites are being accessed, and whether hackers are trying to penetrate into our network."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is reporting."
"FortiAnalyzer's reporting features like graphs, threat intelligence, and vulnerabilities analysis are helpful. Fortinet knows how to do reporting. You can customize your reports to show exactly what you want to analyze. It's user-friendly and doesn't require a lot of effort."
"The solution is quite easy to deploy."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"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."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"Open source and user friendly."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
 

Cons

"One area for improvement could be better support for third-party products, as it doesn't have as much visibility with these compared to Fortinet's own products."
"I would like to see an improvement in the technical support. Stronger authentication will also be a plus."
"When it comes to pushing logs to a SIEM, most of the time we have some issues when it comes to filtering."
"One area for improvement could be better support for third-party products, as it doesn't have as much visibility with these compared to Fortinet's own products."
"FortiAnalyzer's price could be lower."
"The traffic monitoring could be better, and stability could be improved."
"The cloud version can be expensive. If the customers could get the resources to store the logs on-premises, it would be much better."
"Pricing should be about 10-20% lower."
"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."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"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."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"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."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The program is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"Its price is okay for us. Fortinet products are cheaper than other solutions."
"When you compare with other firewall vendors, FortiAnalyzer is quite competitive in pricing."
"​It depends upon the company.​"
"FortiAnalyzer was in the product itself, but two years ago they split it from Fortinet. We paid the license two years ago."
"Its worth spending on FortiAnalyzer if you have multiple firewalls in your network."
"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."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"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."
"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."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"We're using the Community edition."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
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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.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.