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 March 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is 2.1%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.4%, 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 log events are quite useful for us."
"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."
"Provides detailed log reports"
"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."
"I like its simplicity. It is straightforward. We get reports and emails about the logs, and that's it."
"Logging is the best feature."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Many of my clients are financial institutions that transmit files from around the country across a VPN. In a setup like this, it's helpful to have a centralized dashboard to manage firewalls and other security solutions across a distributed environment. You can do all sorts of analysis and configure it to trigger alarms."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"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."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"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."
"Graylog is very handy."
"Open source and user friendly."
 

Cons

"The solution could improve by allowing the ability to search logs in integrated solutions."
"When somebody is new to the system they find it difficult to perform certain operations, like backups, and to see where the reports are."
"In future releases, we'd like to see more granular reporting. The reports on offer right now are pretty short."
"The deployment of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is not complex, but integrating it with firewalls can take some time, depending on the number of firewalls."
"I feel that Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is a little bit heavy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"A possible improvement for FortiAnalyzer could be in threat intelligence. This feature might be enhanced to provide better insights and more efficient operations."
"I would like to see an improvement in the technical support. Stronger authentication will also be a plus."
"It is very important that FAZ can support FortiController as the architecture designed for the network. FortiController should be registered in FAZ at least for event logs."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"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."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"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."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature.​"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In the local market sometimes people are being charged more than other solutions. Although the market is competitive, legitimate suppliers do not receive a large enough discount to pass onto the customers."
"FortiAnalyzer was in the product itself, but two years ago they split it from Fortinet. We paid the license two years ago."
"​It depends upon the company.​"
"The program is expensive."
"The solution is quite expensive"
"I rate FortiAnalyzer six out of 10 for affordability. FortiAnalyzer pricing isn't steady. It changes each quarter or year. That's one of the main problems in West Abaco because most businesses here are small or medium-sized enterprises. It makes budgeting complicated. You always want to pay the same price on the subscription."
"I rate Fortinet FortiAnalyzer's pricing as five out of ten."
"The company's choice to utilize Fortinet FortiAnalyzer was based on the overall security strategy and compatibility with existing solutions. It was deemed the best fit as it provided a centralized point of visibility for all of their security solution, including Fortinet FortiGate firewall, FortiClient, Forti EMS, and FortiAP. The company conducted a thorough evaluation of various solutions in the market but found that none of them could fully integrate and manage all their solutions as effectively as Fortinet FortiAnalyzer."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"We're using the Community edition."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
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: January 2025.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.