Google Cloud&#39;s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs Graylog comparison

Google Cloud's operations s...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Graylog and Google Cloud's operations suite compete in log management and monitoring. Google Cloud appears to have the upper hand due to its superior feature set, although Graylog's cost-effectiveness and support are notable.

Features: Graylog offers real-time log analytics, flexible search, and open-source customization. Google Cloud features comprehensive cloud-native integrations, advanced machine learning analytics, and automated insights.

Room for Improvement: Graylog could improve its alerting mechanisms, dashboard customization, and user experience. Google Cloud faces a steep learning curve, integration complexity, and could improve ease of use.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Graylog's deployment is straightforward and quick, with a need for better documentation. Google Cloud has complex deployment but provides responsive customer service, though it may be challenging for beginners.

Pricing and ROI: Graylog is favored for lower setup costs and high ROI in budget-conscious environments. Google Cloud demands a higher investment yet offers long-term value through features and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. Graylog Report (Updated: March 2025).

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. Graylog

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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

Google Cloud's operations s...

Ranking in Log Management

30th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (25th), Cloud Monitoring Software (23rd)

Graylog

Ranking in Log Management

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 0.7%, down from 1.0% 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

Anand_Patel

Senior Technical Architect at T-Systems International GmbH

Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations

As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or BigQuery can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings.

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Andrey Mostovykh

Senior Data Architect at a non-tech company with 201-500 employees

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Google's technical support is very good."

"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."

"Offers a valuable logging transport feature"

"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."

"I like the monitoring feature."

"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."

"We find the solution to be stable."

"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) pros

"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."

"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."

"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."

"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."

"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."

"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."

"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."

"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."

More Graylog pros

Cons

"It could be more stable."

"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver."

"The process of logging analytics can be improved"

"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."

"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."

"The logging functionality could be better."

"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."

"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) cons

"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."

"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."

"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."

"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature."

"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."

"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."

"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."

More Graylog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."

"The cost could be lower."

"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."

"We're using the Community edition."

"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."

"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."

"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."

"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements."

"You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."

"Having paid official support is wise for projects."

More Graylog pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Government

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Stackdriver?

If the errors are caught early in the interface, it would be easier for users to manage. The process of logging analytics can be improved.

What is your primary use case for Google Stackdriver?

I use the solution for logging, defining alerts, and monitoring. Our company's Java and Python logging teams mainly use it.

What advice do you have for others considering Google Stackdriver?

The Ops Agent and logging transport feature of the solution have had a major impact on improving application performance. The solution also allows the transport of logs into log buckets, which is h...

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...

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Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) product report

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) report

Download Graylog product report

Also Known As

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring

Graylog2

Overview

Real-time log management and analysis

Cloud Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and platform log data, as well as custom log data from GKE environments, VMs, and other services inside and outside of Google Cloud. Get advanced performance, troubleshooting, security, and business insights with Log Analytics, integrating the power of BigQuery into Cloud Logging.

Built-in metrics observability at scale

Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. Collect metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components. Visualize this data on charts and dashboards and create alerts so you are notified when metrics are outside of expected ranges.

Stand-alone managed service for running and scaling Prometheus

Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, built on top of the same globally scalable data store as Cloud Monitoring. Keep your existing visualization, analysis, and alerting services, as this data can be queried with PromQL or Cloud Monitoring.

Monitor and improve your application's performance

Application Performance Management (APM) combines the monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler to help you reduce latency and cost so you can run more efficient applications.

Google

Graylog is purpose-built to deliver the best log collection, storage, enrichment, and analysis. Graylog is:

Considerably faster analysis speeds.
More robust and easier-to-use analysis platform.
Simpler administration and infrastructure management.
Lower cost than alternatives.
Full-scale customer service.
No expensive training or tool experts required.

Sample Customers

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. Graylog