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Graylog vs Nagios Log Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

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
Nagios Log Server
Ranking in Log Management
33rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog is 6.2%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nagios Log Server is 0.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Syarul Idzuddin Adzmi - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable and affordable tool for monitoring data centers
Five engineers are needed for the maintenance of the product. I would definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it. To increase the rating for the product, Nagios should offer remote support and offer more customization in reporting while making it easy for the customers to use it. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"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."
"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."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"The initial setup of Nagios Log Server was easy and straightforward."
"The product is scalable."
"One of the most valuable features is the dashboard because the UI was effective and easy to use. The alert systems are good as well. We had no failovers and had high availability. We can search the queries fast as well in Nagios Log Server."
"A great feature of the solution involves its internal portal."
 

Cons

"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 needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"Graylog could improve the process of creating rules. We have to create them manually by doing parses and applying them. Other SIEM solutions have basic rules and you can create and get more events of interest."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"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."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"More customization is always useful."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"As we are talking about a product which is open to the public, the pricing makes it challenging for us to profit off of its marketing."
"The configurations during initial setup could be improved. If they could be agentless, as in the case of the Ansible product, it would be better. I would like to be able to analyze the network bandwidth."
"The customization and dashboards have shortcomings and need to be improved to make the tool look more presentable."
"The support could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"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."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"We found the pricing to be quite affordable."
"For a single instance, the price is around $4,000."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap, I rate the pricing an eight or nine."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Nagios Log Server?
The initial setup of Nagios Log Server was easy and straightforward.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios Log Server?
My company pays around 500 to 1,000 USD per year toward the licensing cost of the solution. For support, we need to pay extra to Nagios. The solution's price is low. On a scale of one to ten, where...
What needs improvement with Nagios Log Server?
The customization and dashboards have shortcomings and need to be improved to make the tool look more presentable. The reporting side of the product should allow users to have more customized reports.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Graylog2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
IBM, impulse, wipro, comteco
Find out what your peers are saying about Graylog vs. Nagios Log Server and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.