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Graylog vs VMware Aria Operations for Logs 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
6.9
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Log Management
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Logs is 1.2%, down from 1.4% 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.
LarsChristensen - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient troubleshooting with precise log filtering and an easy setup
The tool could benefit from improved filter settings and dashboarding. While there are dashboards available, they are often created by community members and may not work after updates. It would be beneficial to have a roadmap for these dashboards to ensure consistent functionality. It would also be advantageous if the tool could process even large amounts of data faster, though this may be more related to data movement challenges rather than the software itself.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"Open source and user friendly."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"Graylog is very handy."
"We use the on-premises version of this solution for log analysis and to find details about certain issues."
"Overall, I would recommend VMware Aria Operations for Logs because it is a good tool with many valuable features."
"I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten."
"The interface of the solution is good."
"I like the interface."
"VMware Aria Operations for Logs is a very stable product."
"We are using it because we have a VMware product. It has its own built in dashboards for VMware products, and that's a good thing."
"The most valuable feature is server virtualization. It's been very useful."
 

Cons

"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"More customization is always useful."
"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."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"The product's price falls on the higher end of the spectrum, making it an area of concern."
"The response time and quality need improvement. It takes too long to prove a problem and get a solution."
"Paid or free does not matter, but it is complex to find good training material for vRealize Log Insight."
"In vRealize login files, we have limitations regarding log partitions."
"I think that it should be able to integrate with other third-party backup and recovery solutions, more that it does now."
"It's great for VMware, but it would be good if they had third-party logins."
"Integration with other vendors is something that could be improved, they could add more vendors."
"The solution is a very good tool, but it has a lot of limitations. One of the main issues is around how you define your retention policy, for instance, in Log Insight. It doesn't have it. You can't define a log retention policy. You also can't define the destination or location for your logs. All of the logs are in one index or one bucket."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"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."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"We're using the Community edition."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"Pricing could always be lower. If it were free, I would be more satisfied."
"The pricing has been updated recently."
"I rate the product's price a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"I think it is a reasonably priced product."
"The product's price is reasonable, but when it comes to SQL licensing, it's a bit expensive."
"The licensing cost for vRealize Log Insight is a little higher, so in terms of cost, it all depends upon what kind of environment you have. If you have a complete virtualized environment, or at least you're using a ninety-five percent virtualized environment, then vRealize Log Insight will play a very good role because it is a VMware component, so it has very tight integration with other VMware components and systems. This means you don't have to procure any other monitoring and management tool, and you don't need a separate automation tool. vRealize Log Insight will have an upper hand if your environment is purely virtualized on VMware. If you're using a mix of physical and virtual components, for example, a 50:50 ratio, then you need to have a third-party component to manage overall monitoring."
"The license cost for any other monitoring tool is too high compared to this product."
"It is not cheap. But it is worth it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 vRealize Log Insight?
The events are notably more descriptive, aiding in security and event analysis. We've also integrated Sky Collector, providing valuable insights and solutions for troubleshooting.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Log Insight?
Pricing for VMware Aria Operations for Logs can depend on several variables, including the workload and the customer. The price has risen significantly, and for smaller customers, the cost can be u...
What needs improvement with vRealize Log Insight?
It is not the main tool in my stack. I can do similar tasks using solutions like Grafana ( /products/grafana-reviews ). My focus is mainly on finding alternatives for hypervisor and automation purp...
 

Also Known As

Graylog2
vRealize Log Insight
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Wildlands Adventure Zoo, Medic Mobile, IBM, Seventy Seven Energy, Baystate Health, Osis, Oxford University, Columbia University, Siemens, Cardinal Health, Ashdod Port, Vasakronan, Sydney Adventist Hospital, University of Derby
Find out what your peers are saying about Graylog vs. VMware Aria Operations for Logs and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.