10 Best Graylog Alternatives in 2024

Graylog offers a scalable solution and operates under multiple different solutions. You can choose from either Graylog Open, Small Business, Enterprise, or Cloud.

There are Graylog's users that show discontent with some of its features, especially at the start. Deployment of Graylog needs some "playing around" and really benefiting from Graylog and having reliable and sustainable log management and analyzing solutions requires a lot of tweaking. Installing plugins and optimizing performance can be also quite difficult.

The market is full of good log monitoring solutions, that's why we've decided to put together a list of alternatives to Graylog, alternatives that support seamless integrations, easier deployment, or less tech-savviness at the start. Our list is sourced mostly from the experience of our developers and clients, but also the community surrounding Graylog and Better Stack. The list is not in an ascending or descending order, it's simply an array of alternatives, each performing well in its respective field.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack allows you to query your logs the same way you'd query your database with SQL-compatible structured log management. By offering integrations into stacks like Kubernetes, Heroku, Logstash, Rails, Docker, or AWS, and more, you get a broad array of options for monitoring. Thanks to custom-built log management based on ClickHouse, you can work with your logs more efficiently and save funds, compared to Graylog. With Better Stack, you can start monitoring in minutes. With Graylog cloud, it could take up to 2 days.

Better Stack effortlessly searches through petabytes of logs within moments and is prepared to sound an alarm if any anomaly, presence, or absence is registered. Better Stack, compared with Graylog, also offers multiple reliable integrations DevOps, and Alerting tools.

The collected data are visualized by Grafana what ensures even more efficient intel management. Tighter security is one of the main benefits of log monitoring, and Better Stack itself is one of the most secure tools available. Using industry-standard best practices and cooperating only with data centers compliant with DIN ISO/IEC27001 certifications, your data is safe during both transit and storage.

Main Benefits of Better Stack:

• A one-click filter of logs in a structured format
• Better Stack Uptime integration for a full-stack monitoring solution
• Advanced Collaboration features
• Well designed Dark Mode UI and Grafana built-on

2. Splunk

Splunk is a relatively new and modern log management and monitoring solution. You can also use it on mobile, and it provides support for augmented reality.

Apart from log management, Splunk provides you with searching, filtering, diagnosing, indexing, and reporting features. It also offers intuitive and user-friendly dashboards which can be divided into multiple relevant sections. Splunk uses distributed tracing, a method to monitor events, failures, or performance issues.

Splunk is fast when searching for short-time data. However, it lacks behind when getting data from the broader period or identifying trends. Both tools are okay; however, they differ in some crucial aspects, and one or the other is not suitable for everyone. Splunk provides multiple additional features on the other hand. These include live logging, S3 backup, Heroku support, Github integration, JIRA integration, and more.

Main Benefits of Splunk

• Support for various features like S3 backup, live, logging, Heroku, Github, and more
• Flexible GUI, support for a query language
• Complex, suitable for an enterprise solution

3. Logz.io

Logz.io is based on open source tools and heavily emphasizes the necessity of "giving back to the community", maybe that's why their free subscription plan is called Community. Logz.io is ELK-stack based, which promises performance and reliability, but for a price. Its crowdsourcing and machine learning features can help you discover otherwise invisible events. It also provides a live tail feature to observe data in real-time, providing you with an option to monitor and analyze data from multiple sources at once.

Using query language, you can create custom and flexible alerts to be the first one to know about any bugs, threats, or anomalies. Kibana's query language provides you with multiple more features such as identifying specific events, customizing alert formats, or grouping options by fields.

Logz.io provides a safe way to store your in-transit data with its support for SSL and AES 256-bit encryption.

You can get Logz.io for free. Their pricing starts at $0.92/month per ingested GB and 7 days retention. The pricing model depends on the retention period and volume of data ingested.

Main benefits of Logz.io

• It's based on open source
• ELK-stack provides a wide array of tools
• Reasonable pricing model

4. Sematext Logs

Sematext is a monitoring and logging service. It allows for centralized logging and provides you a way to aggregate and store logs from any data source in one location. You can collect data from servers, applications, databases, containers, systems, and more. Sematext also allows you to see your logs live as they arrive from multiple data sources into the cloud.

It uses Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana for collecting and transforming data, searching, filtering and analyzing, and finally, data managing and visualization. You can troubleshoot faster with real-time alerting on both metrics and logs. Log analyzing and looking for anomalies are used to make the whole process quicker. You can integrate it with email, PagerDuty, Slack, HipChat, BigPanda, OpsGenie, On-Call (VictorOps), WebHooks, Nagios, Zapier, and more.

Sematext runs on AWS, whose infrastructure follows strict IT security best practices. Your logs are encrypted via HTTPS and sent through TLS/SLL channels. On top of that, you can restrict specific permissions to some members of your team to increase the integrity and security of your service.

Main Benefits of Sematext Logs

• It brings infrastructure and application performance monitoring together with log management
• Easy to use with good pre-configured dashboards and reports thus also quick to start
• No need to lengthly configure; it works fine out of the box

5. Datadog

Datadog is an all-in-one monitoring solution and log management is one of them. Datadog helps you to filter and assess which logs to archive and which will just waste storage without compromising data integrity, creating information gaps, or accidentally removing essential data. Log management, also called logs decouples log ingestion and log indexing in order to collect, process, archive, explore, and monitor logs without limits. This is covered by their trademarked Logging without Limits, which also powers Security Monitoring.

Datadog automatically parses JSON logs and lets users choose how to parse records from different formats via the Grok Parser. You can use MySQL, JSON, Windows Event Logs, W3C Log Formats, and other various log formats throughout the board. It also provides a view of all IIS log files, which can help you discover multiple patterns and trends. You can search them by date, IP address, and more, eliminating the need to search through many different files. Datadog lets you analyze IIS log data, graph it, and more. You can also configure Datadog to get alerts when IIS faces performance issues.

This solution can also provide you with real-time data and detect the number of events per second or a sampling rate. It gives users the option to customize vast parts of their GUI.

Main Benefits of Datadog

• Quick to start
• Team collaboration tools
• Full API access
• Alert notifications

6. Logic Monitor

Logic Monitor offers log intelligence at scale for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Your data are centralized, correlated, and contextualized, emphasizing data hygiene and internal compliance. LogicMonitor allows you to centralize your monitoring, correlate relevant logs with metrics in a single platform.

It supports more than 2000 integrations, modules, and pre-built templates for on-premises and cloud infrastructures. LogicMonitor is truly user-friendly since it offers query options for all experience levels. It also allows you to access raw data up to 12 months old. Metrics, logs, and log anomalies are all associated with their corresponding devices, cloud instances, and containers.

LogicMonitor manipulates your data with machine learning tools, which decreases troubleshooting times and allows better workflow by sparing your engineers of unproductive tasks. Anomalies are automatically detected and contextualized for easier root cause analysis. LogicMonitor offers Full IT operations lifecycle support via integrations like ServiceNow, CMDB, and Ansible.

One of the biggest disadvantages is the necessity of communicating your subscription with a sales team; you need to get a custom quote.

Main Benefits of LogicMonitor:

• Heavy usage of automation and machine learning methods
• Suitable of all experience levels without compromising functions

7. New Relic One

New Relic's infrastructure monitoring offers faster visibility and troubleshooting. New Relic offers an all-in-one data observation tool capable of correlation or drill-down from Kubernetes to specific log tracing in only a few steps.

New Relic is highly adjustable, so it does not matter if you run from one or multiple clouds on-premise; you will have access to specific, accurate, and custom metrics in real-time and on a limitless scale. New Relic is an open and flexible integration network supporting all the most popular integrations like AWS, Azure, GCP, MYSQL, NGINX, Kafka, and more. If you find an integration that is not supported, you can build it from scratch with NewRelic's Flex integration builder.

New Relic offers a good alternative to Graylog's cloud monitoring solution, thanks to its seamless integration features. The UI is much better looking, and the learning curve is not as drastic when it comes to New Relic.

You can get New Relic for free and access the basic logs management and analyzing features. The rest of the packages are priced depending on your usage, where you pay for everything you over-used over the free plan.

Main benefits of New Relic:

• All-in-one infrastructure monitoring tool
• Open Source projects available
• Pay-as-you-go pricing model

8. Logstash

The "L" in ELK stack, Logstash, offers a free and open server-side data processing tool for data ingestion from multiple sources, transformation, and transport into a" stack" of your choice. Since Logstash is open-source, you have to deploy it on your own machine. Logstash is often used as a part of the ELK stack with Elasticsearch and Kibana. However, a wide array of different options is available, like Graphite, Librato, or Datadog, for example. ELK stack is a powerful solution as a whole, so Logstash does not really offer a plethora of features on its own. Logstash supports JavaScript, Elasticsearch, Kibana and has its own REST API and JSON templates.

Logstash supports a variety of outputs that allows you to route your data with flexibility and according to your needs. Thanks to more than 200 plugins, Logstash is quite customizable, and if you don't find what you're looking for, you can always use their API for plugin development.

Main benefits of Logstash

• The direct part of the ELK stack ecosystem
• Elastic Maps Server
• Advanced alerting tools

9. Dynatrace

Log Monitoring from Dynatrace’s portfolio allows you to access and monitor logs of all your mission-critical processes. Creating custom log metrics is easy and will enable you to oversight and comprehend log data in the context of the rest of your infrastructure in real-time.

Logs can be filtered based on keywords or timeframe and processed using AI, which correlates log messages with problems and uses this correlation in root-cause analysis. You can use Log Monitoring v1 or Log Monitoring v2 if you use Dynatrace as SaaS. Dynatrace's documentation covers all the nuances. However, Dynatrace is not easy to jump into and requires more learning.

Dynatrace offers either a full-stack monitoring solution or multiple individual plans.

Looking for tools similar to Dynatrace? Explore our Dynatrace alternatives article.

Main benefits of Dynatrace

• AI-assisted full-stack monitoring solution
• More than 560 supported technologies
• Solutions also cover security, Digital Experience or even Business Analytics

10. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic offers a complete set of log management tools for the entire stack, whether it's cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. Centralized data visualization allows you to spot developing trends and disarm any errors before they occur or during damage control, finding the root cause faster. Thanks to anomaly detection, outlier detection, and predictive analytics, you get deep and comprehensive insights into your architecture's performance. Sumo logic offers real-time visibility into AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud applications and infrastructure. Alongside that, you get access to over 150 apps and native integrations to get full out-of-the-box visibility into third-party technologies.

Sumo Logic provides you with two dashboards - a live dashboard and an interactive one. The live dashboard offers numerous real-time data in the order as they come. However, it doesn't provide an option to look back at the older data. That's when the interactive dashboard comes in. In the interactive dashboard, you can view a complete overview of events and trends, focus on the graphs and identify rare events. You can filter for the specific errors and exceptions to be able to focus on them in the future.

Main Benefits of Sumo Logic

• A free limited version is provided to you to test out the service
• It allows you to ingest the logs from your network directly and in real-time
• The application also offers extensive REST API
• GUI is easy to grasp, thus making it quicker to start

Conclusion

In this article, we took a closer look at Graylog, its strong and weak aspects and deployment options. Then we proposed a list of the best Graylog alternatives in 2023. The rest is up to you, try to take a closer look at the solutions, compare them and pick one, that will help your project the most.