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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
7.7
Number of Reviews
94
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 April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is 2.0%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% 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 most valuable feature is the capability to create a customized dashboard."
"The solution provides good standardized reports and is easy to troubleshoot."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the reports and the playbooks."
"The analyzer is the most valuable feature."
"Based on the logs of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer you can have it trigger actions. For example, if the log has a word or a sentence you specified it can send an alert or Syslog to an email address."
"I would say that Fortinet's tech support is really good."
"The log analysis and reporting are both quite good."
"The most valuable feature of FortiAnalyzer is its visibility, especially in network investigations."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"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."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
 

Cons

"If Fortinet could introduce some firewalling or maybe FortiAnalyzer on the cloud, that would be interesting because I've never seen it on a cloud."
"It should have customized reports as well. While it currently has them, you need to write a script which is not straightforward."
"One area for improvement could be better support for third-party products, as it doesn't have as much visibility with these compared to Fortinet's own products."
"Sometimes, there is a problem with CPU consumption, where one process consumes 100%, and I need to restart FortiAnalyzer to fix this."
"A possible improvement for FortiAnalyzer could be in threat intelligence."
"I don't find Fortinet FortiAnalyzer to be as robust as Check Point Security Management."
"Fortinet FortiAnalyzer could improve the user interface, and the experience of users receiving the reports and tracking could be better."
"Our organization wants the solution to be able to provide us access to a centralized dashboard that displays a log view for all firewalls under Fortinet FortiAnalyzer."
"I would like to see a date and time in the Graylog Grok patterns so that I can save time when searching for a log. I like how the streams and the search query work, but adding a date and time will allow me to pull out a log in a milli-second."
"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."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Fortinet FortiAnalyzer's pricing as five out of ten."
"When comparing with other solutions such as Checkpoint and Cisco, Fortinet is priced well."
"I believe that these devices were procured with a five-year maintenance and support license up front. I work at a university, so the vendor provides a considerable higher ed discount."
"In other countries, the product may seem cheap, but in Vietnam, the costs are high."
"The cost of the license is high."
"I do not know the price of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. I did not pay for it, but I know the price of other Fortinet products. They are not cheap. I am from Poland. We have Zloty, not Euro, so for us, everything is expensive."
"We pay for an annual license."
"The pricing model is subscription-based."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"We're using the Community edition."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"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."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
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: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.