Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Graylog vs USM Anywhere 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

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
USM Anywhere
Ranking in Log Management
42nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (31st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (53rd), Compliance Management (12th)
 

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 USM Anywhere is 0.4%, down from 1.1% 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.
Kris Nawani - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers complete coverage without the need to install additional software
USM Anywhere is used for threat detection and investigation. It provides a solution with built-in threat intelligence and various other investigation tools The solution offers complete coverage without the need to install additional software, as it is maintained by the vendor. It helps in saving…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"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."
"Open source and user friendly."
"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."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"We're using it more for reporting, that's all. We're using it to help our customers to pass any kind of audits that they receive."
"The USM is a work horse, no matter what devices or the number of logs we throw at it, the system processes them in real time, correlates the events, and alerts on only events that need human review."
"The dashboards are very descriptive and contain just the right amount of information. The activity alarms and events contain a plethora of data that is very descriptive and useful."
"Log-monitoring and alerting enable us to know when things happen that we need to know about."
"The most valuable feature is threat intelligence."
"The most valuable feature is vulnerability management because it gives you insight into your environment to know what systems need to be updated or patched."
"We had used previous products and found AlienVault centralized the logging for our security."
"As we have to service several servers, we can manage them in a economical way, which is beneficial to our team and business."
 

Cons

"We ran into problems with Elasticsearch throwing a circuit-breaking exception due to field data size being too large. It turned out that the heap size directly impacted this size in a high-throughput environment, causing unexplained instability in Graylog. We were able to troubleshoot on the Elasticsearch size, but we should have been able to reference some minimum requirements for Graylog to know that our settings weren't sufficient."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"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."
"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-"
"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 would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"The reporting is mediocre and is something that needs to be improved."
"The lack of mature functionality and expertise in any of those areas is a strong negative."
"they seem to have bugs from time to time that go unfixed for a while and that is frustrating. I'm not saying the product needs to be bug-free, but they need to be responsive to bugs."
"As this software is in the cloud, you do not have control on updates and general changes which are happening."
"The other thing is the agent is OSSEC. They needed to create its own agent to help to find threats on the devices that it happens to be installed."
"Reporting is convoluted and difficult at times, although they claim to have hundreds of pre-built reports, very few of them are actually useful for anything but what the USM is doing."
"It was easy on PoC, but when we got to the product it was different story. We had to learn the product again and got feeling that the PoC was a different product."
"I want to see more compliance management capability. The quality of integrations seems to be a little bit low."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"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."
"We're using the Community edition."
"AlienVault is flexible on their pricing for unlimited licenses."
"It's affordable for most customers."
"​The price point is good.​"
"The ROI is quite good."
"We pay around $12,000 a year including storage."
"It is affordable, and it also has many features that the premium products such as ArcSight and QRadar have. It is a very good platform for a SIEM solution. Everything is included in the price."
"Do the one month trial and try to work out the kinks during it, as it has free support and service hours."
"They charge a license based on the storage. ATT AlienVault USM is a less expensive solution than IBM QRadar."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
845,485 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Educational Organization
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 AT&T AlienVault USM?
The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of deployment that it provides to users. The integrations that the product has with third-party applications are useful.
What needs improvement with AT&T AlienVault USM?
There are scalability issues due to a 60 TB limit, which restricts its use for large customers like banks. It is also limited when used with bigger products and has complex password requirements.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Graylog2
AT&T AlienVault USM, AlienVault, AlienVault USM, Alienvault Cybersecurity
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Abel & Cole, Bank of Ireland, Bluegrass Cellular, CareerBuilder, Claire's, Hays Medical Center, Hope International, McCurrach, McKinsey & Company, Party Delights, Pepco Holdings, Richland School District, Ricoh, SaveMart, Shake Shack, Steelcase, TaxAct, Taylor Morrison, Vonage and Zoom
Find out what your peers are saying about Graylog vs. USM Anywhere and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,485 professionals have used our research since 2012.