What is our primary use case?
Graylog Enterprise is used primarily for log management and to perform security analytics. It helps the organization collect logs from different sources and centralize them in one place. We can search and analyze events, detect suspicious activity, and it supports security investigations. The organization ingests a lot of logs including firewall logs, AWS, Windows endpoints, and authentication logs. It helps collect everything in a single dashboard, and we can search the logs and monitor each aspect.
Graylog Enterprise collects everything in one dashboard, allowing the SOC team to search the logs and monitor every alert based on the rules, enabling investigation of suspicious activity. For example, if a user account suddenly logs in from an unusual or unauthorized location with multiple failed login attempts, Graylog helps correlate those logs and allows analysts to investigate that quickly.
Graylog Enterprise is used for compliance and audit log retention, for investigation, and it is useful for centralized log collection.
In alerting and correlation, logs are ingested from multiple sources, allowing us to create alerts based on those use cases. For example, if a suspicious IP from an unauthorized location is detected, the IP is checked in the firewall logs, application logs, or whether it has executed some PowerShell script or is showing some authentication behavior. Based on that, everything is correlated, and those insights are available in the tool for SOC analysts to analyze those alerts.
What is most valuable?
The best feature Graylog Enterprise offers is its centralized log management, allowing analysts to search logs from a single tool instead of checking multiple tools. It is fast, and we can search effectively because during incident response time, the SOC analyst can quickly search a suspicious IP, username, or any IOCs across the historical logs. Another valuable aspect is the alerting and correlation functionality, where alerts can be created for multiple rules based on use cases, such as multiple failed logins, privilege escalation, abnormal authentication behavior, and other security events.
The dashboard and visualization in Graylog Enterprise is good for SOC monitoring purposes.
Graylog Enterprise positively impacts the organization by helping the team and analysts investigate incidents faster since logs from servers, endpoints, cloud, and firewalls are available in one place. Instead of switching between multiple tools, timelines can be reviewed and suspicious activity validated quickly, resulting in faster investigation times, better visibility into logs, and improved incident response capabilities. This has also reduced manual effort and compliance tasks.
Previously, as an SMB company, approximately 40 to 50 alerts per day were generated. When Graylog Enterprise was implemented and evaluated, it correlated everything, providing true positive alerts and reducing the number of alerts to 10, which allows analysts to monitor those true positive alerts and take action accordingly.
What needs improvement?
Graylog Enterprise performs well overall; however, the UI could be improved because the SOC team creates multiple dashboards based on their use cases, and creating dashboards is complex. If there were multiple dashboard and chart styles available, it would be helpful for the team and for the SOC analysts to investigate and use the UI in a better way.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working as a cybersecurity engineer for six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Enterprise-grade platforms like Graylog Enterprise are expected to be stable for security purposes as well as monitoring workloads, and the experience has been good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Graylog Enterprise is designed to be capable of handling growing workloads effectively.
How are customer service and support?
The support experience generally depends on the issue complexity, but the team was very responsive and their technical guidance was also very good and constant. I would rate the customer support around nine out of ten.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, Elasticsearch, an open-source SIEM tool, was used, and multiple monitoring approaches were evaluated depending on maturity and requirements.
How was the initial setup?
Graylog Enterprise is a security product and generally requires an evaluation. Multiple tools were evaluated, and the solution will need to be scaled if required, as the main cost depends on integration and operation requirements. These details will be shared with leadership, and they will make the decision.
What about the implementation team?
Graylog Enterprise was purchased from a Graylog salesperson, a third-party salesperson.
What was our ROI?
Instead of having five analysts working, Graylog Enterprise has reduced the number of analysts as well as time, resulting in a decreased cost of 20%. It has provided better quality and improved detection capabilities.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The organization often compares Graylog Enterprise with other SIEM and detection solutions tools based on the integration, and it is upon leadership's decision.
What other advice do I have?
If others are looking into using Graylog Enterprise and have multiple log sources that they need to monitor and correlate, I would recommend Graylog Enterprise. It is a good product, allowing them to ingest all the logs into a single platform where they can search, triage, create rules, and monitor every alert.
Graylog Enterprise is a good, secure SIEM platform with mature investigation capabilities that works best when integrated into multiple log sources. I rate this product an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?