Graylog Security (self-hosted) vs. LogRhythm SIEM (self-hosted)

Which SIEM is Right for You?

The Rundown

In today’s rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, deploying the right Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution is vital to protecting your organization’s assets. This comparison between Graylog Security and LogRhythm SIEM explores each platform’s strengths to help security professionals make informed decisions that align with their organization’s needs. While both vendors offer threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) and compliance management capabilities, they differ in meaningful ways, such as deployment flexibility, advanced analytics, threat coverage, and TCO. This analysis sheds light on these key differentiators, empowering decision-makers to choose a solution that best meets their specific security challenges and operational goals.

The Comparison & Context

Data Ingestion and Normalization

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to collect and import diverse log data sources. Normalization involves converting different data formats into a consistent format for analysis.

Graylog

Graylog Security excels with its powerful data ingestion capabilities, which allow it to handle a variety of data sources and formats. The Graylog Schema ensures that all data ingested is normalized into a standard format, making it easier to analyze and correlate across different sources. It also provides robust data enrichment and processing capabilities within the same interface, allowing users to extract meaningful insights from raw data quickly and efficiently.

LogRhythm

LogRhythm SIEM supports various data sources and offers pre-configured log collection and processing rules. It is architected with Inputs and processing rules combined, meaning bringing in a data source that isn’t supported yet can be challenging, and no mechanisms exist to build additional data enrichment. However, LogRhythm often requires more manual configuration and custom parsing to handle diverse data sources effectively.

Search and Query Capabilities

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to effectively allow users to quickly locate relevant data and insights and generate queries for specific information, enabling faster incident investigation and response.

Graylog

Graylog Security is known for its high-speed full-text search because of its index-on-write capabilities. It allows security analysts to perform complex queries and get results in near real-time. Graylog Security uses a query interface that is based on the Lucene syntax. It is intuitive and easy to use, allowing for free text search and field-based queries. This simplicity makes it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise. Graylog Security also provides advanced visualization tools, making exploring and interpreting data easier. These powerful search and visualization capabilities significantly enhance the speed and effectiveness of threat detection and investigation.

LogRhythm

LogRhythm SIEM offers search functionality with its graphical user interface, allowing analysts to search log data using keyword-driven search and suggested search features. Users are required to use LogRhythm SIEM’s GUI to build search terms. There is a way to make “advanced” queries, but it requires experience using Lucene. LogRhythm SIEM search can also get complicated because LogRhythm separates “Events” and “Logs” into different data stores. While LogRhythm’s search capabilities are effective, they generally do not match the speed and flexibility of Graylog’s full-text search engine. The user experience in LogRhythm can be more cumbersome for large data sets, potentially slowing down the investigation process.

Integrated SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, & Response)

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to automate repetitive tasks and orchestrate incident response processes, integrating various security tools and processes to streamline operations so security teams can focus on more critical analysis and response actions.

Graylog

Graylog Security offers automation features through integrations and custom scripting, but achieving the same level of SOAR functionality as LogRhythm SIEM requires more configuration and additional tools. Graylog Security can integrate with various SOAR platforms, and the out-of-the-box automation capabilities are on par with those provided by LogRhythm SIEM.

LogRhythm

LogRhythm SIEM provides robust built-in SOAR capabilities, allowing for automated response workflows and seamless integration with other security tools. This integration simplifies incident response and reduces the time to mitigate threats. LogRhythm SIEM’s SOAR features include implementing “case tasks” that can be created and assigned but are not as robust as traditional playbooks.

User & Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to use machine learning and analytics to identify and monitor user and entity behavior deviations, detecting potential insider security threats, compromised accounts, and other anomalies that traditional security measures might miss.

Graylog

Graylog Security provides UEBA features through machine learning jobs and anomaly detection in OpenSearch. This approach is more customizable and requires users to define and train/tune their models. Graylog’s approach allows for flexibility and customization but can also mean more manual setup and tuning.

LogRhythm

LogRhythm SIEM offers machine learning capabilities through Cloud AI, its proprietary cloud service. This employs supervised ML, which requires a learning curve and time to train the models. There is no self-managed/on-prem version or capability to create custom anomaly detectors.

API Security Integration

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to include information about API vulnerabilities in the overall log data correlation, search, detection, and alerting capabilities.

Graylog

With its acquisition of Resurface.io, Graylog has expanded into API security, offering built-in capabilities to monitor API traffic within Graylog Security. This is increasingly important as APIs become a critical attack vector.

LogRhythm

LogRhythm SIEM does not natively provide the same level of integrated API security, making Graylog Security a more comprehensive security solution for organizations developing cloud-native or enterprise applications.

Compliance Management & Reporting

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to help organizations adhere to industry regulations by demonstrating regulatory alignment and generating necessary compliance reports.

Graylog

Graylog Security offers compliance features, but achieving the same comprehensive and automated compliance reporting often requires additional configuration and manual effort. Graylog’s open architecture allows for flexibility in building custom compliance reports, which can be time-consuming for organizations. As a result, LogRhythm SIEM provides a better out-of-the-box experience for compliance management.

LogRhythm

LogRhythm SIEM excels in compliance management with its pre-built compliance modules and automated reporting features that cover a wide range of regulations, such as HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and more. This simplifies the process of maintaining compliance and generating audit-ready reports. LogRhythm’s comprehensive compliance features are integrated into its SIEM platform, reducing the burden on security teams for compliance-related tasks.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

This capability addresses the total cost of owning and operating an SIEM solution over its lifecycle, including initial purchase costs, implementation expenses, maintenance fees, and additional operational costs.

Graylog

Graylog Security is optimized for high performance and efficient resource utilization. Its distributed architecture allows for horizontal scaling, meaning additional resources can be added as needed without significantly impacting performance. This makes Graylog Security highly resource-efficient for handling large volumes of data. It offers a flexible, cost-effective pricing model, significantly lowering initial and ongoing costs. Strong controls for data routing, data tiering, and mature administrative capabilities reduce data management requirements for storing long data periods. The ingest-based pricing allows organizations to pay only for what they need, making it a budget-friendly option with predictable expenses.

LogRhythm

Traditionally, self-hosted/on-premises instances of LogRhythm are a mix of Windows and Linux systems sold as an appliance/virtual appliance, which can create additional overhead managing these different operating systems. LogRhythm SIEM’s traditional licensing model based on data ingestion rates can create financial disincentives for organizations to collect and analyze all relevant security data. LogRhythm SIEM also scales horizontally, requiring additional appliances to support increased log volumes. As a result, the TCO for LogRhythm SIEM can be higher than Graylog Security’s more flexible and cost-effective pricing model.

See How Graylog Stacks Up

Graylog Security Named a Leader and Fast Mover in GigaOm 2024 SIEM Radar Report

Graylog stands out in GigaOm’s Innovation/Feature Play quadrant for its flexibility, responsiveness, and cutting-edge functionalities. The platform excelled in cost optimization, alert fidelity and self-tuning capabilities, scalability, data enrichment, and anomaly detection.

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Graylog Security (self-hosted) vs. LogRhythm SIEM (self-hosted)

Which SIEM is Right for You?

The Rundown

The Comparison & Context

Data Ingestion and Normalization

Graylog

LogRhythm

Search and Query Capabilities

Graylog

LogRhythm

Integrated SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, & Response)

Graylog

LogRhythm

User & Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)

Graylog

LogRhythm

API Security Integration

Graylog

LogRhythm

Compliance Management & Reporting

Graylog

LogRhythm

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Graylog

LogRhythm

See How Graylog Stacks Up

Graylog Security Named a Leader and Fast Mover in GigaOm 2024 SIEM Radar Report

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