Graylog Security (SaaS) vs. Exabeam Security Operations Platform (SaaS)

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 Exabeam Security Operations Platform 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

Open Source Flexibility and Community Support

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to be customized, extended, and integrated based on open-source technologies. Community support involves the assistance and resources available from the user community of an open-source project.

Graylog

Graylog Security is built on open-source standards, which allows organizations to customize and extend their SIEM solution according to their specific needs. The active and large Graylog community contributes to continuous improvements, shared resources, and robust support. This collaborative environment accelerates innovation and problem-solving, serving as an unofficial QA test bed. Thousands of users test, use, and scrutinize new features and capabilities daily, offering a significant advantage in the solution’s stability.

Exabeam

While the Exabeam Security Operations Platform offers a powerful and comprehensive solution, it is not open source, limiting customization and extension flexibility. Organizations must rely on Exabeam’s singular QA of proprietary features and vendor-specific updates. While Exabeam Security Operations Platform provides strong support and professional services, it does not benefit from the same level of community-driven innovation and shared resources as Graylog Security.

Threat Intelligence and Detection Content

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to collect and analyze information about current and emerging threats. Detection rules are predefined patterns or signatures used to identify malicious activities within a network. They enhance the SIEM’s ability to proactively identify and respond to threats, reduce the risk of breaches, and improve overall security posture.

Graylog

Graylog Security, through a strategic partnership with SOC Prime, includes built-in detection rules aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework as part of the subscription. These rules are regularly updated to address the latest threats, providing Graylog users with up-to-date protection. Graylog also allows users to customize and create their own detection rules, leveraging community contributions and external threat intelligence feeds. Unlike Exabeam, the Graylog Security ML engine is exposed to enable users to create their own anomaly detectors.

Exabeam

The Exabeam Security Operations Platform uses its proprietary Threat Intelligence Service, which ingests multiple commercial and open-source threat intelligence feeds and aggregates, scrubs, and ranks them. It also uses proprietary machine learning algorithms to produce a stream of indicators of compromise (IoCs) and detection capabilities, including pre-built use cases and alignment with the MITRE ATT&CK framework. However, creating and customizing detection rules might be less flexible than Graylog Security’s open-source approach.

AI-Driven Security Operations

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to leverage artificial intelligence to enhance threat detection, investigation, and response. This involves using machine learning models to automate and improve the accuracy of security operations and reduce the time and effort required to detect and respond to threats.

Graylog

Graylog Security provides automation features and integrates with other tools for response automation, but these capabilities often require more configuration and custom scripting. While powerful, Graylog’s approach can be more complex and time-consuming to set up compared to Exabeam’s more integrated and streamlined automation features. While Graylog Security also incorporates machine learning and anomaly detection, it focuses more on providing the tools and flexibility for users to build and customize their models. This can be powerful for organizations with the expertise to develop tailored AI solutions, but it may require more effort and expertise than Exabeam’s out-of-the-box AI-driven capabilities.

Exabeam

The Exabeam Security Operations Platform excels in AI-driven security operations with its advanced use of AI to automate threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR). The platform learns normal behavior patterns and uses this knowledge to identify anomalies, prioritize threats, and automate responses. This approach enhances the accuracy of threat detection and speeds up the entire investigation process by providing automated threat timelines and impact analysis. The Exabeam Security Operations Platform offers automated incident response capabilities, integrating with various security tools to automate and orchestrate response workflows.

Behavioral Analytics

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to monitor and analyze user and entity behavior to detect deviations from normal patterns that might indicate insider security threats, compromised accounts, and other subtle indicators of malicious activity that traditional security measures might miss.

Graylog

Graylog Security offers behavioral analytics through its machine learning features, but the approach is more customizable and requires users to define and train their models. This provides flexibility but may not match the out-of-the-box behavioral analytics and user entity behavior analysis (UEBA) capabilities that Exabeam offers. Graylog’s solution can be very effective but typically involves more manual setup and tuning.

Exabeam

Exabeam Security Operations Platform is known for its advanced behavioral analytics capabilities. The platform uses machine learning to build behavioral baselines and detect anomalies across user and entity activities. This includes identifying lateral movements, changes in device usage, and deviations in access patterns, which are critical for detecting sophisticated threats such as insider attacks and account compromises.

Persona-Based Workflows

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to tailor user experience and functionality based on the specific roles and responsibilities of different users within the security operations team, improving productivity and effectiveness in handling security tasks.

Graylog

Graylog Security offers a flexible and customizable user interface that focuses on the Security Analyst persona. It is tailored for analysts to quickly access investigations, alerts, and reporting workflows that address commonplace security challenges. Analysts can also easily create customized dashboards and visualizations based on their investigation evidence.

Exabeam

Exabeam Security Operations Platform users can customize the interface and functionalities for different types of users, such as analysts, managers, and incident responders. This approach ensures that each user has access to the tools and information they need most, streamlining their tasks and enhancing overall operational efficiency.

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.

Exabeam

Exabeam Security Operations Platform 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.

Guided Threat Detection and Response

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to provide step-by-step recommendations and automated processes for identifying and responding to threats, often incorporating industry best practices and frameworks for consistency and thoroughness in threat detection and response.

Graylog

Graylog Security provides extensive threat detection and response capabilities, including alignment with the MITRE ATT&CK framework and curated Sigma Rules from SOC Prime. The remediation information provided by SOC Prime fuels the guided incident response workflow. Additional emphasis is placed on providing integration with flexible tools that can be leveraged for response capabilities.

Exabeam

Exabeam Security Operations Platform offers guided threat detection and response workflows that map data to prepackaged use cases and the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This guided approach provides actionable recommendations and helps organizations improve their threat coverage and response strategies.

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 any 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.

Exabeam

Exabeam Security Operations Platform depends heavily on supervised machine learning, which requires more setup time and tuning, whereas Graylog Security’s use of rules-based detection and unsupervised machine learning dramatically reduces setup time for threat detection. The Exabeam Security Operations Platform license is based on the total user population, whereas Graylog Security can provide lower upfront licensing options based solely on log volumes.

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.

Industry

Use Case

Graylog Security (SaaS) vs. Exabeam Security Operations Platform (SaaS)

Which SIEM is Right for You?

The Rundown

The Comparison & Context

Open Source Flexibility and Community Support

Graylog

Exabeam

Threat Intelligence and Detection Content

Graylog

Exabeam

AI-Driven Security Operations

Graylog

Exabeam

Behavioral Analytics

Graylog

Exabeam

Persona-Based Workflows

Graylog

Exabeam

API Security Integration

Graylog

Exabeam

Guided Threat Detection and Response

Graylog

Exabeam

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Graylog

Exabeam

See How Graylog Stacks Up

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

Features

LEARN

SUPPORT

Company