Graylog Security vs. Microsoft Sentinel

Which SIEM Should I Choose?

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 Microsoft Sentinel 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

Flexible Deployment Options

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to be deployed in various environments, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid setups, and adapt to an organization’s existing infrastructure and specific needs.

Graylog

Graylog Security offers extensive flexibility in deployment options, including on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid environments. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the deployment model that best suits their existing infrastructure, compliance requirements, and operational preferences.

Microsoft

Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native solution designed to run on Microsoft Azure. While it provides robust cloud capabilities, its focus on the Azure environment can limit flexibility for organizations that operate in multi-cloud or hybrid environments, mainly if they use non-Microsoft services extensively.

Data Ownership and Control

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to allow an organization to fully own, manage, and control its data without reliance on third-party management, complying with regulatory requirements, and maintaining control over sensitive information.

Graylog

Graylog Security allows organizations to retain full ownership and control over their data, whether deployed on-premises or with Graylog’s Cloud service. This capability includes the ability to archive data offline. This capability is crucial for organizations operating in industries with stringent regulatory requirements and organizations prioritizing data sovereignty.

Microsoft

As a cloud-native solution, Microsoft Sentinel operates within the Azure environment, where data management and control are shared with Microsoft. While Sentinel offers strong data security measures, some organizations may prefer the greater control and ownership provided by Graylog Security.

Customization and Extensibility

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to be tailored to specific organizational needs and to extend its capabilities through integrations and custom developments, enhancing its effectiveness and usability.

Graylog

Graylog Security’s open-source foundation enables customization and extensibility. Organizations can develop custom plugins and integrate with various tools to meet specific needs. This level of customization supports a highly tailored and adaptable security strategy. While Graylog Security offers robust integration capabilities, it does not provide the same seamless experience within a single vendor ecosystem as Sentinel. Graylog Security integrates well with various tools, but the integration experience may require more manual configuration and management.

Microsoft

Microsoft Sentinel is deeply integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure, Microsoft 365, and other Microsoft security tools like Defender. This integration provides a platform for managing and monitoring security across the entire Microsoft environment. However, its proprietary nature can limit the extent of customization compared to the open-source Graylog Security. While Sentinel is highly capable, the flexibility to adapt to unique or rapidly changing requirements can be more constrained.

Advanced Threat Intelligence Integration

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to incorporate up-to-date threat data from various sources to enhance the detection and analysis of potential security threats, improving the accuracy of threat detection and enabling proactive defense against emerging threats.

Graylog

Graylog Security supports threat intelligence integration with out-of-the-box support for various open-source threat intelligence feeds. Graylog’s powerful Pipeline capabilities insert matching threat intelligence context into streaming log data, including threat severity ratings, CVE IDs, and URLs to additional details.

Microsoft

Microsoft Sentinel integrates with Microsoft’s threat intelligence network, including Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence and other third-party feeds. This integration provides continuous updates on the latest threats, enhancing Sentinel’s ability to detect and respond to sophisticated attacks.

Automated Incident Response

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to use predefined workflows and automated actions to manage and respond to security incidents without manual intervention, freeing security teams to focus on more complex tasks.

Graylog

Graylog Security provides automation features but often requires more manual setup and customization. While Graylog can achieve similar results, Sentinel’s out-of-the-box automation capabilities are more user-friendly.

Microsoft

Microsoft Sentinel integrates with Microsoft Logic Apps to provide automated incident response capabilities. It offers orchestration and automation capabilities, allowing organizations to create response workflows.

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.

Microsoft

Microsoft Sentinel 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 and Reporting

This capability addresses the SIEM solution’s ability to generate reports and provide evidence that an organization adheres to regulatory requirements and industry standards, reducing the risk of fines and improving the organization’s security posture.

Graylog

Graylog Security also provides compliance and reporting through its Illuminate content service, which is included with the product’s annual subscription. Graylog’s ready-for-audit reports are mapped to the specific controls across various regulatory compliance frameworks.

Microsoft

Microsoft Sentinel includes compliance management features and customizable reporting capabilities. It helps organizations demonstrate various regulatory requirements with pre-built templates and automated compliance reporting.

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.

Microsoft

A limited number of log sources aren’t counted against log ingestion subscriptions, so organizations would have to pay for some common log types to be ingested if they want complete visibility into their environment. Sentinel’s free data retention policy is capped at 90 days, which may pose a challenge for organizations in industries (i.e., healthcare) where log data should be retained for six months due to several regulations. Also, organizations using Microsoft must consider the costs of ingesting logs that are not part of the Microsoft suite. Incident response automation capabilities, like LogicApps and machine learning, also have additional associated charges, causing an increase in TCO.

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 vs. Microsoft Sentinel

Which SIEM Should I Choose?

The Rundown

The Comparison & Context

Flexible Deployment Options

Graylog

Microsoft

Data Ownership and Control

Graylog

Microsoft

Customization and Extensibility

Graylog

Microsoft

Advanced Threat Intelligence Integration

Graylog

Microsoft

Automated Incident Response

Graylog

Microsoft

API Security Integration

Graylog

Microsoft

Compliance and Reporting

Graylog

Microsoft

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Graylog

Microsoft

See How Graylog Stacks Up

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

Features

LEARN

SUPPORT

Company