In the world of log management and security analytics, one thing is abundantly clear: data volumes fluctuate. Yet most pricing models haven’t caught up. Traditional ingest-based licensing models force organizations to size their license needs based on a worst-case capacity scenario—the “high-water mark”—whether those spikes are rare and/or expected.
The Problem with Ingest Pricing
Think about how your environment actually works. You might see:
- Peak usage during business hours
- Lower volumes on weekends
- Sharp dips, or spikes, during holidays
- Seasonal swings based on operational cadence
But if your vendor’s pricing model doesn’t account for these natural ebbs and flows, you’re left paying for capacity you may not consistently use. It’s an uncomfortable trade-off: either overpay to cover your times with heavy volumes or risk missing critical data.
Enter Graylog’s Consumption-Based Pricing
At Graylog, we believe you should only pay for what delivers real value. That’s why we are excited to announce our new drawdown pricing model—a flexible, usage-aligned approach that reflects the real rhythms of your business[i].
Instead of obligating your organization to choose a license tied to daily maximums, drawdown pricing works like a prepaid gift card: As you elect to write Active Data to Graylog’s indexing tier, you “draw down” or consume from your total allotment. Multiple clusters can participate under the same drawdown allotment, so as your organization matures, you can deploy new clusters where and when you need to. Finally, this capability is available for self-managed and on-premise installations as well as Graylog-hosted environments on AWS, making Graylog the only SIEM solution provider to bring this parity to market.
You gain:
- Flexible and shared costs
- Freedom from overprovisioning
- Licensing that ebbs and flows like your business
Whether it’s a quiet weekend or a sudden incident spike, Graylog’s pricing adapts to how and when you actually use data.
Coupled with Smarter Data Handling
But pricing is only half the story. With Graylog, native pipeline management and tiered data handling maximize value and align it to your costs.
Our platform enables you to:
- Parse and enrich almost any log source without worrying about a fixed license capacity
- Route high-priority data to active analytics for dashboards, alerts, threat detection, and compliance.
- Move aged data into less expensive warm tiers while retaining immediate access to longer stretches of historic data.
- “Park” less critical or less time-sensitive data—like voluminous firewall access logs, internal domain DNS queries, or verbose application logs—into our native standby Data Lake. The log data is already parsed, enriched, and structured, so retrieval is fast.
Even better, Data Lake Preview allows you to view records before retrieving them, so you can make informed decisions before incurring any additional drawdown cost. It’s transparency and control, built into the platform.
With Graylog, the choice is yours. Simply put – we believe in options, not obligations.
Pay for What Matters
Drawdown pricing aligns perfectly with Graylog’s philosophy: log data is only as valuable as what it enables you to do. So why pay equally for everything, regardless of relevance or urgency?
By combining our new flexible licensing model with native pipeline management, Graylog empowers you to:
- Maintain visibility without compromise
- Stay within budget
- Scale with confidence
Experience Graylog and contact us today to witness what a SIEM without compromise means.
[i] While we’re excited to offer this new consumption-based pricing model to our customers, we understand that some folks are more familiar and comfortable with our traditional capacity model. Rest assured, we will continue to offer our traditional licensing model to both new and existing customers. The choice is yours. As it should be!
