“You can’t investigate what you don’t have”. Every analyst knows the pain of missing context. You’re in the middle of a high-stakes investigation, but the logs you need are gone, archived weeks ago due to retention limits. Or worse, they were never collected in the first place to keep costs under control. This is the Visibility vs. Cost trap, and it puts analysts at a disadvantage every day.
The Analyst’s Reality
To stay within budget or performance limits, many SIEMs force uncomfortable trade-offs: ingest less, retain less, or archive aggressively. For analysts, this means:
Incomplete Visibility: You can’t search for what was never collected or collected and then dropped. This impacts threat hunts on new indicators of compromise and your standard triage and investigations.
Hidden Archives: Even when logs are archived, it is:
- Difficult to search into,
- Easy to forget about,
- And painfully slow to restore due to preprocessing steps.
Investigation Paralysis: These barriers delay time-sensitive work, compromise detection depth, and push analysts to make decisions with incomplete data.
How Graylog Changes the Game
Graylog removes this compromise with an intelligent data control and search-aware guidance that empowers analysts:
Collect Everything: Send all logs to Graylog without worrying about costs spiraling out of control.
Split Actionable and Standby Data: Graylog’s data pipeline management separates active and standby data. Active data applies to your real-time threat detections, dashboards, and reports, while standby data does just that, stands data by in inexpensive storage until needed. Data in the standby data lake does not apply to your Graylog license, giving the flexibility to collect and store what is needed without budget concerns.
Search-Time Awareness: When investigating, Graylog automatically notifies analysts when relevant logs exist in standby storage. Preview allows a sneak peek at the logs without applying to your license, allowing full control over what and when data is retrieved.
No Restoration Needed: Logs in the data lake are preprocessed and ready, eliminating the time-consuming rehydration phase.
The Analyst Advantage
- Run deep, historical investigations without delay.
- Never miss the bigger picture due to retention policies.
- Cut down on dependency on backend or data engineering support.
When you can collect and search everything, you’re not just more effective—you’re also faster and freer to pursue advanced investigations. Find out how Graylog Security can help.
