The Log Management Conundrum
Organizations have grappled with the cost-benefit tradeoff of log management and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) for decades. Do you capture every log at the risk of overwhelming storage, infrastructure, and license costs, or limit your collection and gamble on what’s truly important? The high costs imposed by traditional vendors have dictated Sophie’s choice, forcing enterprises into a game of compromise that risks the entire organization’s security.
But the world has changed. With cyber threats constantly evolving and compliance regulations demanding comprehensive data retention, the old question—“To log or not to log?”—should no longer be relevant. With Graylog’s innovative data management capabilities, organizations can now log everything without sacrificing budget, efficiency, or compliance. This blog explores the evolution of log management, the limitations of traditional approaches, and how Graylog 6.0 and 6.1 are rewriting the rules.
From Necessity to Innovation: A Brief History of Log Management
Logging has long been an essential practice for IT and security teams. Whether troubleshooting operational issues, investigating security incidents, or meeting audit requirements, logs are the forensic breadcrumbs that lead to answers. However, as data volumes exploded in the past two decades, traditional log management and SIEM tools buckled under the pressure resulting in scalability, search, forensic, and incident management challenges.
Splunk’s Approach: Powerful but Pricey
Splunk pioneered the commercial log management market, offering a powerful platform capable of processing and analyzing vast amounts of data. However, like many other vendors, its pricing model—based on volume, ingestion rate, or resource usage—quickly became a source of frustration for customers. Organizations faced unpredictable and unsustainable costs, prompting tough decisions about what data to keep and what to discard.
This frustration has spawned a new wave of innovation, with companies like Cribl introducing data brokers. These tools position themselves as intermediaries, filtering and redirecting data before it reaches costly platforms like Splunk. But while they promised cost savings, they introduced new challenges and compromises.
The Problem with Data Brokers
Data brokers attempt to ease the cost burden by segregating logs into categories:
- Important logs go to the SIEM for analysis.
- Less critical logs are routed to low-cost storage solutions.
This approach seems logical at first glance, but it presents critical flaws:
1. The Guessing Game
How do you know what’s important before an incident occurs? The unfortunate reality is that you often don’t. Incidents frequently reveal that seemingly “unimportant” logs—discarded or sent to cold storage—held the key to understanding the breach. Forensic investigations hit a dead end once these logs are gone or inaccessible.
2. Incompatibility
When logs are redirected to non-standard storage or formats, they lose the contextual and structural integrity needed for seamless analysis. Many SIEM platforms struggle to ingest or process such data later, creating barriers to effective investigations.
3. Compliance Complexity
Regulations often mandate the retention of specific logs for defined periods. Using third-party data brokers complicates this, as organizations must ensure compliance across multiple platforms and vendors. The result is fragmented data management that increases operational risk and expense.
Graylog Data Management: Coverage Without Compromise
Recognizing these limitations, Graylog has introduced an innovative approach to log management and data routing. With Graylog, organizations can achieve comprehensive log management and SIEM without the compromises of traditional models or third-party brokers.
The Data Routing Revolution
Graylog’s long-standing pipeline management capabilities are at the heart of this innovation, which allows multiple actions to process, enrich, and route data within the platform. This functionality has already enhanced data management and this new data routing functionality is straightforward and easily adopted by existing customers as they are already used to using this workflow. This capability allows organizations to intelligently route logs based on their value and use case—directly within the Graylog platform.
Unlike third-party brokers, Graylog’s approach solves the guessing game introduced earlier since data and pipeline management, data routing, and analytics are all part of the same integral solution vs untethered across different products/policies with different data formats and user interfaces.
How It Works
Active Data: Logs with immediate value are processed, indexed, and stored for quick access. These are the lifeline for real-time analysis, alerting, and troubleshooting. Graylog provides automated tiering hot, warm, and archive storage even at this layer, where the organization can control search speed and storage cost.
Standby Data: Logs that may not seem critical today are seamlessly routed to low-cost storage tiers. They remain accessible, indexed, and in their original format, ready to be retrieved when needed, and don’t count against your license.
Granular Compliance: The platform includes retention policies, which allow organizations to align their logging practices with regulatory requirements.
This approach ensures cost efficiency and predictability across three critical dimensions:
License Costs: Pay only for the data you actively process and index.
Infrastructure Costs: Optimize storage with tiered options that suit your needs.
Resource Costs: With data brokers, data is processed multiple times (e.g., Cribl has pre-processing + post-processing, and then the SIEM’s processing, etc.). Each time data is processed, there is a resource cost, and equally important, there is a risk that contextual data is lost or misinterpreted, interfering with your downstream analytics.
Why Graylog Stands Apart
Graylog is one of only three vendors with 15+ years of experience offering a unified platform for centralized log management (CLM) and security information and event management (SIEM). It covers the logging needs of Dev_Ops, IT_Ops, Cloud_Ops, and Sec_Ops Teams. Whether deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or as a SaaS solution, Graylog delivers feature parity across all environments.
This versatility, combined with this refreshing new approach to Threat Detection and Incident Response (TDIR), rapid search, and investigation, makes Graylog the go-to choice for organizations seeking to consolidate their logging, security, and operational needs.
Options, Not Obligations
Unlike traditional vendors, Graylog’s pricing and deployment models prioritize customer choice. Whether you’re an enterprise with a legacy on-premises setup or a lean, cloud-native organization, Graylog meets you where you are—offering solutions tailored to your environment.
The Maturity Point: Why This Matters Now
The introduction of embedded Data Routing, where data processing is performed at the same time as all other processing activities using the same workflow, represents a maturity milestone for the log management and SIEM industry. For years, the market has been constrained by outdated pricing models and siloed solutions. Graylog’s innovations mark a turning point, empowering organizations to:
Log everything without fear of cost or complexity.
Streamline operations with unified data management.
Ensure regulatory compliance with built-in retention and accessibility.
In an era where data-driven decisions are paramount, Graylog redefines what’s possible in log management.
Final Thoughts
To log or not to log is no longer the question. The answer is clear: log it all. With Graylog, you get coverage without compromise, options without obligations, and a future where data is no longer a burden but a resource.
Ross Brewer
Cybersecurity Authority | Strategic Advisor | Media Commentator
As Vice President and Managing Director of EMEA at Graylog, Ross Brewer is transforming how organizations harness their log data to outsmart cyber threats and streamline IT operations. By leveraging Graylog’s scalable log management and security analytics platform, he empowers Dev_Ops, IT_Ops, Cloud_Ops, and Sec_Ops teams to rapidly detect attacks, accelerate troubleshooting, and reduce downtime—ultimately driving resilience, efficiency, and confidence across the enterprise.
