When comparing Graylog2 vs Flume, the Slant community recommends Graylog2 for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Graylog2 is ranked 7th while Flume is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Graylog2 is:
Graylog2 is licensed under GNU GPL v3.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Free and open source
Graylog2 is licensed under GNU GPL v3.
Pro Easy setup
Graylog2 can be quickly installed on any Linux machine running Java 7 via an executable that allows installing and configuring remote dependencies and graylog2 itself via a web interface.
Pro Real-time
Information and statistics displayed update in real time.
Pro Great interface
Easy to overview, intuitive and full of explainers.
Pro Little maintenance
Pro Streams allow identifying events in real-time and perform actions
Stream allow filtering events in real time and perform action such as issue alerts or forward messages.
Pro Server-side functionality can be extended via plug-ins
Pro Works well with just about any type of logging
Pro Flume is transactional (no lost when duplicating streams), and can be backuped by Kafka
Pro Hadoop integration
Flume was created to efficiently move log data to Apache Hadoop's HDFS.
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under Apache 2.0.
Cons
Con Limited logging protocols support
Graylog2 only has support for syslog and GELF.
Con Self hosted. Difficult to maintain.
Maintenance is very difficult because of the high volume nature of logs.
Con Slow
Takes multiple servers even for smaller deployments
Con Interface is hard to use
The interface is hard to use, loaded with data, and difficult to understand.
Con Hard to manage
Since Flume cannot do multiplex connections, it's extremely hard to manage. It's essentially one socket per log type.