When comparing Sumo Logic vs Graylog2, 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 Sumo Logic is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Graylog2 is:
Graylog2 is licensed under GNU GPL v3.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Scalable
Sumo logic is entirely cloud based and very scalable.
Pro Flexible licensing model
Licensing cost is primarily determined by daily ingest of logs, however this is averaged out over 30 days instead of locking a user out of their own data after an arbitrary number of license breaches.
Pro Truly multi-tenant
Sumo Logic is truly multi-tenant, a single instance running on the server can serve multiple groups of users.
Pro A large set of supporting Apps
Allows customers to quickly setup and start getting actionable insights from their infrastructure by using Apps that integrate with various different platforms out of the box.
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
Cons
Con Useless need for collectors
You have to install a plugin on each host to collect logs, the collector is 89MBs and is written in Java. there's no reason to install a Java tool to send syslog data when Linux already does that natively. The memory footprint for Java-based apps is way too high and, in this case, completely unnecessary.
Con Does not support structured data
They don't support RFC5424 standard events
Con Install is very painful
Con Search is very difficult
Here's an example:_sourceCategory=*windows* _sourceName=Security (4771 OR 4768 OR 4776 OR 4625) | parse regex "EventIdentifier = (?<event_id>\d+?);" | parse regex "ComputerName = \"(?<hostname>.+?)\"" | parse regex "(?:Result|Failure|Error) Code:.+?(?<result_code>0x[A-Fa-f\d]+)\b" nodrop | where result_code !="0x0" AND event_id in ("4771", "4768", "4776","4625") | count by hostname
Con Indexing and search are very slow
Sending around 45000 events to it may take more than 3 minutes to show up in the interface.
Once they show up, a search may take up to 32 seconds to return results. On only 45000 events, the search should return in milliseconds.
Con Difficult / Confusing Interface
The service and interface are very confusing.
Con There can be issues with smaller vendors
There may be some issues when using devices and services for smaller vendors which are not officially supported by Sumo Logic.
Con No free version
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.