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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Log Management
  4. Log Management
  5. AWS CloudTrail vs Graylog

AWS CloudTrail vs Graylog

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Stacks304
Followers280
Votes14
Graylog
Graylog
Stacks595
Followers711
Votes70
GitHub Stars7.9K
Forks1.1K

AWS CloudTrail vs Graylog: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here we compare key differences between AWS CloudTrail and Graylog.

  1. Data Collection and Sources: AWS CloudTrail primarily focuses on providing detailed logs for actions taken within the AWS environment, such as API calls and changes to resources. On the other hand, Graylog is a more versatile tool that can collect and analyze logs from a variety of sources beyond just AWS, including servers, applications, and network devices.

  2. Deployment and Management: AWS CloudTrail is a cloud-native service provided by Amazon Web Services, which means it is fully managed and integrated with other AWS services. Graylog, on the other hand, requires installation and management on a separate server or infrastructure, providing more flexibility but also requiring more maintenance and resources from the user.

  3. Search and Analysis Capabilities: AWS CloudTrail offers basic search and filtering options for navigating through the logs it collects, focusing on providing audit trails and compliance data. Graylog, however, offers a more advanced search and analysis engine that allows for complex queries, correlation of data from multiple sources, and the creation of dashboards and alerts based on log data.

  4. Scalability and Customization: AWS CloudTrail is designed to handle large volumes of logs generated within the AWS environment, providing scalability and reliability out of the box. Graylog, while also scalable, offers more customization options for configuring data inputs, processing pipelines, and storage backends based on the specific needs of the user.

  5. Cost Structure: The pricing for AWS CloudTrail is based on the volume of logs generated within the AWS environment, with different rates for management and data storage. Graylog, on the other hand, is an open-source tool that is free to use but may incur costs for infrastructure, maintenance, and additional features depending on the deployment scenario.

  6. Community Support and Integration: AWS CloudTrail is tightly integrated with other AWS services and has official support from Amazon, while Graylog benefits from a strong open-source community that provides plugins, extensions, and integrations with a wide range of third-party tools and services, allowing for greater flexibility and extensibility.

In Summary, AWS CloudTrail and Graylog offer distinct approaches to log management, with CloudTrail focusing on AWS-specific data collection and compliance, while Graylog provides a more flexible and customizable solution for collecting, analyzing, and monitoring logs from diverse sources.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Graylog
Graylog

With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

Increased Visibility- CloudTrail provides increased visibility into your user activity by recording AWS API calls. You can answer questions such as, what actions did a given user take over a given time period? For a given resource, which user has taken actions on it over a given time period? What is the source IP address of a given activity? Which activities failed due to inadequate permissions?;Durable and Inexpensive Log File Storage- CloudTrail uses Amazon S3 for log file storage and delivery, so log files are stored durably and inexpensively. You can use Amazon S3 lifecycle configuration rules to further reduce storage costs. For example, you can define rules to automatically delete old log files or archive them to Amazon Glacier for additional savings.;Easy Administration- CloudTrail is a fully managed service; you simply turn on CloudTrail for your account using the AWS Management Console, the Command Line Interface, or the CloudTrail SDK and start receiving CloudTrail log files in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you specify.;Reliable- CloudTrail continuously transports events from AWS services using a highly available and fault tolerant processing pipeline.;Timely Delivery- CloudTrail typically delivers events within 15 minutes of the API call.;Log File Aggregation- CloudTrail can be configured to aggregate log files across multiple accounts and regions so that log files are delivered to a single bucket. Please refer to the of the AWS CloudTrail User Guide for detailed instructions.;Notifications for Log File Delivery- CloudTrail can be configured to publish a notification for each log file delivered, thus enabling you to automatically take action upon log file delivery. CloudTrail uses the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for notifications.;Choice of Partner Solutions- Multiple partners including AlertLogic, Boundary, Loggly, Splunk and Sumologic offer integrated solutions to analyze CloudTrail log files. These solutions include features like change tracking, troubleshooting, and security analysis.
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
7.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.1K
Stacks
304
Stacks
595
Followers
280
Followers
711
Votes
14
Votes
70
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Very powerful
  • 2
    Backup to S3
Pros
  • 19
    Open source
  • 13
    Powerfull
  • 8
    Well documented
  • 6
    Alerts
  • 5
    User authentification
Cons
  • 1
    Does not handle frozen indices at all
Integrations
Boundary
Boundary
Loggly
Loggly
Splunk Cloud
Splunk Cloud
GitHub
GitHub

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail, Graylog?

Papertrail

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Logmatic

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Logentries

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

Sematext

Sematext

Sematext pulls together performance monitoring, logs, user experience and synthetic monitoring that tools organizations need to troubleshoot performance issues faster.

Fluentd

Fluentd

Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure.

ELK

ELK

It is the acronym for three open source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash is a server‑side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a "stash" like Elasticsearch. Kibana lets users visualize data with charts and graphs in Elasticsearch.

Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic

Cloud-based machine data analytics platform that enables companies to proactively identify availability and performance issues in their infrastructure, improve their security posture and enhance application rollouts. Companies using Sumo Logic reduce their mean-time-to-resolution by 50% and can save hundreds of thousands of dollars, annually. Customers include Netflix, Medallia, Orange, and GoGo Inflight.

Splunk

Splunk

It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

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