AWS CloudTrail vs Graylog vs Logstash

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AWS CloudTrail

291
277
+ 1
14
Graylog

608
704
+ 1
70
Logstash

12K
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+ 1
103

AWS CloudTrail vs Graylog vs Logstash: What are the differences?

### Key Differences Between AWS CloudTrail and Graylog and Logstash

1. **Purpose**: AWS CloudTrail is primarily used for monitoring and logging AWS account activity, including actions taken by users, services, or in response to AWS services. Graylog, on the other hand, is an open-source log management platform that enables users to collect, index, and analyze log data from various sources. Logstash is a data processing pipeline that allows for the collection, enrichment, and transport of log data to various destinations.

2. **Integration with AWS Services**: AWS CloudTrail integrates seamlessly with various AWS services, providing detailed insights into AWS account activity. Graylog and Logstash, while being flexible and customizable tools, require additional configuration and setup to integrate with AWS services and extract log data effectively.

3. **Vendor Lock-in**: Using AWS CloudTrail ties the user to the AWS ecosystem, limiting flexibility in terms of switching to other cloud providers or on-premises solutions. Graylog and Logstash, being open-source and configurable tools, offer more flexibility in terms of vendor lock-in, allowing users to adapt and customize according to their needs and infrastructure.

4. **Scalability and Performance**: AWS CloudTrail is a managed service, ensuring scalability and performance based on AWS infrastructure. Graylog and Logstash, being self-hosted solutions, require manual scaling and optimization for performance depending on the size of log data being processed.

5. **User Interface and Experience**: AWS CloudTrail provides a user-friendly web interface for viewing and managing logs, making it easy for users to navigate and analyze log data. Graylog offers a customizable web interface for log data analysis, providing more control and customization options. Logstash relies on configuration files for setup and lacks a built-in user interface, requiring more technical expertise for configuration and monitoring.

6. **Cost**: AWS CloudTrail involves costs based on data storage and API activity, making it a potential cost consideration for organizations with large amounts of log data. Graylog and Logstash, being open-source tools, offer cost-effective options for log management and analysis, especially for organizations looking to minimize expenses.

In Summary, the key differences between AWS CloudTrail, Graylog, and Logstash lie in their purpose, integration with AWS services, vendor lock-in, scalability, user interface, and cost considerations.

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Pros of AWS CloudTrail
Pros of Graylog
Pros of Logstash
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Very powerful
  • 2
    Backup to S3
  • 19
    Open source
  • 13
    Powerfull
  • 8
    Well documented
  • 6
    Alerts
  • 5
    User authentification
  • 5
    Flexibel query and parsing language
  • 3
    User management
  • 3
    Easy query language and english parsing
  • 3
    Alerts and dashboards
  • 2
    Easy to install
  • 1
    A large community
  • 1
    Manage users and permissions
  • 1
    Free Version
  • 69
    Free
  • 18
    Easy but powerful filtering
  • 12
    Scalable
  • 2
    Kibana provides machine learning based analytics to log
  • 1
    Great to meet GDPR goals
  • 1
    Well Documented

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Cons of AWS CloudTrail
Cons of Graylog
Cons of Logstash
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 1
      Does not handle frozen indices at all
    • 4
      Memory-intensive
    • 1
      Documentation difficult to use

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

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    What is AWS CloudTrail?

    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.

    What is Graylog?

    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.

    What is 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.

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    What companies use AWS CloudTrail?
    What companies use Graylog?
    What companies use Logstash?

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    What tools integrate with AWS CloudTrail?
    What tools integrate with Graylog?
    What tools integrate with Logstash?

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    Blog Posts

    May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

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    What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail, Graylog, and Logstash?
    AWS Config
    AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
    AWS X-Ray
    It helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With this, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. It provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    Logback
    It is intended as a successor to the popular log4j project. It is divided into three modules, logback-core, logback-classic and logback-access. The logback-core module lays the groundwork for the other two modules, logback-classic natively implements the SLF4J API so that you can readily switch back and forth between logback and other logging frameworks and logback-access module integrates with Servlet containers, such as Tomcat and Jetty, to provide HTTP-access log functionality.
    SLF4J
    It is a simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J) serves as a simple facade or abstraction for various logging frameworks allowing the end user to plug in the desired logging framework at deployment time.
    See all alternatives