Graylog nabs $18M to manage and analyze log data

Graylog, a platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing log messages, today announced that it completed an $18 million growth equity round led by new investor Harbert Growth Partners and coinvestor Piper Sandler Merchant Banking. CEO Andy Grolnick says that the funds, which bring Graylog’s total raised to $28.5 million, will support the company’s growth as it looks to become a leader in the log management and analytics market.

Traditional log management solutions can introduce a host of challenges, perhaps most commonly the inability to distinguish good from potentially bad activity. Without analysis capabilities, they can’t correlate or evaluate data in a way that might save  IT teams time and effort. With the majority of organizations failing to become data-driven, according to a recent report, it’s often a lack of software intelligence and incompatibilities that breed log mismanagement.

Founded in 2012, Houston, Texas-based Graylog aims to solve these  challenge with a system that supports real-time analysis of machine log data. Graylog’s platform is designed to help users explore log data to address security, compliance, operational, and app development issues. Deployed in over 50,000 installations and across more than 100,000 users, Grolnick says that the company’s solution is “purpose-built” for modern analytics to deliver a superior experience with a cost-effective and flexible architecture.

Graylog began as an open source log management project in Hamburg, Germany in 2009, when founder and CTO Lennart Koopmann set out to solve some of the log management problems facing app developers, IT, and security teams. Since then, Graylog’s use cases have expanded to DevOps as well as centralized log management and IT operations, according to Grolnick.

“While threat detection, compliance and troubleshooting of IT and DevOps issues tend to be the primary use cases of solutions like Graylog, customers leverage Graylog for business intelligence use cases as well. Also, looking for user or network anomalies using machine learning techniques with solutions like Graylog can enhance threat detection in an organization,” Grolnick told VentureBeat via email.

Managing log data

With Graylog, companies can gain insight into log data by building and combining searches for analysis and reporting. The platform offers a single source of data, allowing teams to trigger alerts via email, text, Slack, and more based on relationships between events and even missing events. Graylog lets developers launch queries in minutes, execute them, and view them in real time, as well as chain queries together so that the results of one initiate the next, creating a threat-hunting or root cause analysis workflow.

Graylog can also store older data on slow storage and reimport it on demand. And it allows developers to add structured data like threat intelligence for faster research. Moreover, using Graylog, admins can control who’s able to access data and capabilities and build data displays that automate the delivery of reports to inboxes. They’re additionally able to integrate log data from Graylog into third-party systems and track who accessed what data and what actions they took, ensuring compliance and security.

Graylog’s competitors in the over $3.7 billion log management segment include Splunk, Elastic and Sumo Logic. But the company, which has about 75 employees, says it continues to experience “strong growth” during the pandemic and plans to expand its workforce to over 100 people by 2022. Currently, it has 300 enterprise customers.

Existing investors Mercury Fund, HTGF, and Integr8d Capital also participated in Graylog’s latest funding round.