Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by floren 2155 days ago
I think Gravwell (https://gravwell.io) might be what you're looking for--but I work for Gravwell so I may be biased! If I can be forgiven a short sales pitch, we've built a format-agnostic storage & querying system that easily handles raw packets, Netflow records (v5, v9, and IPFIX), collectd data, Windows event logs, and more. You can see some screenshots at https://www.gravwell.io/technology

We have a free tier which allows 2GB of data ingest per day (paid licenses are unlimited) which should be more than enough for capturing logs and flows. The resources needed to run Gravwell basically scale with how much data you put into it, but it's a lot quicker to install and set up than something like Elastic, in our opinion (https://www.gravwell.io/blog/gravwell-installed-in-2-minutes)

Edit: it's currently a bit roll-your-own, but we're really close to releasing Gravwell 4.0 which enables pre-packaged "kits" containing dashboards, queries, etc. for a variety of data types (Netflow, CoreDNS logs, and so on)

2 comments

When you say

> Gravwell is developed and maintained by engineers expert in security and obsessed with high performance. Therefore our codebase is 100% proprietary and does not rely on open source software. We love open source, but we love our customers and their peace of mind a lot more!

does that mean you've even rolled your own webserver? Programming language?

That's... not good copy. I think it must have been written long ago. We use open-source libraries (with compatible licenses, of course) and even maintain our own set of open-source code (https://github.com/gravwell). I'll talk to the guys who maintain the website and get that fixed. Thanks for pointing it out!

Edit: We've had lots of people assume we use Elastic under the hood, so I wonder if that was just a (poorly-worded) attempt to indicate that our core storage and querying code is custom rather than some existing open-source solution.

Maybe you should just wipe that paragraph completely. I get that investors like to see that you are using proprietary code, but I wouldn't expect you to be faster with that. Especially when running against Elastic, which has over 1.400 contributors currently. But you don't necessarily need to. You can get me with being focused on the right thing and not bloating your software. Lot of big projects start to loose focus and start doing everything, hence become worse doing their main job.

Especially when it comes to security, I'd like to see the lowest complexity possible. Harden your software instead of feature-fu around. That would be a good USP (I've got the feeling that no vendor has realized this so far - but customers neither did).

I don't mind you giving a small sales pitch...and maybe your product is indeed what I'm searching for. But your pricing model is instantly putting me off. Same as with Splunk, you end up with not being able to predict your cost and paying way too much. Tell me when you fix that and I might be interested ;)

Edit: Sorry, I was misreading your comment. Premium is unlimited...I will look into it, thanks. :)

Yep, paying customers are licensed by the node rather than by the gigabyte (as Splunk does it), and you're really only limited by your hardware at that point. You might be surprised at how much you can accomplish on the free license, though--there are several small businesses using it to monitor their networks because 2GB/day will hold a pretty hefty amount of Netflow, collectd, Zeek, and syslog records.