Blumira Free and Graylog SMB are gone. Now what?

Two security monitoring options that a lot of small IT teams relied on have gone away in the last eight months. Blumira retired the free SIEM tier that CISA listed as a resource for small organizations, and Graylog discontinued its Small Business license on December 31, 2025. If you used either one, you are now looking at a paid tier or at more infrastructure to run yourself.

What changed

Blumira Free provided cloud SIEM coverage for Microsoft 365 and up to three integrations, with two weeks of log retention and automated detections, at no cost. It was a useful service, and CISA listed it alongside free tools from larger vendors. Blumira’s paid plans now start at $12 per employee per month on the Detect tier. For a 50-person organization that comes to $600 a month, or $7,200 a year.

Graylog Small Business gave organizations that qualified for the free license Graylog’s enterprise log management features, including alerting, correlation and reporting. With the program retired, existing license holders get one final 12-month renewal and then move back to Graylog Open. Open keeps basic alerting but not the correlation and scheduled reports from the paid license, and you still have to set up and maintain the OpenSearch backend yourself.

What neither product covered

Even when they were free, Blumira and Graylog were log collection and alerting tools. Neither one mapped your logs to compliance frameworks, which is what comes up when an auditor asks how you monitor the specific requirements your framework lists.

That has usually meant buying a separate compliance automation platform, and those are not cheap.

A county sheriff’s office that needs CJIS log monitoring and a dental practice that needs HIPAA audit logging are in the same position. They can buy a SIEM for detection and a separate compliance platform for the framework side, or they can work through Event Viewer by hand. Blumira Free and Graylog SMB helped with detection. The compliance side, which is what the auditor asks about, always cost extra.

Where Arden fits

Arden handles both from the same Windows event logs. Arden Security analyzes those logs for attack patterns seen in real intrusions, such as stolen-credential use and lateral movement, and raises an alert when it finds them. It detects many attacks, not all, and it does not block anything. Arden Comply uses the same logs to report audit-log coverage for 133 requirements across seven frameworks: CJIS, HIPAA, PCI DSS, CMMC, NIST SP 800-171, SOX and FERPA. Arden Complete includes both.

It differs from what Blumira Free and Graylog SMB offered in a few practical ways.

It runs on your own server. Arden is a single executable that you install on hardware you already have. The agents send logs only to that server, and nothing goes to a cloud service or back to us as telemetry. Keeping logs inside your network usually makes the vendor security review shorter, and it is a simpler arrangement for CJIS agencies and healthcare practices that have to account for where their log data is stored.

Compliance reporting is part of the product. For each requirement, Arden Comply shows which Windows event categories it depends on, whether those events were observed in the collected logs, and where the logging gaps are. Reports export as PDF, CSV or JSON, which helps you prepare for an audit. Whether you are compliant is still up to your auditor or assessor. For comparison, Vanta charges a $10,000 base plus $5,000 per additional framework, and Sprinto starts around $6,000 for a single framework. Arden Comply includes all seven of its frameworks in the same product.

Pricing won’t depend on log volume. Blumira now bills per employee, and Graylog’s paid tiers scale with data volume. Arden’s pricing hasn’t been announced yet. It will be a flat monthly rate based on the size of your environment, with no per-GB ingest fees, so turning on more audit policies won’t change what you pay.

For more on what SIEMs end up costing, see our breakdown of hidden SIEM costs or the 2026 SIEM pricing comparison. If compliance reporting is the main thing you need, read how small teams handle audits without a GRC platform.