Security teams using legacy SIEMs face rising data volumes, limited resources, fragmented tools, and growing operational complexity, while outdated architectures and pricing models make security data costly to collect, difficult to manage, and slow to investigate.

Security analysts using legacy SIEMs often move between disconnected tools to piece together evidence while contending with a flood of false positives from poorly tuned detections. At the same time, engineers devote significant time and resources to maintaining brittle ingestion pipelines and parsers, while security leaders must decide which logs they can afford to retain and which visibility gaps they are willing to accept.

A new Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting examines how the Gravwell Security Data Platform helped organizations overcome these constraints, reduced tradeoffs, and strengthened security operations with a more flexible, cost-effective approach to data ingestion, storage, and analysis.

Gravwell commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview Gravwell customers and develop a composite mid-sized, regulated organization with four security analysts, tens of thousands of users, more than 9,000 endpoints and cloud resources, and hundreds of gigabytes of daily log volume. Forrester then evaluated the potential costs, benefits, flexibility, and risks of deploying Gravwell over three years.

The study found that the composite organization achieved a 264% return on investment, $743,000 in net present value, and payback in less than six months. More importantly, Gravwell helped the security team investigate incidents faster, build better detections, reduce platform maintenance, streamline compliance reporting, and expand visibility without escalating ingest costs.

65% Faster Investigations, From Alert to Evidence

Security investigations slow down when the evidence analysts need is scattered across identity, endpoint, SaaS, network, cloud, and infrastructure systems. Before Gravwell, customers interviewed by Forrester described manually gathering logs from multiple portals, requesting data from other teams, and correlating information by hand. Analysts could spend hours, or even multiple business days, collecting and validating evidence before reaching a conclusion.

Gravwell centralizes security data in a time-series data lake, giving analysts a single queryable environment where they can move directly from an alert to the underlying evidence without switching tools or piecing together incomplete datasets. For the composite organization, Forrester modeled a 65% reduction in investigation time, enabling analysts to triage alerts, validate suspicious activity, and determine whether escalation was necessary far more quickly.

This matters especially for false positives. Gravwell gives analysts the context to resolve them quickly, so low-value activity does not consume hours that should be spent on genuine threats.

Build better detections, 70% Faster

Legacy SIEM detection engineering often requires analysts to navigate proprietary rule formats, rigid schemas, indexes, preprocessors, and multiple configuration layers. That complexity slows the creation of new detections and makes existing logic difficult to tune. It can also force teams to rely on generic out-of-the-box content that does not reflect how their environment actually operates.

Gravwell, with its lauded query capabilities, gives analysts a flexible workflow for creating and modifying detections. Logic can be reused, adapted, and applied across workflows without rebuilding an extensive processing chain. Forrester modeled a 70% reduction in the time required to create or materially modify detections.

The benefit extends beyond speed. Customers reported that greater data access allowed them to build more precise detections, expand monitoring coverage, establish earlier thresholds, and reduce the number of irrelevant alerts and false positives reaching analysts.

90% Less SIEM Maintenance Means More Time for Security

Before Gravwell, Forrester’s composite organization spent 15 hours per week maintaining its legacy SIEM. That included managing ingestion pipelines, troubleshooting formatting problems, patching systems, maintaining schemas, repairing parsers, and responding whenever an upstream data source changed.

Gravwell’s structure-on-read architecture allows organizations to ingest data in its original form and structure it when queried. Teams do not need to normalize every source before the data becomes searchable.

Forrester modeled a 90% reduction in ongoing SIEM administration effort as a result of removing much of the recurring pipeline, parsing, and mapping work associated with traditional SIEMs. Engineers can onboard diverse data sources more quickly and spend more time improving security operations and detections instead of keeping data flowing.

Gravwell’s Mission Support team also helps customers migrate data, replicate existing use cases, validate ingestion, and transition from legacy platforms. Customers described implementation effort as manageable and praised the hands-on support they received throughout onboarding.

Compliance and Audit Made Easier with 80% Reduction in effort

Compliance, audit, legal, and regulatory requests may be episodic, but they can consume substantial time when they arrive.

Without centralized historical data, teams must coordinate across departments, export information from several systems, validate it, and manually compile it into a usable report. Due to cost, teams are often forced to minimize the time they retain data or move it to cold storage where it’s more difficult to retrieve.

Gravwell gives organizations a single source of truth for historical security data. Analysts can retrieve, correlate, validate, and export evidence through repeatable queries, dashboards, reports, and automated workflows.

Forrester modeled an 80% reduction in effort per compliance, audit, legal, or regulated reporting request. Work that previously required hours of manual collection can be completed through a saved query or automated report, reducing disruption while improving the speed and consistency of the response.

60% Reduction in SIEM Cost Reduces ingest anxiety

Many SIEM pricing models turn increased visibility into increased cost. As log volumes grow, organizations are forced to filter data, shorten retention, sample events, or exclude valuable telemetry altogether. Some customers interviewed by Forrester reported exceeding licensed event limits and dropping logs without knowing whether those missing logs contained critical activity.

Gravwell removes the direct connection between data ingestion and licensing costs. Organizations can collect and retain the data they need without creating a larger bill every time data volumes increase.

Forrester’s composite organization replaced a legacy SIEM costing approximately $310,000 annually. The study modeled more than a 60% reduction in SIEM costs and nearly $694,000 in risk-adjusted present-value savings over three years.

The result is a more predictable operating model that allows security leaders to plan around business requirements rather than ingestion thresholds.

Give security teams room to scale

By centralizing more data and reducing manual work, Gravwell helps security teams investigate faster, improve detections, reduce maintenance, accelerate compliance, and control costs without sacrificing visibility. The Forrester study shows how organizations can use Gravwell to strengthen and scale security operations on a single flexible data foundation.

Download the complete Total Economic Impact™ study to explore the findings.

Gravwell commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct this Total Economic Impact™ study. The results are based on interviews with four Gravwell customers and the financial analysis of a composite organization. Results experienced by other organizations may vary.