Wazuh
By Wazuh, Inc.
Wazuh is an open-source security monitoring platform that combines endpoint detection, log analysis, vulnerability detection, and compliance monitoring into a single system, functioning as a free alternative to commercial SIEM and extended…
Definition
Wazuh is an open-source security monitoring platform that combines endpoint detection, log analysis, vulnerability detection, and compliance monitoring into a single system, functioning as a free alternative to commercial SIEM and extended detection and response tools. Organizations deploy lightweight agents on servers and endpoints that forward security-relevant data to a central Wazuh manager, which correlates events, applies detection rules, and surfaces alerts through a web dashboard built on the Elastic Stack.
Overview
Commercial SIEM and XDR platforms can carry substantial licensing costs, which puts continuous security monitoring out of reach for many smaller organizations, open-source projects, and cost-conscious teams. Wazuh was built to close that gap, packaging log analysis, intrusion detection, file integrity monitoring, and vulnerability scanning into a single open-source platform that any team can deploy without per-gigabyte licensing fees. Mechanically, Wazuh consists of a lightweight agent installed on monitored endpoints and servers, and a central manager that receives data from those agents. The agent watches for file integrity changes, collects system and application logs, monitors running processes, and checks installed software against known vulnerability databases. The manager applies decoder and rule sets to this incoming data to generate alerts, storing results in an Elasticsearch or OpenSearch backend and presenting them through a Kibana-based dashboard, which is how Wazuh inherited much of its architecture from the broader Elastic Stack ecosystem. Wazuh differs from narrower tools like OSSEC, from which it originally forked, by adding vulnerability detection, regulatory compliance mapping, and cloud security monitoring on top of core host intrusion detection. It differs from commercial SIEM platforms like Splunk primarily in licensing model and support structure rather than core capability, since Wazuh covers much of the same ground at no software cost, funded instead by an optional paid support and cloud-hosted tier from Wazuh, Inc. The project has also grown well beyond its OSSEC roots by adding modules for container and cloud workload monitoring, so a single agent framework can now cover on-premises servers alongside cloud instances and Kubernetes nodes. In practice, security teams deploy Wazuh agents across servers, containers, and cloud instances to get centralized visibility into file changes, failed logins, malware indicators, and known vulnerabilities, using its rule engine to generate alerts that feed into incident response workflows. Organizations subject to compliance frameworks such as PCI DSS or HIPAA also use Wazuh's built-in compliance dashboards to demonstrate continuous monitoring controls. The trade-off with an open-source platform like Wazuh is that a team takes on the operational burden of running and tuning the Elasticsearch or OpenSearch backend at scale, and support depends on community resources or a paid contract rather than being bundled by default. Detection quality also depends heavily on how well an organization tunes its rule sets, since an under-tuned deployment can generate excessive noise or miss threats a purpose-built commercial platform would catch out of the box. Teams evaluating Wazuh against a commercial alternative should budget for the engineering time to maintain the deployment, not just compare it against a license fee, since that ongoing tuning work is where much of the real cost lives.
Key Features
- Combines log analysis, intrusion detection, and vulnerability scanning
- Uses lightweight agents deployed on servers and endpoints
- Built on the Elastic Stack for storage and visualization
- Provides file integrity monitoring for critical system files
- Maps detections to compliance frameworks like PCI DSS and HIPAA
- Detects known vulnerabilities in installed software packages
- Free and open source with an optional paid support tier
- Originally forked from the OSSEC intrusion detection project