Splunk Enterprise Security and Amazon CloudWatch are key players in the log management and monitoring market. Splunk generally holds an edge due to its advanced data handling features and flexibility, although Amazon CloudWatch benefits from its seamless integration within the AWS ecosystem.
Features: Splunk Enterprise Security is celebrated for its comprehensive log management, scalability, and advanced operational intelligence. It offers quick search capabilities and integrates data from numerous sources. Amazon CloudWatch stands out for its robust integration with AWS services and user-friendly dashboards that are excellent for infrastructure monitoring.
Room for Improvement: Splunk requires enhancements in its operational workflow and user interface to better support SOC environments, and its high pricing is a barrier for smaller organizations. Amazon CloudWatch needs improvements in visualization and real-time monitoring capabilities, as well as better integration with non-AWS systems.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk Enterprise Security provides both on-premises and cloud deployment options, offering flexibility but requiring significant time due to its complexity. Its customer support is reliable with broad community backing. Amazon CloudWatch's deployment is more straightforward, especially within AWS environments, but its customer service could benefit from faster response times and improved integration guidance.
Pricing and ROI: Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing, based on data volume, is high but offers significant ROI from data insights and reduced incident response times. In contrast, Amazon CloudWatch is more budget-friendly with a pay-as-you-go model, which attracts smaller users looking for economical monitoring solutions.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
The documentation for Splunk Enterprise Security is outstanding. It is well-organized and easy to access.
I have noticed a return on investment with Splunk Enterprise Security, as it delivers substantial value for money.
Customers see the value in investing in this solution, particularly when it helps resolve issues quickly, turning a potential 20-hour response into one hour.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
While using their cloud and cloud resources, if you have an issue with CloudWatch, you must pay additional monthly fees to get time from dedicated tech support.
If you want to write your own correlation rules, it is very difficult to do, and you need Splunk's support to write new correlation rules for the SIEM tool.
They try to close issues as soon as possible, often just offering documentation links.
They are responsive and effectively resolve issues.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
They struggle a bit with pure virtual environments, but in terms of how much they can handle, it is pretty good.
It is easy to scale.
It's big in a Central European context, and small from a Splunk North American context.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
They test it very thoroughly before release, and our customers have Splunk running for months without issues.
It provides a stable environment but needs to integrate with ITSM platforms to achieve better visibility.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
When using third-party dashboards such as Kibana or Grafana and other visualization tools, there should be a way to feed CloudWatch's data and logging capabilities into these visualization tools.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage.
Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power.
Splunk Enterprise Security is not something that automatically picks things; you have to set up use cases, update data models, and link the right use cases to the right data models for those detections to happen.
For any future enhancements or features, such as MLTK and SOAR platform integration, we need more visibility, training, and certification for the skilled professionals who are working.
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
I saw clients spend two million dollars a year just feeding data into the Splunk solution.
The platform requires significant financial investment and resources, making it expensive despite its comprehensive features.
Splunk is priced higher than other solutions.
Amazon CloudWatch allows me to set up and view even historical logs, which is one of the features I find valuable.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
The best features of Amazon CloudWatch need to improve visibility into the network because when using hundreds of network resources such as transit gateway, VPNs, routers, route tables, and firewalls, it does not give many details in a structured manner.
This capability is useful for performance monitoring and issue identification.
I assess Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities for helping to find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior as great.
Splunk Enterprise Security provides the foundation for unified threat detection, investigation, and response, enabling fast identification of critical issues.
Amazon CloudWatch is used for monitoring, tracking logs, and organizing metrics across AWS services. It detects anomalies, sets dynamic alarms, and automates actions to optimize cloud utilization, troubleshoot, and ensure service availability.
Organizations leverage Amazon CloudWatch for collecting and analyzing logs, triggering alerts, and profiling application performance. It's also employed for monitoring bandwidth, virtual machines, Lambda functions, and Kubernetes clusters. Valuable features include seamless integration with AWS, real-time data and alerts, detailed metrics, and a user-friendly interface. It provides robust monitoring capabilities for infrastructure and application performance, log aggregation, and analytics. Users appreciate its scalability, ease of setup, and affordability. Additional key aspects are the ability to create alarms, dashboards, and automated responses, along with detailed insights into system and application health. Room for improvement includes dashboards and UI enhancements for better visualization and customizability, log streaming speed, advanced machine learning and reporting capabilities, pricing, and integration with non-AWS services and databases. Users also seek more real-time monitoring and comprehensive application performance features, and simpler alerts and configuration processes.
What are the most important features?
What benefits and ROI can users expect?
Amazon CloudWatch is implemented across a range of industries, including technology, finance, healthcare, and retail. Technology firms use it to monitor application performance and traffic, while financial organizations leverage it for ensuring compliance and system reliability. Healthcare entities rely on it for maintaining service availability and monitoring data flow, and retail companies utilize it for tracking customer interactions and optimizing server usage.
Splunk Enterprise Security is widely used for security operations, including threat detection, incident response, and log monitoring. It centralizes log management, offers security analytics, and ensures compliance, enhancing the overall security posture of organizations.
Companies leverage Splunk Enterprise Security to monitor endpoints, networks, and users, detecting anomalies, brute force attacks, and unauthorized access. They use it for fraud detection, machine learning, and real-time alerts within their SOCs. The platform enhances visibility and correlates data from multiple sources to identify security threats efficiently. Key features include comprehensive dashboards, excellent reporting capabilities, robust log aggregation, and flexible data ingestion. Users appreciate its SIEM capabilities, threat intelligence, risk-based alerting, and correlation searches. Highly scalable and stable, it suits multi-cloud environments, reducing alert volumes and speeding up investigations.
What are the key features?Splunk Enterprise Security is implemented across industries like finance, healthcare, and retail. Financial institutions use it for fraud detection and compliance, while healthcare organizations leverage its capabilities to safeguard patient data. Retailers deploy it to protect customer information and ensure secure transactions.
We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.