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AWS X-Ray vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

The compared Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Splunk solutions aren't in the same category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #15 in APM , with an average rating of 7.4, and holds a 2.7% mindshare in the category. Splunk is ranked #1 in SIEM , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 9.2% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Splunk users who would recommend it.
AWS X-Ray
Read 11 AWS X-Ray reviews
  • 4,843 Views
  • 4,552 Comparison Views
90% willing to recommend
Splunk Enterprise Security
Read 369 Splunk Enterprise Security reviews
  • 23,960 Views
  • 12,459 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary
We performed a comparison between AWS X-Ray and Splunk Enterprise Security based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

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To learn more, read our detailed AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security Report (Updated: May 2023).
Buyer's Guide
AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security
May 2023
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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS X-Ray
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (15th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
369
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Application Lifecycle Management solutions, they serve different purposes. AWS X-Ray is designed for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability and holds a mindshare of 2.7%, down 3.4% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 9.2% mindshare, down 11.2% since last year.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
AWS X-Ray2.7%
Dynatrace8.9%
Datadog7.4%
Other81.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security9.2%
Wazuh10.2%
IBM Security QRadar7.0%
Other73.6%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Muhmad Tabrez A Deewanji - PeerSpot reviewer
Improving performance through efficient trace metrics and data insights
As an application developer and architect, I appreciate AWS X-Ray for checking latency and identifying bottlenecks. I use it for performance tuning, conducting performance testing on applications, getting real-time traces, and gaining data insights. It helps in improving throughput and tuning infrastructure. The trace metrics and data collected provide valuable insights.
Read full review
Kyle Vernham - PeerSpot reviewer
Built-in searches and unified data access streamline alert investigation and boosts analyst efficiency
The two features I appreciate the most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the built-in searches, which have been very easy for us to get started with right out of the box, and the fact that it accesses all of our other systems. You can access it as a pane of glass rather than having to search individually. We also have the option to compare our analysts from our service to service. Splunk Enterprise Security helps our SOC team prioritize and investigate high-fidelity alerts more effectively by providing a more in-depth look and the ability to access a lot more of our data. Instead of jumping from several segmented systems, it allows us to have everything brought together in one place. For example, you have to move from our purview to our build system and to Splunk Enterprise Security, and it enables us to streamline that process. The built-in features of Splunk Enterprise Security, which we recently procured, have given us a good starting point and demonstrated the value of the product, providing an easy way to sell it to our company. The ease of getting everything into our purview helps us, and it serves as a good start for the investigation part in one location rather than what we usually have, which is jumping from system to system to system. Splunk Enterprise Security plays a role in our company's strategy to combat insider threats and advanced persistent threats by currently being in its technical test phase. We are still rolling it out, and it should help us find any insider threats based on information that our policy states should not be present in our system. Splunk Enterprise Security's risk-based alerting (RBA) has impacted our alert volume and analyst productivity because we've got many different systems feeding into it. However, it has helped to make it easier for our analysts to go through a set of events rather than 100 alerts. RBA allows us to streamline the process and customize it for our analysts. When it comes to leveraging Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards and visualizations to communicate security posture to executives, it's pretty straightforward for any type of information. The visualization is easy to understand, but I haven't had any direct conversations with our executives.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."
"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."
"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."
"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."
"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."
"The solution has made it easier for us to trace the problems that we have with our requests and to monitor the timing of each step in each request we do in our endpoints."
"AWS X-Ray's endpoints and user monitoring are considered the most valuable features."
"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."
More AWS X-Ray pros
"The community marketplace is useful; often, you do not need to rely on Splunk Enterprise Security support due to the wealth of online documentation available—Splunk docs are truly beneficial."
"Splunk's interface is user-friendly, and it has apps and add-ons for most applications. We can easily normalize the data to make it readable and understand the logs. We easily get all the field extractions and enrichment done by using the apps and add-ons. This helps us understand the application logs because the raw data is useless unless we extract some useful information from it. These add-ons make it so much easier."
"From my experience, the visual aid that it provides is most valuable. There are charts and other means to provide information."
"Out-of-the-box, it seems very powerful."
"The Splunk queries are valuable."
"They are a good partner for Google Cloud. It provides great visibility, threat detection, and proactive mitigation of risks for our mutual consumers."
"The most valuable features include the incident review and Dashboard Studio."
"The incident review pane is the best part of it because that is where the SOC lives. It is the heartbeat of what the SOC needs to do. You are able to start the investigative process. As you are sitting in the incident review pane, you see the alert, and from that one alert, which is called a notable alert, you can drill in and see all the different specific details that are tied to that."
More Splunk Enterprise Security pros
 

Cons

"AWS X-Ray should improve its implementation process to make it easier for developers."
"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."
"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."
"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."
"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."
"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."
"Like most Amazon products, the user interface, configuration, and tuning aren't the easiest. That's the biggest reason why people tend to go to products like TerraForm and Terragrunt. We use TerraForm and Terragrunt. So, for setting things up and interacting with X-Ray, it's definitely the user interface that can be better."
"What needs to be better in AWS X-Ray is the log filtering. Predefined filters could be helpful because the power of analytics comes from how you can filter the data. I also want to see more KPIs from AWS X-Ray."
More AWS X-Ray cons
"On-premises scaling of the solution is a bit more limited than it is on the cloud."
"Adding custom visualization in Splunk has been improved over the years but can still be made better by integrating more and more JavaScript visualization sources."
"The system can be intimidating, and sometimes the concepts conveyed in the documentation require adjustment."
"While Splunk Enterprise Security is powerful, it presents significant complexity for users, as it's not particularly user-friendly for beginners."
"Its pricing is extremely high. There are other tools out in the market that are competitive. They do not necessarily have all the functionality, but they are competitive. The professional services we have used have been high as well in comparison to the market."
"The threat detection system has room for improvement."
"The difficult part is related to integration with sources of data that are used to create the logs as this depends on the infrastructure of the client."
"The GUI can be improved to include some of the capabilities that other BI solutions have."
More Splunk Enterprise Security cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."
"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive but the solution is equipped with a lot of features."
"It is expensive. I used to buy it early on, but then they combined it into a higher-up organization. They buy it for multiple systems now. Last time, I paid around 60K for it. There is just the licensing fee. That's all."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is pretty competitive."
"It is expensive. I work for multiple clients. I am working for more than five clients, but most of the clients are switching from Splunk to Sentinel because of the cost. Even though Sentinel is very limited, clients are moving to Sentinel."
"Be upfront about your needs and expectations. Splunk is great to work with."
"The Splunk Enterprise Security license is expensive."
"Splunk's cost is very high. They need to review the pricing. They have to go back and totally readdress the market."
"It is economical than other solutions."
More Splunk Enterprise Security pricing and cost advice
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Comparison Review

VS
Feb 26, 2015
HP ArcSight vs. IBM QRadar vs. ​McAfee Nitro vs. Splunk vs. RSA Security vs. LogRhythm
We at Infosecnirvana.com have done several posts on SIEM. After the Dummies Guide on SIEM, we are following it up with a SIEM Product Comparison – 101 deck. So, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think by posting your comments below. The key products compared here are…
Read full review
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business111
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise257
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS X-Ray?
While I have not compared it with GCP or Azure ( /products/microsoft-azure-reviews ), AWS generally offers cost-effective services. Some services, like Athena ( /products/odyssey-software-athena-eo...
See all answers
What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?
The challenges we faced with AWS X-Ray were that some of the AWS services we were using did not support it, which we discovered at a later stage. This was potentially a design consideration we shou...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for AWS X-Ray?
I have been using AWS X-Ray for creating insights to our applications we have developed. It is used to correlate different services in AWS when a transaction happens, allowing us to see the flow of...
See all answers
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
See all answers
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log ...
See all answers
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

Datadog vs AWS X-Ray Logo
Datadog vs AWS X-Ray
Compared 19% of the time
Sentry vs AWS X-Ray Logo
Sentry vs AWS X-Ray
Compared 18% of the time
Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs AWS X-Ray Logo
Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs AWS X-Ray
Compared 9% of the time
New Relic vs AWS X-Ray Logo
New Relic vs AWS X-Ray
Compared 8% of the time
Azure Monitor vs AWS X-Ray Logo
Azure Monitor vs AWS X-Ray
Compared 8% of the time
More AWS X-Ray Competitors
IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 9% of the time
Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 6% of the time
Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 6% of the time
Datadog vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
Datadog vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 5% of the time
Security Onion vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
Security Onion vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 4% of the time
More Splunk Enterprise Security Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
AWS X-Ray
October 2025
AWS X-Ray reportDownload AWS X-Ray product report
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Enterprise Security
September 2025
Splunk Enterprise Security reportDownload Splunk Enterprise Security product report
 

Overview

AWS X-Ray is a powerful debugging and performance analysis tool offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows developers to trace requests made to their applications and identify bottlenecks and issues. 

With X-Ray, developers can visualize the entire request flow and pinpoint the exact location where errors occur. It provides detailed insights into the performance of individual components and helps optimize the overall application performance. 

X-Ray integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, making it easy to trace requests across different services and identify dependencies. It also offers a comprehensive set of APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to instrument their applications and capture valuable data for analysis. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, AWS X-Ray is a valuable tool for developers looking to improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Splunk Enterprise Security delivers powerful log management, rapid searches, and intuitive dashboards, enhancing real-time analytics and security measures. Its advanced machine learning and wide system compatibility streamline threat detection and incident response across diverse IT environments.

Splunk Enterprise Security stands out in security operations with robust features like comprehensive threat intelligence and seamless data integration. Its real-time analytics and customizable queries enable proactive threat analysis and efficient incident response. Integration with multiple third-party feeds allows detailed threat correlation and streamlined data visualization. Users find the intuitive UI and broad compatibility support efficient threat detection while reducing false positives. Despite its strengths, areas such as visualization capabilities and integration processes with cloud environments need enhancement. Users face a high learning curve, and improvements in automation, AI, documentation, and training are desired to maximize its potential.

What Are the Key Features of Splunk Enterprise Security?
  • Log Management: Efficiently manages and organizes a vast amount of logs for better data handling.
  • Rapid Data Search: Quickly retrieves relevant data for fast decision-making.
  • Flexible Dashboards: Customizable dashboards provide clear data visualization.
  • Comprehensive Threat Intelligence: Offers detailed insights to preemptively defend against threats.
  • Real-Time Analytics: Analyzes data in real-time to enhance response times.
  • Integration with Third-Party Feeds: Streamlines information flow from multiple sources.
What Benefits Should Users Investigate in Reviews?
  • Efficient Incident Response: Enhances the ability to respond promptly to threats.
  • False Positive Reduction: Minimizes incorrect threat alarms, making monitoring more efficient.
  • Threat Detection Speed: Accelerates the identification and evaluation of security threats.
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Potential savings through better licensing options and operational efficiency.
  • User Adaptability: Enhancements in documentation and training resources aid in overcoming the learning curve.

In specific industries like finance and healthcare, Splunk Enterprise Security is instrumental for log aggregation, SIEM functionalities, and compliance monitoring. Companies leverage its capabilities for proactive threat analysis and response, ensuring comprehensive security monitoring and integration with various tools for heightened operational intelligence.

Splunk
 

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Buyer's Guide
AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security
May 2023
Free Report: AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security
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