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Centreon vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Centreon
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (25th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (22nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (18th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
305
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Centreon is designed for IT Infrastructure Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 2.9%, up 2.9% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 9.5% mindshare, down 12.8% since last year.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Caulson Chua - PeerSpot reviewer
With fewer staff resources, we can identify and address issues before the system goes down
Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and avoid downtime. The dashboard is user-friendly, and the solution provides good reporting and visibility. The layout is straightforward. You can click on the drop-down list to select the server you want. The anomaly detection feature helped us reduce our average resolution time by 30 minutes to an hour.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment."
"I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring."
"We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention."
"What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team. Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative."
"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"Valuable features include the ability to schedule downtime, intensity or depth of monitoring which it does, different plugin packs, Centreon MAP, Centreon BI."
"For servers and for applications, it was very, very efficient."
"The customizable reports and dashboards are really flexible. We started this partnership with Centreon, when we were looking for a solution, because of the flexibility of the reporting. That's what we found to be most attractive in the solution. You can display the data as you want."
"Splunk provides immediate visibility into key business metrics and new business insights that deliver immediate value."
"There are quite a lot of things that we find useful. Splunk agents are useful and good. Its UI is quite impressive."
"The Splunk queries are valuable."
"Splunk Enterprise Security helped improve our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data."
"The dashboard is amazing. Out-of-the-box dashboard is very good. It is very user-friendly."
"The user interface is excellent, and since I'm using Splunk as a power user, it's easy to create dashboards."
"The most valuable features are the logs, which allow us to identify what happened and who interacted with the web repository."
"The solution allows easy gathering and ingestion of the data."
 

Cons

"Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French."
"Centreon introduced network discovery in the most recent update. However, it doesn't work well. Our previous monitoring tool could discover networking equipment on the network and identify the relationships between the devices."
"Release management and quality of testing need improvement, because with each major upgrade we have many issues coming in. Then, it takes several minor upgrades to get rid of them."
"The reporting has room for improvement."
"There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking."
"The product collects the information, but it fails to send them via SMS, WhatsApp or Telegram."
"I would like them to improve their documentation. When I faced some issues, I was looking for more documentation on the Internet. There is official documentation on Centreon's website, which sometimes is useful. Sometimes it is not very useful, as you cannot find the information or enough examples of configuration. The answer for me was to contact the support, who helped me, but I was not able to find all the information by myself on Centreon's website. A Centreon community or blog would be helpful."
"I would like to see an improvement of the communication with big data systems, because Centreon is a monitoring system. In our point of view, Centreon should be a part of a source for a big data system, not a big data system itself. So, it should be easier to add data from the Centreon system to a big data system. For example, it should be able to teach machine learning."
"We would like more integrations with other cloud products, not just AWS, e.g., Azure."
"The user access control could be much more granular, so that the admins can control r/w/x access for specific features of the product like dashboards, etc."
"The area of concern revolves around the fact that Splunk is an expensive product."
"I find the graphical options really limited and you don't have enough control over how to display the data that you want to see."
"An area of improvement would be the licensing of the solution. They need a free license, which would allow faster lead times."
"We were inundated with the amount of alerts and alarms that we could get out of it. It is also a resource hog and we didn't have the resources to support it on-prem so we're taking it offline now."
"Splunk Enterprise Security offers a vast amount of information to learn and comprehend, resulting in a challenging initial learning curve."
"This is not really a monitoring solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing starts at around 5000 euro. However, this depends on: Your environment, the size of your host, how many hosts you have, how many remote pollers you have, and if you want to use the Monitoring Business Intelligence or Centreon MAP functionalities."
"Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing."
"Open-source solutions like this can be very cost effective for an organization looking for a product that they can quickly implement, as there is no initial cost and there are no license renewal fees. However, it is important to take into consideration some of the related costs that may come along as needed, such as training, support, and product enhancements."
"It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them."
"Centreon is better than Nagios XI in regards to cost and support response times, when you have a problem. If you have a problem, it costs money to contact the Nagios XI support."
"They only sell four hour slots for support, so if you have just one question, then you need to pay for four hours. Or, you need to wait until you have enough questions to fill those four hours. They are not flexible in this."
"I think Centreon's pricing is fair, especially given the criticality of our system. They were cheaper than the other solutions. The licensing terms were pretty straightforward. I believe it was based on the number of hosts."
"You purchase a package. You have a support contract (there is also a platinum support contract) and it is per module. That means you have to pay, e.g., for the MBI module or the BAM module. Or, if you want to save a lot of money, you can pay for IMP, which is the complete package."
"The cost is on the high end, which makes it difficult for some organizations to use."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is priced lower than competitors."
"Regarding the product's pricing, I think it has always been difficult to have a conversation with Splunk."
"I think the price could be improved."
"The price of Splunk is reasonable."
"This product could use better pricing in general."
"The licensing is good, but the pricing absolutely needs some work. It is very high."
"I've heard Splunk is often preferred over other options, but the cost can be prohibitive for smaller organizations."
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Comparison Review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Centreon?
Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and av...
What needs improvement with Centreon?
The issue my company has with the tool stems from the fact that it didn't give an on-time response to us. The product collects the information, but it fails to send them via SMS, WhatsApp or Telegr...
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...
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 ...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Airbus, Bollore, BT, Canal Plus, Kuehne Nagel, Limagrain, LVMH, Oberthur Technologies, Orange, Darty, Addax Petroleum, Plastic Omnium, Auchan, Valeo, Saint Gobin, Clarins, Hugo Boss, JC Decaux, French Government (Defense, Justice, Environment, Agriculture), OptiComm, Thales, Zeiss.
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: March 2025.
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