Mar 18, 2020
The two things are entirely different.
Splunk is primarily a log collection, analysis, and visualization solution. It can collect metrics now as well. Its purpose is after the fact forensics (what happened) as a part of a problem resolution process. That problem can span the entire gamut from security, to infrastructure operations to application operations. The primary competitors to Splunk are Elastic and Sumologic.
Dynatrace is an Application Performance Management solution designed to automatically measure the performance of an application (or a micro-service), discover the topology and dependencies that the application relies upon, and determine if a problem is in the code or in the software and hardware infrastructure that supports the application. The key to Dynatrace's ability to do this is its real-time topology and dependency mapping engine called SmartScape. There is no similar capability in Splunk. The principal competitors to Dynatrace are AppDynamics, New Relic, and Instana.
Rather than viewing these things as competitors, many companies use them together. In fact, Dynatrace has integration with Splunk, and Splunk has a Splunk App for Dynatrace up in Splunkbase. The most common use case for using them together is that Dynatrace finds the problem, determines if it is the code or not and if not determines where in the software and hardware infrastructure the problem resides. Splunk is then used to drill down into the part of the identified infrastructure to determine the exact nature of the problem (for example a security breach).
