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Elastic Observability vs Splunk APM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), Log Management (14th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
Splunk APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 5.8%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk APM is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
Lakshmi Padaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection
Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has connectors to many services."
"The most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Observability is the text search."
"The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes."
"Elastic provides built-in features for queries and report generation. It's a very good tool for monitoring integration capabilities."
"The tool's most valuable feature is centralized logging. Elastic Common Search helps us to search for the logs across the organization."
"Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning over a month from multiple data sources can be completed within seconds."
"The price is very less expensive compared to the other solutions."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"This solution is very quick to deploy as it is a SaaS solution and integrates with tools like ServiceNow."
"The most valuable features are troubleshooting and optimizing application performance."
"The features are pretty much ready out of the box."
"I like the fact that Splunk APM makes it easy to connect to the application database and run queries against the data."
"The features are pretty much ready out of the box."
"It is a good tool. It allows you to set alerts for application and infrastructure monitoring, and it allows you to create dashboards."
"The company has many systems that the customer is paying to access. Splunk APM issued via AppDynamics helps find problems in the feed. It reduces the risk of supervising all the devices. I can supervise the flow and simulate the conditions of the repository across several dashboards to show what's happening at the moment."
 

Cons

"The price is the only issue in the solution. It can be made better and cheaper."
"The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome."
"Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low."
"More web features could be added to the product."
"One example is the inability to monitor very old databases with the newest version."
"The interface could be improved."
"There is room for improvement regarding its APM capabilities."
"Elastic Observability needs to improve the retrieval of logs and metrics from all the instances."
"Splunk APM's performance could be improved - at the moment, it's very slow and takes forever to give me what I want."
"Once you see the issues related to the scalability part, you need to understand that it is a warning triangle. After seeing the warning triangle, you need to realize that you cannot trust any of the numbers you see in the chart because it is not a complete, full data set."
"The UI enhancements could be a way to improve the solution in the future."
"It is essential for the monitoring tool to deliver quick response times when generating analytical reports, instead of prolonged delays."
"We currently lack log analysis capabilities in Splunk APM."
"The dashboards are used mainly to visualize information about the infrastructure, but it isn't easy to construct or use the dashboards. While we tried to resolve the issue by calling support, it would be easier if they had an AI co-pilot to identify the problem and help you solve it."
"Splunk APM should include a better correlation between resources and infrastructure monitoring."
"There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is not that cheap."
"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"We will buy a premium license after POC."
"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"We have been using the open-source version."
"Splunk APM is a very cost-efficient solution."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"Splunk APM is expensive."
"The pricing is based on several factors, including the scale of deployment."
"The price of Slunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."
"Splunk offers a 14-day free trial and after that, we have to pay but the cost is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing. However, sizing and licensing information could be clearer.
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability could improve asset discovery as the current requirement to push the agent is not ideal. Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial.
What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts. The custom detector could be m...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The main purpose of using Splunk APM is to optimize our application. We use Splunk APM primarily to understand how the application works, how it uses resources, and its response time in connection ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. Splunk APM and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.