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Google Kubernetes Engine vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 6, 2025

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

Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Container Management
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (11th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), Cloud Monitoring Software (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.1%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 0.5%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Abhilash Gopidas - PeerSpot reviewer
The auto-scaling feature helps during peak hours, but the support is not great
The product has no downtime. Automated scaling is a valuable feature. During peak hours, the datasets are on a higher volume. We need scaling in place. Otherwise, there's a degradation in the performance. We might sometimes miss data, or there will be no data sync between systems. Auto-scaling helps deal with performance needs during peak hours. There's no lag time for processing data.
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 valuable security features. It can connect with multiple DevOps tools."
"The feature that I like the most is the ease of use as compared to AWS. Its ease of use is very high, and I can quickly deploy clusters with a simple template."
"Stability-wise, this solution is really good."
"It is easy to use and deploy."
"GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service."
"The most beneficial feature is the ability to separate each project and manage permissions more effectively."
"The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team."
"The logs are important for detecting problems in our clusters."
"The features are pretty much ready out of the box."
"The features I have found most valuable are log searching and log analytics, both of which are quick features."
"Splunk APM has helped us to standardize logging and monitoring procedures."
"The features are pretty much ready out of the box."
"The most valuable feature is log reporting."
"It is very easy to monitor multiple cloud environments. It's like a single pane of glass for us. We can use it to monitor our on-prem and both of our cloud environments as opposed to having different tools for each environment. It makes it all come together in one tool."
"Splunk's GUI and dashboard capacity are the most valuable features of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring."
"The solution's service map feature allows us to have a holistic overview and to see quickly where the issues are."
 

Cons

"While the GKE cluster is secure, application-level security is an essential aspect that needs to be addressed. The security provided by GKE includes the security of communication between nodes within the cluster and the basic features of Kubernetes security. However, these features may not be sufficient for the security needs of an enterprise. Additional security measures must be added to ensure adequate protection. It has become a common practice to deploy security tools within a Kubernetes cluster. It would be ideal if these tools were included as part of the package, as this is a standard requirement in the industry. Thus, application-level security should be integrated into GKE for improved security measures."
"The user interface is a bit confusing sometimes. You need to navigate between the various consoles we have. It's hard to figure out where things are. It's frustrating. The documentation could be a bit better."
"We would like to see some improvement in the ease of integration with this solution."
"There is room for improvement in this solution. For example, auto-scaling can be complex. We expect it to be easier to set up and manage, even for our customers."
"t is not very stable."
"The network configuration has to be simplified."
"I use the Firebase tool with GKE and it would be helpful if the solution can give notifications when we reach the budget limit."
"The product's stability is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"We never had any issues when it comes to the type of use cases we are using it for. We did not need more advancement on it, but I know that, in general, everything can be updated. There are tiny little tweaks that can be made regardless of whether it looks better or has a different flow to it than it does right now, but it works pretty well for what we use it for."
"We currently lack log analysis capabilities in Splunk APM."
"There is not a lot of support for the tool's on-premises version, especially since everything is on the cloud."
"The cardinality is pretty low."
"We still use Splunk Enterprise licensing. A lot of the newer features go into Splunk Cloud before Enterprise. We're not looking to switch our licensing over, so we're falling behind on the newer features."
"The solution's stability is an area that has room for improvement. It needs to provide constant stability to its users."
"The licensing model is expensive. We need to monitor the amount of data ingested because the cost is based on the data collected."
"We have both on-prem and cloud, and the challenge is getting all our log data aggregated or streams aggregated so that it is real-time. We do a pretty good job of that, but our organization is not using it as a security platform when it can do a great job of that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for GKE is dependent on the type of machine or virtual machine (VM) that is selected for the nodes in the cluster. There is a degree of flexibility in choosing the specifications of the machine, such as the number of CPUs, GPUs, and so on. Google provides a variety of options, allowing the user to create the desired cluster composition. However, the cost can be quite steep when it comes to regional clusters, which are necessary for high availability and failover. This redundancy is crucial for businesses and is required to handle an increase in requests in case of any issues in one region, such as jumping to a different region in case of a failure in the Toronto region. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest type of machines, this may result in a limited capacity and user numbers, requiring over-provisioning to handle additional requests, such as those for a web application."
"We are planning to use external support, and hire a commercial partner for it."
"The price for Google Kubernetes Engine could be lower - I'd rate its pricing at three out of five."
"This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."
"Currently, it costs around $1000 per month which sorted our deployment. So once we get more clients, having a huge suffix, costs can go up."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"Its pricing is good. They bill us only per user. That's nice."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
"I am not in that circle, but we are currently licensing based on our queries. That is working out for us. Previously, it was by volume of data, and now, we can store as much data as we want."
"The product is a bit expensive considering the competition but the company may negotiate the price."
"Splunk has been fairly expensive, but it has been predictable."
"Licensing cost is the biggest argument I get from those divesting from Splunk. There are those within our organization who say we are going to go to other tools since Splunk is too expensive."
"Splunk APM is expensive."
"The solution's pricing is costly."
"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its 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
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive, so we now use spot machines.
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
Gemini could be more integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine ( /products/google-kubernetes-engine-reviews ). For example, it would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

GKE
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.