ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

ServiceNow and Splunk are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. ServiceNow is ranked #42 with an average rating of 7.5, while Splunk is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.5. ServiceNow holds a 0.4% mindshare in APM, compared to Splunk’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Read 4 ServiceNow Cloud Observability reviews

789 Views
621 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Splunk Observability Cloud

Read 50 Splunk Observability Cloud reviews

1,910 Views
1,148 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Splunk Observability Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 6, 2025

Splunk Observability Cloud and ServiceNow Cloud Observability compete in the observability and monitoring category. Splunk Observability Cloud holds an advantage with its robust real-time monitoring platform, while ServiceNow Cloud Observability is a strong contender due to its extensive integration capabilities.

Features: Splunk Observability Cloud offers advanced analytics, machine learning tools, and data-driven insights for real-time monitoring. ServiceNow Cloud Observability excels in its seamless integration with ITSM processes, enhancing incident management and operational integration.

Room for Improvement: Splunk Observability Cloud could benefit from simplifying its setup process and enhancing user interaction. Its resource consumption might be optimized, and more intuitive dashboards could enhance user experience. ServiceNow Cloud Observability could improve by expanding alerting features, improving scalability, and providing detailed customization options for advanced users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: ServiceNow Cloud Observability provides a cloud-native deployment model integrated into existing ServiceNow environments for a cohesive experience, appreciated for its straightforward integration. Splunk Observability Cloud offers flexible deployment options with a higher setup complexity, providing customization opportunities but requiring more initial effort.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk Observability Cloud generally has a higher initial setup cost, justified by its comprehensive analytics features delivering strong ROI. ServiceNow Cloud Observability features a more accessible pricing model, particularly valued when combined with other ServiceNow products, offering integrated solutions and holistic value.

To learn more, read our detailed ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs. Splunk Observability Cloud Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

March 2025

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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

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

42nd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Splunk Observability Cloud

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

11th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th), Cloud Monitoring Software (9th), Container Management (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

VinayKumar16

Senior DeliveryManager at ITC Infotech

Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting

The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

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Lakshmi Padaga

Java Developer at U.S. Bank

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The UI is very intuitive."

"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."

"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."

"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."

"Splunk APM helps us to find errors immediately and resolve them."

"The alerts are the most valuable feature."

"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."

"The solution's service map feature allows us to have a holistic overview and to see quickly where the issues are."

"The vibrant dashboards are valuable."

"It can monitor, get the data, and then report on the data."

"The initial setup was straightforward. We didn't find it to be too complex."

"I have primarily used it to go back into the past and understand why something happened. It provides enough information to do research and figure things out."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pros

Cons

"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."

"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."

"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."

"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."

"Splunk would be better if some tools were integrated to be able to take action on security or network concerns."

"They can improve the flow system and the keyword language. It has predefined keywords, but they can be improved."

"This solution is difficult to configure and the instructions are complex."

"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."

"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."

"The implementation can be more user-friendly."

"There are some predefined metrics.......we may want to create customized metrics."

"I've been using the Splunk query language, and it can be a bit time-consuming to set up the queries I need."

More Splunk Observability Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."

"I would rate the price of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring as an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"Splunk APM is expensive."

"The product is a bit expensive considering the competition but the company may negotiate the price."

"The solution's pricing is costly."

"The price of Slunk 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."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"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."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Retailer

11%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about LightStep?

The UI is very intuitive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with LightStep?

There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for LightStep?

I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...

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What do you like most about SignalFx?

The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Grafana vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 35% of the time

Helios vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 19% of the time

Dynatrace vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 19% of the time

Datadog vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 17% of the time

New Relic vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 11% of the time

More ServiceNow Cloud Observability Competitors

Observe vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 22% of the time

Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 8% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 6% of the time

Rancher Labs vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon CloudWatch vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

More Splunk Observability Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

February 2025

Download ServiceNow Cloud Observability product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Observability Cloud

February 2025

Download Splunk Observability Cloud product report

Also Known As

LightStep

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring

Overview

ServiceNow Cloud Observability is a comprehensive platform designed to enhance visibility, control, and performance monitoring of your IT infrastructure and applications. It seamlessly integrates log management, trace management, metrics monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring in real-time, leveraging AI and machine learning for automated tasks and actionable insights. With benefits including improved visibility, faster incident resolution, enhanced application performance, simplified IT operations, and reduced costs, this cloud-native solution is ideal for businesses of all sizes with complex IT infrastructures. It integrates seamlessly with ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM), supports OpenTelemetry standards, and provides AI-powered insights along with pre-built dashboards and reports.

ServiceNow

Splunk Observability Cloud combines log search, data integration, and dashboards for seamless monitoring, enhancing infrastructure visibility and security. Its cloud integration and scalability support diverse environments, improving operational efficiency.

Splunk Observability Cloud offers comprehensive monitoring tools with user-friendly interfaces, enabling end-to-end infrastructure visibility. Its real-time alerting and predictive capabilities enhance security monitoring, while centralized dashboards provide cross-platform visibility. Users benefit from fast data integration and extensive insights into application performance. Despite its advantages, improvements could be made in integration with other tools, data reliability, scalability, and cost management. Users face challenges in configuration complexity and require better automation and endpoint protection features. Enhancing AI integration, alerts, and adaptation for high-throughput services could further improve usability.

What are the key features of Splunk Observability Cloud?

Log Search: Efficiently search and analyze log data for enhanced insights.
Data Integration: Fast integration across platforms for comprehensive visibility.
Custom Dashboards: Powerful and adaptable dashboards for real-time monitoring.
Cloud Integration: Seamless integration with cloud services for scalable solutions.
Application Performance Monitoring: Advanced tools for improving application performance.

What benefits and ROI should be expected?

Infrastructure Monitoring: Improved visibility and monitoring across infrastructure components.
Operational Efficiency: Enhancements in data analysis lead to efficient operations.
Business Resilience: Supports adaptability and swift responses to changing needs.
Security Management: Enhances threat identification and response through real-time alerts.
Compliance Support: Aids in meeting compliance and auditing requirements effectively.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Splunk Observability Cloud is implemented for application performance monitoring and infrastructure metrics. Its ability to track incidents and analyze machine data benefits network infrastructure, while distributed tracing and log analysis aid in tackling security threats. Organizations often integrate it for compliance and auditing purposes, enhancing visibility into network traffic and optimizing performance.

Splunk

Sample Customers

InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,

Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

March 2025

Free Report: ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

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