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SolarWinds NPM vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

SolarWinds NPM
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
157
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
303
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (1st), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. SolarWinds NPM is designed for Network Monitoring Software and holds a mindshare of 5.2%, down 6.1% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 11.2% mindshare, down 15.0% since last year.
Network Monitoring Software
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

MohitKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.
Avinash Gopu. - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good visibility into multiple environments, significantly reduces our alert volume, and speeds up our security investigations
There are limitations with Splunk not detecting all user activity, especially on mainframes and network devices. This is because Splunk relies on agents, which cannot access certain workstations. In these cases, we have to rely on application data. For example, with mainframes, manual reports are generated and sent to Splunk, limiting visibility to what's manually reported. This lack of automation for specific platforms needs improvement from Splunk. Additionally, API access is limited for other applications that rely on API calls and requests. This requires heavy customization on Splunk's end. These are the main challenges we've encountered. Monitoring multiple cloud platforms, like Azure, GCP, and AWS, with Splunk Enterprise Security presents some challenges. While Splunk provides different connectors for each provider, consolidating data from two domains across distinct cloud environments can be complex. However, leveraging pre-built templates and Splunk's data collation capabilities can help overcome these hurdles. Despite initial difficulties, I believe Splunk can effectively address this task, earning it an eight out of ten rating for its multi-cloud monitoring capabilities. While Splunk Enterprise Security offers insider threat detection capabilities, its effectiveness could be enhanced by integrating with additional tools, such as endpoint security solutions. This integrated approach is particularly crucial for financial institutions, which often require dedicated endpoint security teams. While using multiple tools is valuable, further improvements within Splunk itself are also necessary. Considering both external integration and internal development, I would rate its current insider threat detection capabilities as three out of ten. Threat detection is where Splunk falls behind. While it offers tools, other use cases require additional work. PAM is an enterprise tool that centralizes information about users, servers, and everything else. It needs real-time monitoring, which I haven't seen in any of the companies I've worked for. They only rely on Splunk for alerting, but real-time monitoring should be handled by the endpoint security team's tools. This means there's no detection or analysis at the machine or endpoint level. Additionally, threat analysis reporting is also absent.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is scalable."
"This solution offers a very good view of our network and allows us to effectively monitor performance."
"Everything has been complete and stable for our needs over the past four years."
"SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution since it can handle a huge number of users."
"SolarWinds' network and server application monitoring features are strong."
"From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface and the ease of deployment."
"We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM."
"My favorite example of improving of organization is saving a $60k/mo in payroll fraud and $10k/mo in wasted API credits by using simple searches and clear reports."
"The correlation searches are most valuable just because we are able to do things like RBA."
"The solution has proven to be quite stable."
"Splunk stands out for its extensive application integrations."
"The indexing and data collection are valuable."
"Splunk incorporates a lot of elements that help to reduce security risks. For it to reach certain compliance, we need to have some security insight. Splunk is a very good SIEM, it’s a top solution, but the best feature is its cost of visibility. We have all the most important features to detect vulnerabilities or risks."
"Splunk has facilitated the correlation of information security logs to look for incidents which could cause damage to the company's infrastructure, as well as financial losses from leaks."
"The dashboard and reporting are very good... It provides very good visibility in a hybrid cloud environment, and you can build custom utilization APIs using Splunk."
 

Cons

"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"The product is scalable, but at a cost. Extra modules have to be purchased for each extra server. The initial set up isn't complex, but will require someone who is experienced with the network monitoring system"
"Robustness of network element mapping tool could be better"
"SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot."
"The reporting is good, but I want it to be a little easier when creating custom reports. The reports are all on the website now, but it takes some know how to get some to display the way you would like."
"The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support."
"SolarWinds NPM can be very slow at times. The database optimization can be done to improve the product performance."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited."
"There are a lot of competitive products that are doing better than what Splunk is doing on the analytics side."
"It is a challenge to manage the environment in such a way, that one’s log, even with the bandwidth license, isn’t exceeded."
"Splunk isn't appropriate for smaller companies. It's too expensive."
"An improved user interface along with multi-tenancy support would be beneficial."
"The cluster environment should be improved. We have a cluster. In the Splunk cluster environment, in the case of heavy searches and heavy load, the Splunk cluster goes down, and we have to put it in the maintenance mode to get it back. We are not able to find the actual culprit for this issue. I know that cluster has RF and SF, but it has been down so many times. There should be something in Splunk to help users to find the reason and the solution for such issues."
"Splunk could improve its default machine-learning models. Also, Splunk Enterprise's native threat intelligence isn't that good. I prefer a custom threat intelligence model."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can provide more details and help CISOs resolve vulnerability situations better. The reason is that the tools we choose for data analysis and log collection cannot collect all the data and logs. Splunk Enterprise Security should help me with this, but it cannot."
"It works as intended for us, and we are getting everything that we need out of it. If anything, its initial setup can be improved a bit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SolarWinds NPM has different pricing models available. The cost of the solution is less than some competitors."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"I find that the pricing is acceptable."
"It is relatively inexpensive compared to other products in the same category."
"It is not an expensive product."
"I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"The cost is on the high end, which makes it difficult for some organizations to use."
"The price of this solution is expensive. However, it has great features. If you want a great solution you need to pay a price matching the features."
"Splunk is not a cheap solution and the license is billed annually."
"The pricing depends on the bandwidth of an organization and is good compared to some SIEM tools. IBM, for example, is quite costly. But Microsoft Sentinel is notably cheaper."
"Its price is fair. Like with anything else, if you go into the cloud, different providers cost more, and you are able to throttle back or throttle up. The cost is comparable with anything else."
"In addition to the licensing fee, there is also a support and maintenance charge."
"Splunk licensing model might seem expensive but with all the gain in functionalities you will have compared to traditional SIEM solutions I think it’s worth the price."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is competitive."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
57%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
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...
 

Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
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, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: December 2024.
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