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SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (8th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
383
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Application Lifecycle Management solutions, they serve different purposes. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is designed for Server Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 3.2%, up 2.6% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 7.0% mindshare, down 9.2% since last year.
Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.2%
Zabbix11.5%
Nagios XI6.0%
Other79.3%
Server Monitoring
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.0%
IBM Security QRadar5.2%
Wazuh5.1%
Other82.7%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.
Sathis-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Bank of America
Helps us detect cyber threats quickly and integrate multiple feeds effectively
Overall, the product is good, but when it comes to some infrastructure issues, we have to dig into more logs. There is no straightforward indication of an issue. Health check kind of dashboards are not available. More AI would help us, and more optimization, since security products run more queries. The AI module could suggest solutions, optimizing queries or workload balancing. If the product itself advises on running queries during peak times, it would be similar to what ChatGPT currently offers. We see quite a few issues on stability. Even last week, we faced something, and identifying bottlenecks is not easy. We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues. Self-monitoring dashboards could be beneficial. The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side. The primary support team has very limited knowledge to provide.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"The ROI for SolarWinds products is unmatched in the industry."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"The recommendations are a life saver."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"Its dashboard is valuable, and if you have a good knowledge of how to create a dashboard, you can create any dashboard related to cybersecurity, and if fine-tuned, the alarms that are triggered for instant review are also very valuable and useful."
"The features of Splunk Enterprise Security that I appreciate the most are its flexibility and scalability, as it integrates disparate security solutions, offers many out-of-the-box apps through Splunkbase, enables straightforward customization, and supports efficient detection and alerting processes that improve overall business resilience."
"The user interface is excellent, and since I'm using Splunk as a power user, it's easy to create dashboards."
"They are a good partner for Google Cloud. It provides great visibility, threat detection, and proactive mitigation of risks for our mutual consumers."
"Splunk is stable, and this is why many customers want it."
"I would definitely recommend using Splunk."
"Previously, it would take us days to properly analyze, triage, and respond to insider threats; now with risk-based alerting, we are able to reduce that to 10 minutes."
"Alerts when a server is malfunctioning, monitors external attacks, and takes action to stop spreading viruses."
 

Cons

"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"AppInsight needs to include more applications, the current list is very limited."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"They are complex to operate; users need to know what they want during setup."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good."
"The support and the pricing can be better"
"It'd be really nice if Splunk Enterprise Security had a better and solid configuration guide."
"The search could be improved. Now, it is a bit difficult to write search queries because they become quite long, then maintaining those long search queries is quite challenging."
"The UI can be improved. Dashboards and reports can be better in terms of graphics."
"The biggest thing with Splunk is making sure that the documentation is maintained."
"I would like to see an updated dashboard. The dashboard is a little out-of-date. It could be made prettier."
"The use cases provided by Splunk are a good starting point, but could cover many additional topics to ensure that a smaller or less experienced shop might maximize the value of an ES deployment."
"Splunk is very expensive. The license is based on the volume of the logs ingested. I was responsible for managing the contract with our service integrator. I don't know the precise details of the competing solution, but I have heard that Splunk is more expensive than others. I don't know what the going rate is on the market, but I think there are at least two competitors that are less expensive. We have experienced a few issues with our service providers in terms of log filtering and ingestion, so we continue to pay a bit more per day for our logs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"The price is too high."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"The product is expensive."
"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."
"It's definitely worth it."
"Splunk is definitely not a cheap solution. It is an expensive product."
"I think that most of the log analytics solutions are expensive and I'm not sure if it's worth it."
"The pricing is very complicated, and it is very pricey. You do require a lot of different licenses in order to get a comprehensive solution that is not just the SIEM solution."
"We have had a reduction in the time it takes to resolve issues and correlate what has failed."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is competitive."
"You will eat up whatever you purchase quickly. The level of insights that Splunk empowers is addictive."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Server Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
886,664 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

VS
Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Feb 26, 2015
HP ArcSight vs. IBM QRadar vs. ​McAfee Nitro vs. Splunk vs. RSA Security vs. LogRhythm
We at Infosecnirvana.com have done several posts on SIEM. After the Dummies Guide on SIEM, we are following it up with a SIEM Product Comparison – 101 deck. So, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think by posting your comments below. The key products compared here are…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business114
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise268
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
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 SAM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
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 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
886,664 professionals have used our research since 2012.