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SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

The compared SolarWinds and Splunk solutions aren't in the same category. SolarWinds is ranked #8 in SM , with an average rating of 7.6, and holds a 3.3% mindshare in the category. Splunk is ranked #1 in SIEM , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 7.2% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Splunk users who would recommend it.
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Read 44 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews
  • 4,708 Views
  • 1,271 Comparison Views
89% willing to recommend
Splunk Enterprise Security
Read 381 Splunk Enterprise Security reviews
  • 27,630 Views
  • 14,920 Comparison Views
94% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary
We performed a comparison between SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Splunk Enterprise Security based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Server Monitoring solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

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To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Splunk Enterprise Security Report (Updated: May 2023).
Buyer's Guide
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Splunk Enterprise Security
May 2023
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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

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 (22nd), Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (9th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
381
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 3.3%, up 2.5% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 7.2% mindshare, down 9.8% since last year.
Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.3%
Zabbix13.4%
Checkmk6.6%
Other76.7%
Server Monitoring
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.2%
Wazuh5.8%
IBM Security QRadar5.3%
Other81.7%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
NikhilKalwint
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.
Read full review
Sathis-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Sathis-Kumar
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.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"I have found the visibility into server health with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor very beneficial, which we use on a daily basis."
"The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros
"The solution's most valuable feature is the aggregation of all the logs in one place, using enterprise securities built-in or ESCU use cases to find them."
"It has a rapid response search environment in the event of an incident."
"The correlation searches are most valuable just because we are able to do things like RBA."
"We are much faster finding and addressing issues with Splunk."
"The scalability is good."
"The most valuable features for us include its robust log management capabilities, which allow us to efficiently handle and retain logs for extended periods as needed."
"On average, my security ops team takes fairly quickly to remediate security incidents with Splunk Enterprise Security, depending on the use case, minutes versus hours, compared to my previous solution, which was ArcSight."
"If properly built, I'm very impressed with the stability of Splunk ES."
More Splunk Enterprise Security pros
 

Cons

"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"From an integration point of view, if you want to have a manager of manager kind of layer, that is currently lacking in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons
"The default threat intel feeds create many false positives and noise, which is counterproductive."
"Splunk could be improved by reducing the cost. The cost is one of the biggest challenges for us in keeping to our production requirements."
"It can be tough to determine if you are getting all of the value out of your investment at times."
"I want Splunk Enterprise Security to release more AI and machine learning features in the future."
"There are a lot of competitive products that are doing better than what Splunk is doing on the analytics side."
"They could offer pre-built search queries for everyday use cases like brute force attacks, DDoS attacks, and other security threats."
"I would like to see future development in terms of ML (Machine Learning)."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can improve in terms of probably being able to talk to additional sources."
More Splunk Enterprise Security cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."
"The price is too high."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"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."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice
"Splunk Enterprise Security is not at all cost-friendly to be deployed in very small enterprises like start-ups."
"We have seen ROI and improvements as we have continued to use the product, but they are more reactive."
"Splunk has always been on the expensive side."
"Unlike other security tools, Splunk provides a fixed amount of gigabytes per day, and we are required to pay for any additional usage beyond that limit, in addition to our monthly cost."
"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."
"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 can be expensive, as its licensing is based on the daily data ingestion volume."
"The pricing of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
More Splunk Enterprise Security pricing and cost advice
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Comparison Review

VS
Vinod Shankar
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…
Read full review
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
13%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

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 Business112
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise267
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
Identifying the problem statement is easy.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.
See all answers
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 ...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
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 ...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Logo
Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
Compared 9% of the time
Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Logo
Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
Compared 7% of the time
Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Logo
Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
Compared 6% of the time
Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Logo
Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
Compared 5% of the time
eG Enterprise vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Logo
eG Enterprise vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
Compared 4% of the time
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors
IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 10% of the time
Sentinel vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
Sentinel vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 5% of the time
Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 4% of the time
Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 3% of the time
Elastic Security vs Splunk Enterprise Security Logo
Elastic Security vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 3% of the time
More Splunk Enterprise Security Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
February 2026
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reportDownload SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Enterprise Security
February 2026
Splunk Enterprise Security reportDownload Splunk Enterprise Security product report
 

Also Known As

SolarWinds SAM
No data available
 

Overview

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Splunk Enterprise Security delivers powerful log management, rapid searches, and intuitive dashboards, enhancing real-time analytics and security measures. Its advanced machine learning and wide system compatibility streamline threat detection and incident response across diverse IT environments.

Splunk Enterprise Security stands out in security operations with robust features like comprehensive threat intelligence and seamless data integration. Its real-time analytics and customizable queries enable proactive threat analysis and efficient incident response. Integration with multiple third-party feeds allows detailed threat correlation and streamlined data visualization. Users find the intuitive UI and broad compatibility support efficient threat detection while reducing false positives. Despite its strengths, areas such as visualization capabilities and integration processes with cloud environments need enhancement. Users face a high learning curve, and improvements in automation, AI, documentation, and training are desired to maximize its potential.

What Are the Key Features of Splunk Enterprise Security?
  • Log Management: Efficiently manages and organizes a vast amount of logs for better data handling.
  • Rapid Data Search: Quickly retrieves relevant data for fast decision-making.
  • Flexible Dashboards: Customizable dashboards provide clear data visualization.
  • Comprehensive Threat Intelligence: Offers detailed insights to preemptively defend against threats.
  • Real-Time Analytics: Analyzes data in real-time to enhance response times.
  • Integration with Third-Party Feeds: Streamlines information flow from multiple sources.
What Benefits Should Users Investigate in Reviews?
  • Efficient Incident Response: Enhances the ability to respond promptly to threats.
  • False Positive Reduction: Minimizes incorrect threat alarms, making monitoring more efficient.
  • Threat Detection Speed: Accelerates the identification and evaluation of security threats.
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Potential savings through better licensing options and operational efficiency.
  • User Adaptability: Enhancements in documentation and training resources aid in overcoming the learning curve.

In specific industries like finance and healthcare, Splunk Enterprise Security is instrumental for log aggregation, SIEM functionalities, and compliance monitoring. Companies leverage its capabilities for proactive threat analysis and response, ensuring comprehensive security monitoring and integration with various tools for heightened operational intelligence.

Splunk
 

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.
Buyer's Guide
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Splunk Enterprise Security
May 2023
Free Report: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Splunk Enterprise Security
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
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