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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
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 3.2%, up 2.6% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 7.1% mindshare, down 9.5% 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 Security7.1%
IBM Security QRadar5.3%
Wazuh5.1%
Other82.5%
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

"The product integrates with Remedy."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"Once we got our IT inventory organized and aligned with the business, we were able to leverage our Orion Platform to provide more than just a reactive-based monitoring service to the business."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"The OOTB (Out of the Box) implementation does have very good node specific pages and can provide a wealth of information."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"The data analysis part is good in Splunk, which is something that I like the most. It is also quite easy to use. Its dashboards, visualizations, and analytics are good."
"The data analysis part is good in Splunk, which is something that I like the most, and it is also quite easy to use, with dashboards, visualizations, and analytics that are good."
"The most valuable features in Splunk Enterprise Security are the cluster capabilities."
"It scales better in the cloud than on-premise."
"The ability to manipulate data in Splunk is unparalleled."
"It can log more logs than other solutions; it's a good way to troubleshoot problems."
"The best features I've experienced over the past six years with Splunk Enterprise Security are the ability to create use cases and the flexibility to customize searches and use cases based on our specific requirements."
"I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Enterprise Security as very reliable and very stable."
 

Cons

"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."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"The technical support was better in previous years. With the launch of the premium support service, the normal support has declined."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system."
"The solution could use a different licensing model."
"I've ever used it, just studied it."
"Better education for users would be beneficial as they often don't know what they don't know or how to look for certain features."
"​Not even Splunk's support guy, who came to our firm, could help with defining proper role management.​"
"It takes time to train people."
"Because the licensing model is very complicated to understand, it would be better to start with another product that provides a better licensing model."
"Splunk's implementation process for managing multiple indexes can be complex, especially when dealing with a large number of components."
"I want Splunk Enterprise Security to release more AI and machine learning features in the future."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"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."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"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."
"The subscription is monthly."
"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."
"I would highly recommend anyone evaluating this option to download the free trial which allows for the ingestion of 500MB of data per day in order to get a feel for what Splunk does at its core. It will get pricey once your ingestion rates start to sky rocket, but I would consider it expensive given the amount of information that it allows you to analyze and react on straight out-of-the-box."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"While Splunk is more expensive than other solutions, we would still choose it because of its capabilities."
"The pricing of Splunk Enterprise Security is somewhat high, but comparing it with its benefits, it's acceptable. It depends on the type of business."
"This product could use better pricing in general."
"Splunk is not a cheap solution and the license is billed annually."
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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%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing 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 Business112
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise267
 

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.
886,174 professionals have used our research since 2012.