Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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 380 Splunk Enterprise Security reviews
  • 27,630 Views
  • 14,920 Comparison Views
94% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report
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.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE REPORT
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
Download the complete report
Helped 883,044 peers since 2012

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
380
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 Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.3%
Zabbix13.4%
Checkmk6.6%
Other76.7%
Server Monitoring
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
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
reviewer1469784 - PeerSpot reviewer
reviewer1469784
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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

"The product integrates with Remedy."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"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."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros
"Splunk Enterprise Security performs 80% of our work on its own; we just have to do the remaining 20%, which gives us the freedom to explore and detect threats more effectively."
"Splunk can extract all kinds of data. There's no limitation on what kind of structured and unstructured data one needs to extract — it can access any kind of data, including machine-generated data."
"We can automatically suspend or terminate suspicious sessions."
"The scalability of the solution is amazing because it can collect a lot of data and you can have your own structure to monitor this data."
"Splunk Enterprise Security allows us to create custom dashboards by changing fonts and modifying widgets."
"The most useful feature for me is the ability to create different kinds of alerts and set a different kind of denominator that will capture the real event. That is helpful for a power user like me."
"The data representation options in the dashboards are excellent."
"We used it to create a custom anomaly detection data model to monitor the activity of our back-end services on an hourly basis relative to the past three months of activity."
More Splunk Enterprise Security pros
 

Cons

"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."
"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons
"Their technical support sucks."
"Splunk is not very user-friendly. It has a complex architecture in comparison to other solutions on the market."
"You can run a script from an event, but it needs many clicks to run that integration, which could be made easier."
"Data retention can be better. If we want to look at the data for five months or six months, that is not available to us. We only have a history of 20 or 30 days. After that, the information gets lost. That is a drawback."
"Queries are not always as easy or straightforward as they might be, so it can be difficult to figure out what you need to look for."
"The product must improve insider threat detection."
"Adding custom visualization in Splunk has been improved over the years but can still be made better by integrating more and more JavaScript visualization sources."
"The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side."
More Splunk Enterprise Security cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"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."
"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 solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice
"The cost is on the high end, which makes it difficult for some organizations to use."
"We have seen ROI and improvements as we have continued to use the product, but they are more reactive."
"Licensing is a yearly, one-time cost."
"While Splunk is more expensive than other solutions, we would still choose it because of its capabilities."
"The pricing is a little bit on the higher side, but looking at what Splunk provides us, it is reasonable."
"Although Splunk is an expensive product, it is designed to be utilized across your organization in order to maximize your ROI and lower your TCO."
"Splunk is a bit pricier, but the benefits and ROI are huge."
"From what I have seen so far, Splunk has multiple cost models. The one that we are using is pretty good when it comes to ingesting data into the environment. It has worked out pretty well."
More Splunk Enterprise Security pricing and cost advice
report
See which vendors are best for you
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Server Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
See recommendations
883,044 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
12%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software 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 Enterprise266
 

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 8% 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 5% 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.
DOWNLOAD NOW
883,044 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See our SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Splunk Enterprise Security report.

We monitor all Server Monitoring reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.