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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
385
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

"SolarWinds SAM is very stable, and we are using it with hundreds or thousands of customers and there are no stability issues."
"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."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"The component and cable monitoring are good, and SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics."
"The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"From a customers point of view, they get a good return on investment because they are not paying a lot of money when you compare to what they used to pay for IBM and other large vendors."
"Overall, Splunk Enterprise Security has reduced our MTTR by approximately 30%."
"Splunk Enterprise Security helps my SOC team prioritize and investigate high-fidelity alerts more effectively by enabling us to quickly gather information, collaborate, and provide various teams with access to the same information, allowing them to follow the workflow to complete the task."
"Splunk handles a high volume of data that we have, and it does it really well."
"We can extract the metrics we want on the dashboards. We are able to react to the incidents."
"The technical support is among the best in the market."
"I can create dashboards to collect and view information in a tabular, graphical format. This feature is important because it helps me understand time-series data over one or two hours."
"We were able to create a catalog of dashboards and have a holistic view at all levels. We could understand our business much better. Real-time errors, which were buried in emails before now, surfaced up on dashboards."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a valuable tool that allows us to monitor data from the APS daily."
 

Cons

"Mapping interactions between systems."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"AppInsight needs to include more applications, the current list is very limited."
"The integration with all our tool sets felt like we were reinventing the wheel, which was a pain point for us."
"The difficult part is related to integration with sources of data that are used to create the logs as this depends on the infrastructure of the client."
"You do need a lot of training and certification with this product."
"VMware and security device integration looks a bit complex."
"I would definitely improve the risk-based alerts in Splunk Enterprise Security, helping SOC analysts to get to the drill-down searches."
"To improve Splunk Enterprise Security, I would suggest allowing third-party SOAR solutions to work with it."
"Delays in responses from the technical team can pose challenges for both vendors and clients, especially considering that Splunk applications and machine solutions are critical assets."
"The Web Application Firewall will send you too much information because it's more dedicated to security than a normal firewall."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is too high."
"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."
"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."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"This product could use better pricing in general."
"Splunk's costing is a little more difficult. The pricing method is complicated, and the way that costing is calculated in Splunk is a little more difficult."
"Splunk is priced higher than other solutions."
"I have no opinion on pricing."
"Be upfront about your needs and expectations. Splunk is great to work with."
"Personnel costs are saved by not having to involve the domain developers from multiple teams when tracing a problem that spans multiple platforms."
"The pricing modules could be improved."
"Splunk should be able to integrate with other product using the free version."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Server Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
886,976 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
7%
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 Business116
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise269
 

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.
886,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.