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 8.0, and holds a 3.0% mindshare in the category. Splunk is ranked #1 in SIEM , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 7.1% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 44 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

6,217 Views
1,803 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Splunk Enterprise Security

Read 388 Splunk Enterprise Security reviews

36,595 Views
20,493 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Splunk Enterprise Security

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.

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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Helped 894,668 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

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (17th), Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (8th)

Splunk Enterprise Security

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

388

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (1st), 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 3.0%, 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 9.2% since last year.

Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	3.0%
Zabbix	10.7%
Nagios XI	6.1%
Other	80.2%

Server Monitoring

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security	7.1%
IBM Security QRadar	5.2%
Wazuh	4.6%
Other	83.1%

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Featured Reviews

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

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

"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."

"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."

"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."

"One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset."

"SAM has altered the way monitoring is being looked at - from just being able to monitor CPU, Mem, Disk and network utilization levels we have moved to the next levels of finding out process related issues, service related issues and specific application related issues to identify root cause of performance issues."

"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."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

"It is easy to use in any environment."

"I have noticed a return on investment with Splunk Enterprise Security, as it delivers substantial value for money."

"Search language is easy to understand and teach to new users."

"We can present to our management in real time the security of the batch management for the PCs, security regarding the network equipment, and we can send any logs from the cloud to Splunk so we can monitor them and present to the managers and customers, making it a very good solution for reporting and monitoring of any solution in the company."

"Splunk has facilitated the correlation of information security logs to look for incidents which could cause damage to the company's infrastructure, as well as financial losses from leaks."

"I have not seen any outages in the product in the past two years that it has been running in our company, so I think it is good when it comes to the stability part."

"The fact that Splunk is a platform and not just a SIEM solution is a key benefit."

"The stock analysts and security people use one single dashboard (one single location) to check our logs."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pros

Cons

"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."

"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is not stable. We have to maintain the platform and it goes down frequently."

"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."

"As per my view, Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."

"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."

"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."

"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."

"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

"While Splunkbase (the app repository) has a lot of great content, some apps are terribly old and could stand to be updated or purged."

"However, for smaller organizations, the deployment and management can be expensive, leading them to choose other SIEM tools."

"The Web Application Firewall will send you too much information because it's more dedicated to security than a normal firewall."

"I haven't found a way for me to create my own plugins and integrate them into Splunk, but this isn't necessarily a limitation; it could simply be a lack of knowledge on my part."

"It would be nice if they had a wizard to construct searches, including more complex searches that include math or statistics."

"The tool itself is very difficult to configure. It's great for its number of inputs, for the different types of systems devices, and things that it could collect information from. To actually make good use of it, you need a fairly dedicated team of people that have some reasonably good programming or modeling skills to be able to do the things that you need to do with it. Whereas a lot of the other tools are better packaged for that, and so require a lot less training and a lot less dedication."

"Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power. When we execute heavy, resource-intensive queries over long periods, the performance dips."

"A problem that we had recently had was we licensed it based on how much data you upload to them every day. Something changed in one our applications, and it started generating three to four times as many logs and. So now, we are trying to assemble something with parts of the Splunk API to warn ourselves, then turn it off and throttle it back more. However it would be better if they had something systematically built into the product that if you're getting close to your license, then to shut things down."

More Splunk Enterprise Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."

"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."

"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is competitive."

"It is possible to use a developer's license, which is up to 10GB per day of volume traffic, which is usually enough for most use cases."

"The solution is a little expensive."

"Splunk is definitely not a cheap solution. It is an expensive product."

"The subscription is monthly."

"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."

"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."

"Our customers often complain that the price of Splunk is too high."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

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%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	21

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	119
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	270

Questions from the Community

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 is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...

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

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Opsview 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

Compared 8% of the time

Sentinel vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 5% of the time

Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 3% of the time

Elastic Security vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 3% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 2% of the time

More Splunk Enterprise Security Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

April 2026

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Enterprise Security

April 2026

Download Splunk Enterprise Security product report

Also Known As

SolarWinds SAM

No data available

Overview

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provides comprehensive server, application, and infrastructure monitoring, focusing on integration, application dependency, and network insights through user-friendly interfaces and detailed dashboards.

With AppStack and AppInsight support, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor offers service management, detailed resource dashboards, and integration capabilities. It monitors hardware metrics and performance parameters, facilitating database and network insights for cloud and virtual environments. Robust alerting, predictive analytics, and capacity planning ensure efficient management of server health and application performance.

What are the key features?

Integration: Seamlessly connects with existing tools.
AppStack: Provides a holistic view of applications.
AppInsight: Supports widely-used applications.
SNMP Polling: Efficient network data collection.
Diagnostics: Real-time troubleshooting.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailored monitoring views.

What benefits should users expect?

Comprehensive Monitoring: Extends from servers to databases.
Transparent Control: Enhances visibility into performance metrics.
User-Friendly: Simplifies proactive monitoring with alerts.
Predictive Features: Supports capacity and trend planning.

Industries implement SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to enhance server utilization reporting, network configuration, and AV equipment performance tracking. They benefit from monitoring critical services across diverse deployment models, improving management efficiency and decision-making.

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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