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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 (17th), Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (8th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
386
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
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.0%
Zabbix10.7%
Nagios XI6.1%
Other80.2%
Server Monitoring
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.1%
IBM Security QRadar5.2%
Wazuh4.6%
Other83.1%
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

"I have found the visibility into server health with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor very beneficial, which we use on a daily basis."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"SolarWinds is one of the best products on the market and if they eventually support the IBM Mainframe then it will be perfect."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its real-time node monitoring and Help Desk's feedback."
"Having used various other vendors for monitoring over my career, the SolarWinds products give outstanding value for the price."
"The solution has good alerts; notifications are sent via email to technicians, and you can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well, which is excellent."
"Low barrier to start searching with the ability to normalize data on the fly."
"Good for log collection and log management."
"The dashboards are the most valuable feature. We like the ability to drill in and see what queries are under the dashboard, build new visualizations, edit the querying, and see the reports."
"Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) has very good capability of storing, analyzing, and searching compared to other tools."
"The Splunk queries are valuable."
"The solution's most valuable features are its ability to transact in the cloud and its ability to onboard data easily with minimum connectors."
"The solution is the market leader."
"It is easy to use in any environment."
 

Cons

"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"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."
"I had some stability issues. I lost my environment, but with the help of SolarWinds support, I was able to get back to a stable platform."
"They are complex to operate; users need to know what they want during setup."
"MS Azure Service and user experience monitoring is an area in which the SolarWinds tools are lacking; without a doubt, this is the Achilles heel of the Orion monitoring tools, and I am currently reviewing other vendors for Azure service monitoring tools."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"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."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"I'm a security manager and Splunk is not a good solution for my needs and not as good as other products I've used."
"Its deployment is difficult. I remember when I first started learning, I faced several challenges, especially when deploying VMware in a virtual environment."
"The CIM model is the method Splunk uses to normalize data and categorize its important parts, but it is quite complex."
"I find that the learning curve for Splunk is relatively lengthy."
"The technical support can be improved because sometimes when we call them, the issues are not resolved immediately and tickets take time to be addressed."
"Index performance is a bit slow but this is partly due to the huge volumes of data for our industry within our environment."
"It currently has limited default rules and customizations. If they can concentrate more on the compliance part and the security information part, it would be helpful. The platform part is good, but it requires many features from the security aspect."
"We'd like to see a more seamless cloud-based integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"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 pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"It can be expensive, especially the licensing costs. However, there is added value in what it can do, not just log aggregation."
"The pricing could be made more competitive."
"Splunk is not a cheap solution and the license is billed annually."
"Splunk has always been on the expensive side."
"The solution is a little expensive."
"I believe that Splunk Enterprise Security is worth the price, but it is expensive."
"It is economical than other solutions."
"While licensing can be a concern, there are ways to reduce the licensing costs including filtering some events."
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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
13%
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 Business117
Midsize Enterprise51
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 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...
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.
892,678 professionals have used our research since 2012.