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

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.

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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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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
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 3.3%, 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 Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.3%
Zabbix13.4%
Checkmk6.6%
Other76.7%
Server Monitoring
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
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
Sathis-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"SolarWinds SAM has significantly improved our workflow by allowing us to develop a comprehensive knowledge base of known errors and automate responses to specific alerts."
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros
"The logs on the solution are excellent."
"The risk-based alerting (RBA) is one of the valuable features."
"The investigation feature helps the team seamlessly put everything together, providing a consistent view of all relevant artifacts for incidents."
"My favorite example of improving of organization is saving a $60k/mo in payroll fraud and $10k/mo in wasted API credits by using simple searches and clear reports."
"I am enjoying our implementation of risk-based alerting. That has helped very much with cutting out a lot of the noise that we have. It has reduced our alert volume significantly. There is about an 80% reduction."
"There are a lot of third-party applications that can be installed."
"It has a rapid response search environment in the event of an incident."
"The most valuable feature is the incident dashboard, and the extensive use of correlation searches, which isn't available with a standard Splunk search package. This feature is important to me because it enables SOC analysts to do their job more efficiently and be able to investigate or mediate incidents at a faster pace."
More Splunk Enterprise Security pros
 

Cons

"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons
"Integrating tools and creating use cases could be easier. It's hard for a junior security engineer with only a couple of years of experience to write use cases. They can do it, but it's much easier in a solution like IBM QRadar. Setting conditions is like a multiple-choice type of thing. It's a more user-friendly process."
"This is a costly solution."
"It would be great if I could have a certain dialogue box in Splunk that uses innovative AI tools like ChatGPT, which are available now in the tech department."
"It needs more formatting control without having to be an admin."
"Search head clustering is often temperamental in its current state and should be improved, replaced by something better, or be reverted to search head pooling."
"We see quite a few issues on stability. Even last week, we faced something, and identifying bottlenecks is not easy."
"I feel as though a major focus of upcoming releases should be set on Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, and I would enjoy to see more security focused add-ons and apps developed by the vendor."
"When deploying Enterprise Security, the biggest challenge or the most amount of work that you're going to spend time on is onboarding your data and getting it into a position that allows you to search it uniformly. So applying things like the common information model is the biggest time investment that you'll have in the deployment."
More Splunk Enterprise Security cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"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."
"The product is expensive."
"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 tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"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."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice
"My customers have found the price of the solution to be high."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive but the solution is equipped with a lot of features."
"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."
"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."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is pretty competitive."
"Splunk Enterprise Security incurs a significant cost because of the amount of data we send, but we are fine with the value we're getting for that price."
"Pricing can be a limiting factor. You have to continuously tune what you are bringing in and make sure what you bring in is of value."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
More Splunk Enterprise Security pricing and cost advice
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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
13%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing 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 Enterprise267
 

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 8% of the time
Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Logo
Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
Compared 7% 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
Opsview vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Logo
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 Logo
IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security
Compared 9% 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 4% 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.
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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.