We utilize Splunk APM for security purposes, monitoring all transactions within the organization to prevent potential attacks. Additionally, we leverage Splunk APM to analyze application logs, gaining insights into application behaviour and facilitating a reduction in Mean Time To Resolution should any issues arise in the production environment.

OpenTelemetry provides more accurate information about an application by combining views from the customer perspective, infrastructure metrics, and application-specific data. This holistic view enables full telemetry observability, allowing us to analyze and strategize effectively for our company or clients.

Once configured correctly, the analysis reporting the Splunk APM provides is better than that of the other APM tools. Once the correct fields are defined, we can create different report dashboards.

Splunk isn't an ideal tool for application performance management due to the extensive setup required. It necessitates various configurations to gather diverse information from applications, networks, or other sources. Creating the right tables and defining the appropriate fields to extract comprehensive data involves a significant amount of setup within the tool. Managing this process can be quite challenging. However, once configured, the collected information is invaluable, although not easily manageable.

Splunk falls short compared to other APM tools such as AppDynamics or Datadog. It does not collect online information in real time and relies heavily on log files. Unlike Datadog, which collects real-time application behaviour data like CPU, memory, load, and response time, Splunk requires additional configuration to obtain similar information. This makes using Splunk for APM purposes significantly more difficult compared to the automatic data collection capabilities of AppDynamics or Datadog.

I have been using Splunk APM for more than a decade.

Splunk APM lacks scalability, requiring the administrator to constantly monitor or create specific alerts to ensure sufficient disk space, CPU, and memory for data collection and transaction processing. This results in a tool that is challenging to manage and costly to maintain.

Splunk support is responsive and provides quick resolutions when tickets are opened. Their service has left a positive impression on me.

Positive

The initial deployment is complex, requiring the definition of the switch, storage, correct host, and working with certification. This necessitates at least one expensive specialist, costing approximately $5,000 per month to hire and work with our team.

Splunk APM is expensive. Even before we begin, we need substantial infrastructure investment to collect comprehensive logs. For example, to gather log data, we must create specific tables in Splunk, starting at 50 gigabytes. In a cloud environment, this storage requirement becomes very costly.

I would rate Splunk APM six out of ten.

Cisco recently acquired Splunk, and its roadmap for the coming year includes incorporating aspects of Splunk into AppDynamics. Cisco's intention behind combining these two tools is to showcase its commitment to open telemetry and comprehensive observability to the market and its customers.

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring helps identify bottlenecks within the network domain, including issues related to server databases, application response times, and code. These problems can be resolved by our customers promptly.

It is easy to use. It offers a unique dashboard reporting tool called Ollie. Ollie is essentially an observability tool, and it's also referred to simply as "Ollie" for brevity. It's important to note that this product is agent-based only.

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring helps improve the efficiency and performance of applications by up to 70 percent.

It has helped reduce our mean time to detect. It has helped to reduce our mean time to resolve by around 50 percent.

Splunk helps us focus on business-critical initiatives.

It integrates well with multiple sets of products.

The vibrant dashboards are valuable.

The main drawback of Splunk for network monitoring is its limited agent deployment. Splunk excels at collecting data from servers and databases where agents can be installed. However, it cannot directly monitor network devices, unlike Broadcom.

Broadcom offers Spectrum and Performance Management tools that primarily work on SNMP to collect data from network devices. Splunk doesn't have a directly comparable functionality for network devices.

While Splunk offers a wider range of data collection, including metrics, logs, and more, it can be more expensive. Splunk's licensing model is based on data volume (terabytes) rather than the number of devices. This can be costlier compared to Broadcom or similar tools, which often use device-based licensing.

The end-to-end visibility is lacking because Splunk cannot directly monitor network devices.

Broadcom provides a topology-based root cause analysis that is not available with Splunk.

I have been using Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring for 10 years. 

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is stable. 

Splunk deployment is simplified because it is cloud-based. The deployment takes no more than 15 days to complete.

Splunk's infrastructure monitoring costs can be high because our billing is based on data volume measured in terabytes, rather than the number of devices being monitored.

Replacing legacy systems with Splunk could cost up to $200,000.

I would rate Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring 7 out of 10.

The decision to move from another infrastructure monitoring solution to Splunk should be based on a customer's specific needs. While Splunk offers visually appealing dashboards and access to a wider range of data compared to Broadcom products, pricing can be a significant factor, especially in the Indian market.

Deploying Splunk for a customer can involve higher upfront infrastructure costs. This is because implementing Splunk effectively often requires writing custom queries to filter data and optimize license usage. While this approach minimizes licensing costs, it can be labor-intensive.

Right now it improves the gap between our on-prem data centers and our cloud environment. We've been using Splunk on-prem for eight or nine years now and it's been useful seeing existing tools that we've used like Splunk integrate into cloud environments and bridge that gap. We use the integration the most.

It has reduced our mean time to resolve. It's been easy to aggregate logs and infrastructure data in one place, making it easier to find a single point as opposed to jumping around tools. It's ten to fifteen percent better. It makes aggregating data and logs faster for our cloud purposes.

There's a feature that allows you to connect to AWS infrastructure that we've been using. Its integration with the cloud is what we're looking forward to the most.

It is very easy to monitor multiple cloud environments. It's like a single pane of glass for us. We can use it to monitor our on-prem and both of our cloud environments as opposed to having different tools for each environment. It makes it all come together in one tool.

It's fairly important that it has end-to-end visibility into our native environment. We host a lot of other programs in our program. We host an infrastructure platform. It's good to have the integration that we can pass on to our customers to show them that there are tools they can use to better their program while we're using them to better ours. So it's been pretty beneficial.

Splunk's ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time is good. I was very happy with the keynote. A lot of the use of machine learning is cool. We're excited to get our hands on that once it makes its way to Enterprise.

We still use Splunk Enterprise licensing. A lot of the newer features go into Splunk Cloud before Enterprise. We're not looking to switch our licensing over, so we're falling behind on the newer features. I know Splunk has plans to move their cloud features into Enterprise at some point. The only improvement we would like is to have more features put into Enterprise that focus on the cloud. Some people come from an on-prem environment and slowly move to cloud and would have to make a full jump into the Splunk Cloud licensing to get any of the cool Cloud features.

The program that I'm on has been using Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring for around three years now. We started off mainly on-prem for data centers and we've slowly migrated into AWS and Azure for cloud footprint.

The company has been using Splunk since we were a lot smaller. We were using Splunk for data logs, aggregation, and things like that.

It's very stable. We've never had issues with that. Anytime we do have stability issues, it's something that we can work on to fix. It's not an inherent flaw with the product.

Scalability is excellent. That's what Splunk is designed for, big data aggregation. It's been very easy and seamless to scale up over the years.

I've only had a couple of Splunk support cases, and they've been very, very prompt in responding, especially compared to some of the other big enterprise tools we use.

Positive

We have seen ROI. It's made onboarding better and it's easier for engineers in our project because there's a single pane to view all of these different environments.

We have seen time to value. It makes it a lot easier to train new people and get them spun up. We had our cloud environment for a couple of years before we started integrating with Splunk. It was a pretty quick improvement within a couple of months, noticing how beneficial it was to have a single pane of glass in all of our different environments.

I understand Splunk wants people to move towards Cloud licensing for a lot of the newer features, especially for multi-cloud. It would be nice to see those in Enterprise. I understand why they do it but that is my main concern. 

I would rate Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring a seven out of ten. There's more we can do with it. We just haven't explored it.