AWS X-Ray vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

The compared Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Splunk solutions aren't in the same category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #14 in APM , with an average rating of 7.4, and holds a 2.5% mindshare in the category. Splunk is ranked #1 in SIEM , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 8.7% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

AWS X-Ray

Read 11 AWS X-Ray reviews

4,682 Views
4,448 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Splunk Enterprise Security

Read 369 Splunk Enterprise Security reviews

23,704 Views
12,326 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

AWS X-Ray

Splunk Enterprise Security

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between AWS X-Ray and Splunk Enterprise Security based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security Report (Updated: May 2023).

Buyer's Guide

AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security

May 2023

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Helped 873,085 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

AWS X-Ray

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (14th)

Splunk Enterprise Security

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

369

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. AWS X-Ray is designed for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability and holds a mindshare of 2.5%, down 3.4% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 8.7% mindshare, down 10.9% since last year.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
AWS X-Ray	2.5%
Dynatrace	8.1%
Datadog	6.6%
Other	82.8%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security	8.7%
Wazuh	9.3%
IBM Security QRadar	6.5%
Other	75.5%

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Featured Reviews

Muhmad Tabrez A Deewanji

Lead Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Improving performance through efficient trace metrics and data insights

As an application developer and architect, I appreciate AWS X-Ray for checking latency and identifying bottlenecks. I use it for performance tuning, conducting performance testing on applications, getting real-time traces, and gaining data insights. It helps in improving throughput and tuning infrastructure. The trace metrics and data collected provide valuable insights.

Read full review

Kyle Vernham

Threat Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Built-in searches and unified data access streamline alert investigation and boosts analyst efficiency

The two features I appreciate the most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the built-in searches, which have been very easy for us to get started with right out of the box, and the fact that it accesses all of our other systems. You can access it as a pane of glass rather than having to search individually. We also have the option to compare our analysts from our service to service. Splunk Enterprise Security helps our SOC team prioritize and investigate high-fidelity alerts more effectively by providing a more in-depth look and the ability to access a lot more of our data. Instead of jumping from several segmented systems, it allows us to have everything brought together in one place. For example, you have to move from our purview to our build system and to Splunk Enterprise Security, and it enables us to streamline that process. The built-in features of Splunk Enterprise Security, which we recently procured, have given us a good starting point and demonstrated the value of the product, providing an easy way to sell it to our company. The ease of getting everything into our purview helps us, and it serves as a good start for the investigation part in one location rather than what we usually have, which is jumping from system to system to system. Splunk Enterprise Security plays a role in our company's strategy to combat insider threats and advanced persistent threats by currently being in its technical test phase. We are still rolling it out, and it should help us find any insider threats based on information that our policy states should not be present in our system. Splunk Enterprise Security's risk-based alerting (RBA) has impacted our alert volume and analyst productivity because we've got many different systems feeding into it. However, it has helped to make it easier for our analysts to go through a set of events rather than 100 alerts. RBA allows us to streamline the process and customize it for our analysts. When it comes to leveraging Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards and visualizations to communicate security posture to executives, it's pretty straightforward for any type of information. The visualization is easy to understand, but I haven't had any direct conversations with our executives.

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

"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."

"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."

"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."

"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."

"The solution has made it easier for us to trace the problems that we have with our requests and to monitor the timing of each step in each request we do in our endpoints."

"AWS X-RAY identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."

"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."

"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."

More AWS X-Ray pros

"The biggest advantage I can see in Splunk Enterprise Security is the big data analytics."

"The tool helps with advanced reports and keeps the system scalable and flexible. It provides a clear picture of the current status of any incidents. As a CISO, I see a lot of potential for future innovation, which is interesting. I've noticed better performance, especially with the reports."

"Exporting is a good feature. It helps me out when I have to do reports. I do a lot of exporting and crunching of the numbers. Dashboards are okay for showing to the leadership, but for doing statistics and updating tickets, the export feature is very beneficial for me."

"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's most valuable features are its stability and the robust Splunk Search Processing Language, allowing extensive customization and analysis capabilities."

"If I need to integrate devices for logs, it is easier with Splunk. We can integrate different applications, network devices, and databases. It is also very rich in documents. It is the best."

"It has supported our SOC by improving it."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to look at threats and link them to the MITRE ATT&CK framework."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pros

Cons

"Like most Amazon products, the user interface, configuration, and tuning aren't the easiest. That's the biggest reason why people tend to go to products like TerraForm and Terragrunt. We use TerraForm and Terragrunt. So, for setting things up and interacting with X-Ray, it's definitely the user interface that can be better."

"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."

"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."

"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."

"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."

"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."

"Compared to other open-source tools, AWS X-Ray needs improvement in providing discounts."

"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."

More AWS X-Ray cons

"The first thing that comes to mind is a little bit of UI improvement. It sometimes can be a little bit buggy or it can be a little bit slow, but that varies from customer to customer."

"When we do a rollout from the server or host or anything, we'd like to see more automation. It would save us time."

"I would like to get visibility into the data pipelines on heavy forwarders and indexers to see exactly their source and the cause of saturation when it occurs. This would help us learn even more about our high use applications."

"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."

"Splunk can improve its third-party device application plugins."

"There is improvement needed when importing from some types of data sources."

"If possible, we would like to have not only a log monitoring system but a network monitoring feature in this solution as well."

"We find that the maintenance process could be a lot better."

More Splunk Enterprise Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."

"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"It is expensive. I used to buy it early on, but then they combined it into a higher-up organization. They buy it for multiple systems now. Last time, I paid around 60K for it. There is just the licensing fee. That's all."

"Splunk's cost is very high. They need to review the pricing. They have to go back and totally readdress the market."

"While Splunk is more expensive than other solutions, we would still choose it because of its capabilities."

"Luckily, we come under a large federal agency, and before the pandemic, they signed a large enterprise license agreement. It worked out great and to our advantage because we are a small organization. We got a 300 gig license, and we just did not have the buying power to be able to get products cheaply. Because we all partnered together under the agency umbrella, we were able to get Splunk Enterprise Security, UBA, and ITSI for cheap. This was good considering the fact that some of these premium apps require a minimum number of users, and we do not have the number of people needed to even justify buying it."

"I think that most of the monitoring solutions are expensive."

"Splunk Enterprise Security is priced lower than competitors."

"Splunk can be expensive, as its licensing is based on the daily data ingestion volume."

"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 Deloitte & Touche

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

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	110
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	257

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS X-Ray?

While I have not compared it with GCP or Azure ( /products/microsoft-azure-reviews ), AWS generally offers cost-effective services. Some services, like Athena ( /products/odyssey-software-athena-eo...

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?

The challenges we faced with AWS X-Ray were that some of the AWS services we were using did not support it, which we discovered at a later stage. This was potentially a design consideration we shou...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for AWS X-Ray?

I have been using AWS X-Ray for creating insights to our applications we have developed. It is used to correlate different services in AWS when a transaction happens, allowing us to see the flow of...

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

Datadog vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 19% of the time

Sentry vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 18% of the time

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 9% of the time

New Relic vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 8% of the time

Dynatrace vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 8% of the time

More AWS X-Ray Competitors

IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 8% of the time

Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 6% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 6% of the time

Datadog vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 4% of the time

Security Onion vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 4% of the time

More Splunk Enterprise Security Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS X-Ray

November 2025

Download AWS X-Ray product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Enterprise Security

October 2025

Download Splunk Enterprise Security product report

Overview

AWS X-Ray is a powerful debugging and performance analysis tool offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows developers to trace requests made to their applications and identify bottlenecks and issues.

With X-Ray, developers can visualize the entire request flow and pinpoint the exact location where errors occur. It provides detailed insights into the performance of individual components and helps optimize the overall application performance.

X-Ray integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, making it easy to trace requests across different services and identify dependencies. It also offers a comprehensive set of APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to instrument their applications and capture valuable data for analysis. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, AWS X-Ray is a valuable tool for developers looking to improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow

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

AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security

May 2023

Free Report: AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security

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