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AWS X-Ray 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

AWS X-Ray
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (16th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
318
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 3.2%, down 3.4% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 9.4% mindshare, down 12.1% since last year.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Muhmad Tabrez A Deewanji - PeerSpot reviewer
Improving performance through efficient trace metrics and data insights
As an application developer and architect, I appreciate AWS X-Ray ( /products/aws-x-ray-reviews ) 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.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is a very scalable solution."
"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."
"AWS X-Ray's endpoints and user monitoring are considered the most valuable features."
"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."
"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."
"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."
"AWS X-RAY identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."
"It is very simple to tweak or write a small piece of glue code to go ahead and create a new dashboard for a business unit to make near real-time decisions to focus more on other geographies when launching the product."
"Deployment server for deploying changes in one go."
"We can automatically suspend or terminate suspicious sessions."
"The graph visualization is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is very fast and succinct."
"The feature that I have found most valuable with Splunk is the ability to sift through a bunch of data very quickly."
"I like Splunk's automated threat detection and orchestration capabilities. Splunk offers a single solution for analyzing, aggregating, correlating, monitoring, reporting, visualizing, etc. You can get all of these capabilities in one place. On top of that, it provides a cloud, testing, on-premise, and hybrid solution, giving customers more flexibility for their use cases."
"It helps us uncover bottlenecks in the network."
 

Cons

"What needs to be better in AWS X-Ray is the log filtering. Predefined filters could be helpful because the power of analytics comes from how you can filter the data. I also want to see more KPIs from AWS X-Ray."
"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."
"AWS X-Ray should improve its implementation process to make it easier for developers."
"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."
"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."
"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."
"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."
"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."
"While Splunkbase (the app repository) has a lot of great content, some apps are terribly old and could stand to be updated or purged."
"In terms of the interface, it could include some improvements for the look and feel."
"Previously, they developed custom connectors or add-ons for a lot of applications. But that number can be upgraded still. There are a lot of applications in the world that are not supported."
"We can only increase the environment. For instance, with an ES server, we cannot make a cluster of ES. If you have two servers and want to make a cluster of these two servers for ES, that is not possible."
"The search could be improved. Now, it is a bit difficult to write search queries because they become quite long, then maintaining those long search queries is a quite challenging."
"While Splunk Enterprise Security offers valuable features, its cost is high and could be more competitive."
"The security can be improved."
"Splunk has a steeper learning curve, making it feel less user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."
"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 solution is a bit expensive."
"I assume that the pricing is reasonable, because if it was too costly, there are other alternatives."
"Free Splunk license for PoCs on personal machines and the ability to scale the PoC to an enterprise level app."
"From what I have seen so far, Splunk has multiple cost models. The one that we are using is pretty good when it comes to ingesting data into the environment. It has worked out pretty well."
"This product could use better pricing in general."
"The subscription is monthly."
"The tool's pricing model is great. You can choose between workloads or volume."
"The pricing and licensing of the product are quite high."
"I am fine with the licensing, but in terms of the cost, it is expensive for the data that we have. We have an open discussion with our account rep about this."
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Comparison Review

VS
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
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS X-Ray?
AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process.
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...
What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?
AWS X-Ray should improve its implementation process to make it easier for developers. The current manual instrumentation is challenging compared to the almost automatic instrumentation of other pro...
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...
 

Overview

 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
861,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.