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 #15 in APM , with an average rating of 7.4, and holds a 2.0% mindshare in the category. Splunk is ranked #1 in SIEM , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 7.4% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

AWS X-Ray

Read 11 AWS X-Ray reviews

4,470 Views
4,247 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Splunk Enterprise Security

Read 374 Splunk Enterprise Security reviews

24,784 Views
12,640 Comparison Views

94% 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 879,455 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 (15th)

Splunk Enterprise Security

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

374

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 2.0%, down 3.4% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 7.4% mindshare, down 10.0% since last year.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
AWS X-Ray	2.0%
Dynatrace	6.6%
Datadog	5.5%
Other	85.9%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security	7.4%
Wazuh	7.3%
IBM Security QRadar	5.6%
Other	79.7%

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

reviewer1469784

Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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

"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 best feature of AWS X-Ray is the ability to correlate data out of the box, ensuring that if one service calls another service, it will provide a full flow of what has happened without needing to build or develop anything around it."

"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."

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

"I would give AWS X-Ray a nine out of ten overall."

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

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

More AWS X-Ray pros

"Splunk gives my clients the ability to bring multiple, disparate types of data together, then correlate and report on them."

"The most valuable features are the logs, which allow us to identify what happened and who interacted with the web repository."

"Splunk setup is easy and straightforward. "

"Its compatibility with other SIEMS is very useful."

"It's better than IBM, in my opinion, because it's an independent entity."

"The compatibility with the add-ons helps us add more data in the same compatible format and use data models to elaborate and make it faster."

"Search language is easy to understand and teach to new users."

"Splunk is quite flexible for our customers. Splunk does not filter from a specific lock, you can define it later."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pros

Cons

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."

"AWS X-Ray should improve its implementation process to make it easier for developers."

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

More AWS X-Ray cons

"Splunk should align its security principles with those of other vendors like SentinelOne. Splunk has mature APIs that can communicate with various security applications and devices. Splunk can process more to produce an understandable dashboard."

"Splunk does not provide any default threat intelligence like Microsoft Sentinel, but you can integrate any third-party threat intelligence with Splunk. By default, no threat intelligence suite is there, whereas, with IBM QRadar or Microsoft Sentinel, the default feature of threat intelligence is there. It is free. If Splunk can provide a default threat intelligence suite, it would be better."

"My organization does not completely utilize risk-based alerting in Splunk Enterprise Security as it's not fully mature."

"They should make data onboarding easier."

"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by bringing back some of the operational use cases."

"You can run a script from an event, but it needs many clicks to run that integration, which could be made easier."

"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by addressing the content management interface, which is very outdated, slow, and clunky; sometimes we think things are saved and they haven't."

"The training was mostly sales-focused, like how to monitor your sales. It was hard to then come back from doing the training and try to switch it to a cybersecurity focus because all the training we did was sales oriented. The basic training didn't really touch on any kind of cybersecurity use cases or anything like that. That would have been great to see in the training."

More Splunk Enterprise Security cons

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 have no opinion on pricing."

"The pricing and licensing of the product are quite high."

"Splunk Enterprise Security is not a cheap product, but I think it is worth every dollar that you pay."

"It's more expensive than the other tools, but it's worth it. Every penny is worth it."

"Personnel costs are saved by not having to involve the domain developers from multiple teams when tracing a problem that spans multiple platforms."

"It is expensive. I work for multiple clients. I am working for more than five clients, but most of the clients are switching from Splunk to Sentinel because of the cost. Even though Sentinel is very limited, clients are moving to Sentinel."

"It is a bit costly."

"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."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

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

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

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	109
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	263

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...

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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...

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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 16% of the time

Sentry vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 16% of the time

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

Compared 8% 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 9% of the time

Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 6% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 4% of the time

Datadog vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 3% of the time

Sentinel vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 3% of the time

More Splunk Enterprise Security Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS X-Ray

January 2026

Download AWS X-Ray product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Enterprise Security

December 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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