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Cisco UCS Manager vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 19, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.1
Cisco UCS Manager enhances ROI by minimizing hardware failures, downtime, and maintenance, simplifying management, and integrating efficiently with other tools.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk Observability Cloud enhances visibility and efficiency, resulting in faster resolutions, reduced costs, and improved KPI performance for users.
There's no need for an extra management device or virtual machine, as everything runs within the fabric interconnect.
Cisco UCS Manager provides cost savings by reducing the time support staff spend on long deployments.
Using Splunk has saved my organization about 30% of our budget compared to using multiple different monitoring products.
Anyone working in front-end management should recognize the market price to see the true value of end-user monitoring.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.2
Cisco UCS Manager support is praised for expertise and responsiveness, though European support and urgent issues may vary.
Sentiment score
7.4
Splunk Observability Cloud support is responsive but needs faster response times and deeper expertise for improved service quality.
For a severity one case, a call ensures immediate assistance and resolution of the matter.
With Intersight, service requests are automatically generated, enhancing the user experience and providing timely resolutions.
Regarding Cisco tech, they are pretty good.
They often require multiple questions, with five or six emails to get a response.
Support from Splunk is not very helpful because Splunk doesn't have a dedicated APM; they only have one APM engineer in Korea.
They did respond to us, but they did not explicitly inform us about the feature's absence.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Cisco UCS Manager offers scalable infrastructure solutions, though constrained by chassis limits, with largely positive user feedback.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk Observability Cloud offers scalable and flexible solutions, though concerns about cost and complexity persist among users.
Adding new chassis and extra blades is streamlined.
I would rate the scalability at nine out of ten, probably.
We've used the solution across more than 250 people, including engineers.
I would rate its scalability a nine out of ten.
The issue is mainly about pricing because if they want to monitor more, it costs money.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cisco UCS Manager is praised for its stability, reliability, and prompt support, often outperforming competitors in overall robustness.
Sentiment score
8.3
Splunk Observability Cloud is mostly stable and reliable, with users experiencing minimal issues and frequent alert notification management.
If there's a really complex problem, I would probably give it a ten since it gets escalated quickly.
I would rate its stability a nine out of ten.
We rarely have problems accessing the dashboard or the page.
Unlike NetScout or regular agents for APM, RUM has many problems during the POC phase because customer environments vary widely.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco UCS Manager needs a streamlined interface, enhanced support, simpler updates, better integration, affordability, and improved monitoring.
Users seek better integration, customization, scalability, and performance in Splunk Observability Cloud, alongside improved support and navigation features.
We would benefit from advancements in AI that offer firmware recommendations automatically, reducing the need for human intervention and vendor communication.
It doesn't work straight out of the UCS, so someone who knows what they're doing is needed immediately, and it can be quite confusing.
While it has been improved from using Java to HTML, simplifying the tabs would enhance user experience.
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available.
Improvements in dashboard configuration, customization, and artificial intelligence functionalities are desired.
Customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and process terms.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco UCS Manager is seen as expensive but offers competitive value with bundled discounts, quality, and reliability.
Splunk Observability Cloud's pricing is competitive and flexible, offering annual licenses with a 14-day free trial for evaluation.
Recently, we acquired an excellent bundle with significant discounts, with offers like buying three servers and getting one free, along with UCSC and fabric included for free.
As long as they can afford it, there is a setup cost involved.
Splunk is a bit expensive since it charges based on the indexing rate of data.
It appears to be expensive compared to competitors.
Splunk is a little expensive, however, it is in line with the current market pricing.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco UCS Manager offers unified management, easy deployment, flexible configurations, high availability, and cross-infrastructure security compatibility.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers real-time monitoring, intuitive dashboards, and machine learning for comprehensive analytics and performance optimization.
It supports ease of deployment, allowing for quick mass deployments in the data center, saving time and resources by doing so from a remote location.
Whenever there's a failure of any component, it's very easy to swap because you just disassociate that profile, remove the faulty blade, connect the new blade, and associate that profile, maintaining the same MAC address and worldwide port name.
One of the valuable features is the user interface base, specifically the C user interface.
Splunk provides advanced notifications of roadblocks in the application, which helps us to improve and avoid impacts during high-volume days.
For troubleshooting, we can detect problems in seconds, which is particularly helpful for digital teams.
It offers unified visibility for logs, metrics, and traces.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS Manager
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
16th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (9th), Network Monitoring Software (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th), Container Management (7th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Manager is 1.4%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 1.4%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Edwin Mwosa - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced network oversight with rapid issue identification and good efficiency
We mainly use Cisco UCS Manager to integrate and manage our Cisco switches across the building. We also utilize it for network integration. It provides an integrated solution for our Cisco environment, streamlining our operations and managing multiple Cisco devices like switches and routers Cisco…
Lakshmi Padaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection
Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
7%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Manager?
When one server fails, we can attach the service profile to a new server, which saves a lot of time.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Manager?
My experience with the pricing of Cisco UCS Manager ( /products/cisco-ucs-manager-reviews ) is that it is reasonable. Recently, we acquired an excellent bundle with significant discounts, with offe...
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Manager?
For improvements, while the current graphical user interface is satisfactory, it could be further simplified for different tasks. While it has been improved from using Java to HTML, simplifying the...
What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Management Science Associates, Peak 10, Virtual Consulting Professionals
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Manager vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,533 professionals have used our research since 2012.