Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 22, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
138
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.3%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 8.1%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
Unique Categories:
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
9.3%
Network Monitoring Software
3.8%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
10.1%
IT Operations Analytics
30.3%
 

Featured Reviews

Felix Flores - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 24, 2022
Great distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging with a relatively painless setup
We like the distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging. This has been invaluable for us during periods of high traffic or red alert conditions. It has also informed our developers on how our various systems are interconnected and the downstream effects of the problems we might encounter for certain services. We're still working on getting widespread adoption of these products. Still, we're already seeing a shift in the developer's perspective from application-specific and starting to look at things from a more holistic systems perspective. While this is not part of the question, this is relevant: Now that I've learned more about RUM, this will be something that we will heavily leverage moving forward to give us a whole complete view of our system from the front and back end perspective.
SG
Jul 12, 2024
Brings all of the components necessary to identify, analyze, and respond together
The most valuable feature is that it brings all of the components necessary to identify, analyze, and respond together. It's pretty important that Splunk provides end-to-end visibility into your environment. As in any product that one purchases to fulfill a function, we want to recognize where it came in, who it affected, and what the challenges are that need to be met in order to resolve something, both immediately and also to make sure that it doesn't replicate in the future. Splunk does a good job of being able to do the former half. Dealing with issues requires tier-three support and above and it takes time. You can work through it with the help of your vendor team. I would rate them an eight out of ten. It's not so much the problem of the application itself, although there are always improvements that can be done. There are a lot of moving parts that need to be added in and if you don't have the information that you need, especially within identity and inventory, then that can be an added challenge when you have to start making imprints based on what you do know. Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. There are a number of different standards that can be presented, which is beneficial. Some customers like to have the information that they receive in one format. The driving factor is that when you work with federal customers, some of them want it in one format. The response will be in one format as opposed to another. Splunk has helped to improve my company's business resilience. It's an active component in ensuring that we are vigilant against intrusion and detecting it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We find they have a very helpful alert system."
"The most valuable aspect is the APM which can monitor the metrics and latencies."
"Integrating Datadog with other platforms has made our monitoring processes a bit easier. It's not super simple, but it's manageable."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the APM."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime."
"We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications."
"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."
"Without Splunk Enterprise Security, it would be difficult for us to manage and prioritize alerts. There's a potential to lose track of important notifications, and it's essential to our security that we do not miss anything. Splunk has improved our investigations because the reporting and dashboarding make things so much easier. We can provide weekly or monthly reports. I also like Splunk's ability to integrate."
"The ability to digest any information and then correlate it in accordance with what you need is valuable. The ability to connect to pretty much everything and bring the information in the same format is also valuable. On top of that, we can use their language in order to create and customize the dashboards, correlations, or analytics that we want to incorporate."
"The most valuable feature is the incident dashboard, and the extensive use of correlation searches, which isn't available with a standard Splunk search package. This feature is important to me because it enables SOC analysts to do their job more efficiently and be able to investigate or mediate incidents at a faster pace."
"Splunk Enterprise Security gives us a single pane of glass so that we can use just one tool instead of having to use different tools."
"The initial setup is really straightforward. It's one of the easiest installations."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk Enterprise Security is the threat intelligence integration because essentially having to go out and correlate all the data on our own becomes convoluted."
"Easy to deploy and simple to use."
 

Cons

"Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog."
"More granular control over dashboard sharing. Timeboard sharing."
"There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields."
"While I like the ease of use, when compared with Tenable Nessus they could still improve their usability."
"We would like to see some versioning system for the Synthetic Tests so that we could have a backup of our tests since they are time-consuming to make and very easy to damage in a moment of error."
"The pricing should be less of a surprise."
"It would be great if usage metrics were automatically created and we could create custom metrics, instead we ended up building some of our own stuff to track and alert on our own usage."
"When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us."
"The solution is expensive."
"Free-floating panels in the dashboards are like a glass table."
"The ingestion happens quickly, so you can run up the data costs if you use the default settings. It isn't a problem for government agencies in the Saudi market, but many of the corporations in India are small or medium-sized enterprises that cannot afford that kind of ingestion system."
"It requires a significant amount of relatively complex architecture once you push past the single server instance."
"On-premises scaling of the solution is a bit more limited than it is on the cloud."
"Sometimes, the data does not match what we're looking for, or the tool contains incorrect data."
"We'd like Splunk to reduce false positives."
"Splunk Enterprise Security has not helped reduce our alert volume."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"The pricing model is based on the number of gigabytes that you ingest into the Splunk system. So it can be an expensive solution."
"I have no opinion on pricing."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."
"The price of Splunk is too high for our market."
"It is a pretty high cost solution, but if your organization has the funds, it can bring many benefits."
"It would be nice if the pricing were cheaper. However, we did purchase it."
"While licensing can be a concern, there are ways to reduce the licensing costs including filtering some events."
"I am not personally involved with the pricing of the solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Educational Organization
34%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
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...
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
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 Datadog vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.