Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Sep 22, 2023

We compared Dynatrace and Splunk Enterprise Security across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

  • Features: Dynatrace is highly regarded for its advanced AI engine and ability to identify infrastructure automatically. It also offers session replay and impressive visualization features. Splunk Enterprise Security stands out for its efficiency, extensive integration options, and powerful search functionality.

  • Room for Improvement: Some Dynatrace reviewers feel the learning curve is a little steep, and the documentation could be clearer. Users say that Dynatrace should offer more security options and improve integration with other tools.  Splunk users recommended improvements in AI capabilities, user-friendliness, and analytics.

  • Service and Support: Users generally found Dynatrace's customer service to be satisfactory, but some said that the response times and documentation have room for improvement. While some users found Splunk support to be responsive and helpful, others reported slow response times and a lack of expertise.

  • Ease of Deployment: Dynatrace's setup is simple, efficient, and requires minimal technical configuration. It takes a few hours at most. Some users thought Splunk Enterprise Security was easy to deploy, while others found it challenging and needed assistance from Splunk engineers or third-party integrators.

  • Pricing: Users say Dynatrace is expensive. Some noted that the licensing model is complicated and not transparent. Some said they struggled to accurately predict the number of units needed. Some users consider Splunk Enterprise Security to be expensive, but others said the price is reasonable. A few users expressed concerns about the cost of scaling up the solution and managing large volumes of data.

  • ROI: Dynatrace users said the solutions saved them money and reduced downtime. Users said that it’s challenging to calculate an ROI for Splunk Enterprise Security, and the return varies depending on individual circumstances. While some users have observed a substantial ROI, others have not actively explored or been engaged in ROI conversations.

Conclusion: Users appreciate Splunk for its efficient log aggregation, advanced data analytics, and visually appealing dashboards, but the interface could be more intuitive, and Splunk could leverage AI to enhance its feature set. Dynatrace is easy to set up and offers valuable features like automatic infrastructure detection and AI-powered problem identification. However, reviews suggest it could improve its user interface and integration with other tools.
To learn more, read our detailed Dynatrace vs. Splunk Enterprise Security Report (Updated: September 2023).
734,678 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: What is the biggest difference between Dynatrace and Splunk?
Answer: The two things are entirely different. Splunk is primarily a log collection, analysis, and visualization solution. It can collect metrics now as well. Its purpose is after the fact forensics (what happened) as a part of a problem resolution process. That problem can span the entire gamut from security, to infrastructure operations to application operations. The primary competitors to Splunk are Elastic and Sumologic. Dynatrace is an Application Performance Management solution designed to automatically measure the performance of an application (or a micro-service), discover the topology and dependencies that the application relies upon, and determine if a problem is in the code or in the software and hardware infrastructure that supports the application. The key to Dynatrace's ability to do this is its real-time topology and dependency mapping engine called SmartScape. There is no similar capability in Splunk. The principal competitors to Dynatrace are AppDynamics, New Relic, and Instana. Rather than viewing these things as competitors, many companies use them together. In fact, Dynatrace has integration with Splunk, and Splunk has a Splunk App for Dynatrace up in Splunkbase. The most common use case for using them together is that Dynatrace finds the problem, determines if it is the code or not and if not determines where in the software and hardware infrastructure the problem resides. Splunk is then used to drill down into the part of the identified infrastructure to determine the exact nature of the problem (for example a security breach).
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"This is a stable solution.""One of the most valuable features of Dynatrace is that it offers good visibility. It's better than other APM tools. You're not required to use a different technology when you have Dynatrace because it will work whether you're hosting it on Windows or Linux.""The monitoring is very good.""Dynatrace has reduced our total headcount in operations and the mean time to detect and resolve problems. As a result, those challenging offline times are much shorter, if not non-existent, because of this solution.""It is very easy to create customized dashboards.""Dynatrace has the most features compared to other products we looked at.""The visibility that it provides is most valuable.""It is a very good APM tool. There is a lot of thorough scanning of services and applications. It has got great monitoring features."

More Dynatrace Pros →

"Splunk Enterprise Security is able to process a huge amount of data without any issues.""The dashboard and reporting are very good... It provides very good visibility in a hybrid cloud environment, and you can build custom utilization APIs using Splunk.""The most valuable features are how stable and easy to use Splunk is.""The solution helped reduce our alert volume.""Being able to track impossible travel logins and things of that nature is valuable. We can track user logins from various IPs, various countries, and at various times to see if everything adds up.""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.""It is very scalable.""The consolidated overview of all the events that come in through our environment and an easy-to-access interface for all our end users are valuable."

More Splunk Enterprise Security Pros →

Cons
"The solution could improve by allowing more dashboards customization. This would allow us to monitor the metric better.""The user interface for the management functions is not particularly intuitive for even the most common features.""Network monitoring is lacking and could be improved.""The solution is a bit pricey.""When integrating this solution with any third party applications, there is an additional cost to pay. This can make the solution very costly to use.""For a new user of Dynatrace, the tool is not easy to understand, so this is an area for improvement. Before using it, you need to learn from an expert.""There should be more visibility for network performance monitoring. There should be more metrics for things like 5G and IoT. That would be the main thing because they've moved more to mobile performance rather than fixed networks.""The licensing part is complicated or not transparent. It is very difficult to assess the number of licenses for a prospect. You have to do a PoC, and calculating the number of licenses for two years or three years is sometimes very difficult. It also depends on each case. There are multiple types of licenses. Sometimes, you need only one of them, and sometimes, you need all of them. This is an area for improvement."

More Dynatrace Cons →

"I find the graphical options really limited and you don't have enough control over how to display the data that you want to see.""The documentation is in definite need of improvement.""The upgrading process could be smoother.""It works as intended for us, and we are getting everything that we need out of it. If anything, its initial setup can be improved a bit.""The glass table feature does not perform as expected.""The product could be cheaper.""There can be a bit of complexity around some fields during the initial setup.""Their technical support sucks."

More Splunk Enterprise Security Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Dynatrace's pricing for their consumption units is rather arcane compared to some of the other tools, thus making forward-looking calculations based on capacity planning quite hard."
  • "Dynatrace is the most expensive APM that we sell, compared to competitors' products. The license pricing could be improved. My customers pay for licensing yearly."
  • "Its licensing is complicated or not transparent."
  • "Always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership."
  • "Dynatrace is very good and it's provided a lot of information, it plays a positive role in making your application up to date in the market. If you want to monitor some applications only, it would be cheaper if you did cloud monitoring, but the price benefit depends on the use case."
  • "The pricing is not bad, but it could be better."
  • "Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly."
  • "As compared to New Relic and other providers, it is more expensive, which is its biggest disadvantage. Its biggest advantage is its capability. It is more feature-rich."
  • More Dynatrace Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price of Splunk is reasonable."
  • "The subscription is monthly."
  • "It can be cost-prohibitive when you start to scale and have terabytes of data. Its cost model is based on how much data it processes a day. If they're able to create scaled-down niche or custom package offerings, it may help with the cost. Instead of the full-blown features, if they can narrow the scope where it can only be used for a specific purpose, it would kind of create that market for the product, and it may help with the costing. When you start using it as a central aggregator and you're pumping tons of logs at it, pretty soon, you'll start hitting your cap on what it can process a day. Once you've got that, you're kind of defeating the purpose because you're going to have to scale back."
  • "It's a yearly subscription."
  • "This product could use better pricing in general."
  • "The pricing modules could be improved."
  • "This solution is costly. Splunk is obviously a great product, but you should only choose this product if you need all the features provided. Otherwise, if you don't need all the features to meet your requirements, there are probably other products that will be more cost-effective. It's cost versus the functionality requirement."
  • "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."
  • More Splunk Enterprise Security Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Miriam Tover
    Morne' O'Kennedy - PeerSpot reviewerMorne' O'Kennedy
    Real User

    As far as I know, Splunk is used as a syslog system only and DynaTrace is an application monitoring system. So you will use Splunk to collect events/logs from servers and devices and you will use DynaTrace to monitor applications and send alerts to end users, provide dashboards etc.

    HansChen  - PeerSpot reviewerHansChen
    Reseller

    Dynatrace is for APM / ITOM solution. Dynatrace trace can inspect the .net, Java, PHP Program. Splunk is for Log management and SIEM which Dynatrace does not focus on.
    They are two different function products.

    Gregor Oesch - PeerSpot reviewerGregor Oesch (Julius Baer)
    Vendor

    We use Dynatrace for deep dive transaction tracking to find performance issues of applications. We use Splunk various log analysis tasks mainly in the area of security.

    Stacy Ness - PeerSpot reviewerStacy Ness
    User

    It really depends on the use case. Dynatrace can actually enrich the data collected by Splunk and Dynatrace has an out of the box connection to Splunk. If the goal is application performance and end-user analytics then Dynatrace is the better solution. If the goal is security and threat analytics then Splunk is the right solution.

    informat792312 - PeerSpot reviewerinformat792312 (Information Technology Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees)
    Real User

    Splunk and Dynatrace are two different solutions. Most organizations use both of them. Splunk can aggregate logs from Dynatrace. It also depends on what is the purpose of the usage. If you intend to measure end to end application performance and the application logs are instrumenting the metrics, then Splunk alone can do the job. It also allows you to correlate other events like firewall, network and other dependent applications/services.

    Dawid Van Der Merwe - PeerSpot reviewerDawid Van Der Merwe (SUSE)
    Vendor

    Dynatrace and Splunk are two different solutions that provide insight from different perspectives. Dynatrace is installed on servers/applications to provide APM and Splunk is more a log and data analytics solution that processes logs (traps/syslog/Windows Events/Firewall Logs/etc.).

    Dynatrace provides application performance management (APM), artificial intelligence for operations (AIOps), cloud infrastructure monitoring, and digital experience management (DEM), with products for the information technology departments and digital business owners of medium and large businesses. The company's services include performance management software for programs running on-premises and in the cloud. This software manages the availability and performance of software applications and the impact on user experience in the form of deep transaction tracing, synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, and network monitoring.

    Splunk (the product) captures, indexes, and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards, and visualizations.
    Splunk makes machine data accessible across an organization by identifying data patterns, providing metrics, diagnosing problems, and providing intelligence for business operations. Splunk is a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and web analytics.

    Ref - from experience, their own websites and other related sites.

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not… more »
    Top Answer:While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything else… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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,… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
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    Overview

    Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

    Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

    • Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.

    • OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.

    • PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

    What does Dynatrace offer?

    Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

    • Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.

    • Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.

    • Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.

    • Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.

    • Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.

    • Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

    Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

    A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

    Splunk Enterprise Security is a SIEM, log management, and IT operations analytics tool. The solution provides users with the ability to secure their information and manage their data in the cloud, data centers, or other applications. Splunk Enterprise Security also offers visibility from different areas, levels, and devices, rather than from a single system, thus, providing its users with flexibility. Splunk Enterprise Security can monitor data and analyze, detect, and prevent intrusions. This benefits users as it provides alerts to possible intrusions, helps users to be proactive, and reduces risk factors. 

    Full visibility across your environment

    Break down data silos and gain actionable intelligence by ingesting data from multicloud and on-premises deployments. Get full visibility to quickly detect malicious threats in your environment.

    Fast threat detection

    Defend against threats with advanced security analytics, machine learning and threat intelligence that focus detection and provide high-fidelity alerts to shorten triage times and raise true positive rates.

    Efficient investigations

    Gather all the context you need and initiate flexible investigations with security analytics at your fingertips. The built-in open and extensible data platform boosts productivity and drives down fatigue.

    Open and scalable

    Built on an open and scalable data platform, you can stay agile in the face of evolving threats and business needs. Splunk meets you where you are on your cloud journey, and integrates across your data, tools and content.

    Offer
    Learn more about Dynatrace
    Learn more about Splunk Enterprise Security
    Sample Customers
    Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
    Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
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    Financial Services Firm28%
    Insurance Company9%
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    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization27%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government11%
    Energy/Utilities Company8%
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    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company15%
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    Manufacturing Company7%
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    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise71%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise33%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise68%
    Buyer's Guide
    Dynatrace vs. Splunk Enterprise Security
    September 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dynatrace vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: September 2023.
    734,678 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dynatrace is ranked 4th in Log Management with 22 reviews while Splunk Enterprise Security is ranked 1st in Log Management with 71 reviews. Dynatrace is rated 8.4, while Splunk Enterprise Security is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dynatrace writes "Good executive-level dashboards with powerful automation and AI capabilities, but the management interface could be more intuitive". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Splunk Enterprise Security writes "Can be used to find any threats or vulnerabilities inside a user’s environment". Dynatrace is most compared with Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Elastic Observability and Azure Monitor, whereas Splunk Enterprise Security is most compared with Wazuh, Microsoft Sentinel, Elastic Security, IBM Security QRadar and Azure Monitor. See our Dynatrace vs. Splunk Enterprise Security report.

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    We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.