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Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 21, 2025

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

Google Cloud's operations s...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
28th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (30th)
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (6th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 1.0%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.0%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud2.0%
Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)1.0%
Other97.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations
As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or BigQuery can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings.
Taiwo Ige - PeerSpot reviewer
Alerting improves incident response across teams and enables faster awareness before customer impact
Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved in terms of integrations with more technical add-ons, such as Zoom. Although they have one with Zoom, it's not available in the cloud, so having that feature would be beneficial. Essentially, Splunk should continue expanding to create easier ways to ingest logs from different products. The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders. However, there are aspects that could be improved, such as linking dashboards to one another. While IT leaders may not drill down, it's crucial to create levels of dashboards for technical users to find root causes, making it effective for stakeholders.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the monitoring feature."
"Provides visibility into the performance uptime."
"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports."
"Offers a valuable logging transport feature"
"We find the solution to be stable."
"Google's technical support is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."
"The company has many systems that the customer is paying to access. Splunk APM issued via AppDynamics helps find problems in the feed. It reduces the risk of supervising all the devices. I can supervise the flow and simulate the conditions of the repository across several dashboards to show what's happening at the moment."
"The dashboards are the features of Splunk Observability Cloud that I appreciate the most, providing visual representation of all data and text, which has benefited my organization by speeding up people's jobs and allowing a place to monitor all logs, as there are usually thousands of entries coming in which can become very disorderly."
"The most valuable features include user time tracking and the ability to analyze application load times."
"Once configured correctly, the analysis reporting the Splunk APM provides is better than that of the other APM tools."
"The product's deployment phase is good and very easy because it is done with OpenTelemetry for most of the parts."
"The volume it handles is very good, including the number of metrics, the volume number of traces, and more."
"The most valuable features are troubleshooting and optimizing application performance."
"The feature I find most valuable, is the data integration."
 

Cons

"The logging functionality could be better."
"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."
"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."
"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver."
"It could be even more automated."
"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."
"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."
"It could be more stable."
"The UI enhancements could be a way to improve the solution in the future."
"There's no standard use case available where you can see the utilization of the number of use cases I have."
"Splunk Observability Cloud has not yet completely improved our operational performance for our company's resilience as we are just starting out, however, it will help us ultimately to reduce incident time."
"It's a bit difficult to use. It takes some time to get into it and to get it to do what you would like it to do. It is not straightforward to use it."
"Splunk APM's performance could be improved - at the moment, it's very slow and takes forever to give me what I want."
"The UI of Splunk Observability Cloud is one of the major issues; it's old and has been there for more than 10 years, acquired by other applications from other companies. It's time to reinvent how the UI is going to work with the AI modules and integrations, making it softer and cleaner."
"They do not have all the features that I expect right now."
"Particularly what we're having is disconnection from the cloud console, where we will be working in it and receive a message saying that we've been disconnected and have to wait for it to come up."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
"The cost could be lower."
"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
"I would rate the price of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring as an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
"Splunk APM is expensive."
"Splunk offers a 14-day free trial and after that, we have to pay but the cost is reasonable."
"Splunk's infrastructure monitoring costs can be high because our billing is based on data volume measured in terabytes, rather than the number of devices being monitored."
"Splunk Observability Cloud is expensive."
"Licensing cost is the biggest argument I get from those divesting from Splunk. There are those within our organization who say we are going to go to other tools since Splunk is too expensive."
"It is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Media Company
7%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Stackdriver?
If the errors are caught early in the interface, it would be easier for users to manage. The process of logging analytics can be improved.
What is your primary use case for Google Stackdriver?
I use the solution for logging, defining alerts, and monitoring. Our company's Java and Python logging teams mainly use it.
What advice do you have for others considering Google Stackdriver?
The Ops Agent and logging transport feature of the solution have had a major impact on improving application performance. The solution also allows the transport of logs into log buckets, which is h...
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

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
871,358 professionals have used our research since 2012.