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Google Kubernetes Engine 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
9.0
Google Kubernetes Engine offers cost-effectiveness, operational productivity, and flexibility, though competitor offerings affect ROI and challenge startups.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk Observability Cloud enhances visibility and efficiency, resulting in faster resolutions, reduced costs, and improved KPI performance for users.
By migrating from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, we have saved a lot of time and money.
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
5.5
Google Kubernetes Engine's customer support is mixed; some users find it satisfactory, while others rely on alternative solutions.
Sentiment score
7.4
Splunk Observability Cloud support is responsive but needs faster response times and deeper expertise for improved service quality.
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
8.5
Google Kubernetes Engine offers scalable, efficient, and flexible resource management for various applications, including machine learning on cloud platforms.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk Observability Cloud offers scalable and flexible solutions, though concerns about cost and complexity persist among users.
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
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
8.3
Google Kubernetes Engine is praised for stability, frequent updates, scalability, seamless integration, and high satisfaction ratings, despite minor challenges.
Sentiment score
8.3
Splunk Observability Cloud is mostly stable and reliable, with users experiencing minimal issues and frequent alert notification management.
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

Google Kubernetes Engine needs improved security, integration, user-friendliness, monitoring, pricing, and application-level security for better user experience.
Users seek better integration, customization, scalability, and performance in Splunk Observability Cloud, alongside improved support and navigation features.
When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved.
Log observability could be made easier so someone from high school can use it without having technological expertise.
It would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular namespace without needing to write certain labels.
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

Google Kubernetes Engine offers flexible, open-source pricing based on resource usage, competitive with AWS, affecting costs for high availability.
Splunk Observability Cloud's pricing is competitive and flexible, offering annual licenses with a 14-day free trial for evaluation.
Google is considered cheaper compared to AWS, making it suitable for smaller to medium companies concerning cost.
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive.
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

Google Kubernetes Engine offers easy deployment, auto-scaling, robust security, seamless cloud integration, and efficient resource and traffic management.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers real-time monitoring, intuitive dashboards, and machine learning for comprehensive analytics and performance optimization.
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team.
GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service.
What I find most valuable is the ability to focus solely on my product without worrying about the Kubernetes infrastructure itself.
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

Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Container Management
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (8th), Network Monitoring Software (6th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.2%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 0.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Immánuel Fodor - PeerSpot reviewer
The auto-scaling feature ensures that we only use resources when needed
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team. Features like auto-scaling are highly beneficial for both handling traffic spikes and optimizing costs. Furthermore, Google's promise of good SLA availability, with the service being available in different locations, adds to its robustness.
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
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive, so we now use spot machines.
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
Gemini could be more integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine ( /products/google-kubernetes-engine-reviews ). For example, it would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular...
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

GKE
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.