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Grafana vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
8.0
Users and managers find Grafana valuable for cost-effective data visualization, enhancing application and infrastructure insights.
Sentiment score
7.2
Splunk Enterprise Security improves efficiency, automates tasks, enhances visibility, and offers customization for better threat detection and resource allocation.
The documentation for Splunk Enterprise Security is outstanding. It is well-organized and easy to access.
I have noticed a return on investment with Splunk Enterprise Security, as it delivers substantial value for money.
Customers see the value in investing in this solution, particularly when it helps resolve issues quickly, turning a potential 20-hour response into one hour.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Grafana users appreciate community support and prompt formal assistance, with enterprise users benefiting from knowledgeable representatives and helpful guides.
Sentiment score
6.7
Splunk Enterprise Security support is knowledgeable and generally effective, but response times and expertise levels could improve.
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
I do not use Grafana's support for technical issues because I have found solutions on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT helps me as well.
Grafana's customer support is mainly for developers.
If you want to write your own correlation rules, it is very difficult to do, and you need Splunk's support to write new correlation rules for the SIEM tool.
They try to close issues as soon as possible, often just offering documentation links.
They are responsive and effectively resolve issues.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.8
Grafana is scalable and effective for monitoring, though costs and complexity rise with larger deployments or open-source versions.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Enterprise Security offers versatile scalability, handling large data volumes effectively, with cost considerations for on-premises deployments.
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
They struggle a bit with pure virtual environments, but in terms of how much they can handle, it is pretty good.
It is easy to scale.
It's big in a Central European context, and small from a Splunk North American context.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Grafana is highly stable, with most users experiencing smooth operation and minimal issues, rating its reliability very high.
Sentiment score
7.9
Splunk Enterprise Security is stable and reliable, though performance challenges occur with high data volumes and complex queries.
When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
They test it very thoroughly before release, and our customers have Splunk running for months without issues.
It provides a stable environment but needs to integrate with ITSM platforms to achieve better visibility.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Grafana needs improvements in security, usability, data correlation, integration, and flexibility, with enhanced reporting, machine learning, and user interface.
Splunk Enterprise Security needs interface and integration improvements, streamlined setup, better training, cost adjustments, and enhanced AI features.
It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power.
Splunk Enterprise Security is not something that automatically picks things; you have to set up use cases, update data models, and link the right use cases to the right data models for those detections to happen.
For any future enhancements or features, such as MLTK and SOAR platform integration, we need more visibility, training, and certification for the skilled professionals who are working.
 

Setup Cost

Grafana provides open-source for free and enterprise versions vary in cost based on metrics, plugins, and features.
Splunk Enterprise Security, seen as costly, offers extensive features, requiring careful data management to optimize expenses.
In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it.
I saw clients spend two million dollars a year just feeding data into the Splunk solution.
The platform requires significant financial investment and resources, making it expensive despite its comprehensive features.
Splunk is priced higher than other solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Grafana offers intuitive dashboards, strong integration, powerful visualizations, live monitoring, and extensive plugins, making it ideal for development teams.
Splunk Enterprise Security offers powerful data management, flexible search, seamless integration, and advanced threat detection tools for efficiency.
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
Its alerting feature is effective because it allows me to set thresholds to send an email if a certain threshold is met.
It's definitely useful for monitoring, alerting, logs, and analysis.
This capability is useful for performance monitoring and issue identification.
I assess Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities for helping to find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior as great.
Splunk Enterprise Security provides the foundation for unified threat detection, investigation, and response, enabling fast identification of critical issues.
 

Categories and Ranking

Grafana
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (5th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
315
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Application Lifecycle Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Grafana is designed for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability and holds a mindshare of 6.2%, up 6.1% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 9.4% mindshare, down 12.1% since last year.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Vikash-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Displays data visually from multiple sources while integrating seamlessly with existing systems
Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards. It integrates with Prometheus to pull data and offers a straightforward setup process. Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data. Grafana's integration capability is straightforward, which facilitates building dashboards as needed.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.
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Comparison Review

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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
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it. That is pretty much great for us.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The whole AI capability would be useful for Grafana in the future, and while I don't think we're mature yet, I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following differ...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
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 Grafana vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
860,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.