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Icinga 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Icinga
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (18th), Server Monitoring (11th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (27th), Cloud Monitoring Software (20th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
369
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Icinga is designed for Network Monitoring Software and holds a mindshare of 2.5%, down 3.1% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 8.7% mindshare, down 10.9% since last year.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Icinga2.5%
Zabbix10.1%
SolarWinds NPM4.2%
Other83.2%
Network Monitoring Software
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security8.7%
Wazuh9.3%
IBM Security QRadar6.5%
Other75.5%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Harrison Bulley - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification
I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.
Kyle Vernham - PeerSpot reviewer
Built-in searches and unified data access streamline alert investigation and boosts analyst efficiency
The two features I appreciate the most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the built-in searches, which have been very easy for us to get started with right out of the box, and the fact that it accesses all of our other systems. You can access it as a pane of glass rather than having to search individually. We also have the option to compare our analysts from our service to service. Splunk Enterprise Security helps our SOC team prioritize and investigate high-fidelity alerts more effectively by providing a more in-depth look and the ability to access a lot more of our data. Instead of jumping from several segmented systems, it allows us to have everything brought together in one place. For example, you have to move from our purview to our build system and to Splunk Enterprise Security, and it enables us to streamline that process. The built-in features of Splunk Enterprise Security, which we recently procured, have given us a good starting point and demonstrated the value of the product, providing an easy way to sell it to our company. The ease of getting everything into our purview helps us, and it serves as a good start for the investigation part in one location rather than what we usually have, which is jumping from system to system to system. Splunk Enterprise Security plays a role in our company's strategy to combat insider threats and advanced persistent threats by currently being in its technical test phase. We are still rolling it out, and it should help us find any insider threats based on information that our policy states should not be present in our system. Splunk Enterprise Security's risk-based alerting (RBA) has impacted our alert volume and analyst productivity because we've got many different systems feeding into it. However, it has helped to make it easier for our analysts to go through a set of events rather than 100 alerts. RBA allows us to streamline the process and customize it for our analysts. When it comes to leveraging Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards and visualizations to communicate security posture to executives, it's pretty straightforward for any type of information. The visualization is easy to understand, but I haven't had any direct conversations with our executives.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Icinga has multiple automation and integration features. There is an API for everything and a web UI for configurations. The APIs enable you to automate tasks in Icinga. We can also use plugins to talk to the API. The Icinga Director talks to a database in the background, and you can import settings from the CMDB to all systems in Icinga."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"Icinga does the job and is fairly stable."
"We have found the solution to be stable."
"The drafts are easy but what I like about Icinga is that there are many add-ons that you can download."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"Macros and the ability to connect it to Google Maps are valuable features."
"I like the ability to amend and adjust things really easily, which is useful in a case where you could make it auto-discover and then set a template to say all of these applications or servers under this template have an automatic threshold set that you’d set up manually."
"The SIEM is the most valuable feature of the product."
"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."
"Compared to IBM QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security offers faster alert resolution."
"My customer was integrated with many third-party credentials and other threat sources as well. The integration part was seamless and easy. The rates for allocating valuable information and IOCs from different sources are also good."
"The most valuable feature is the log aggregation, being able to scan through all of the logs."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Enterprise Security as very reliable and very stable."
"I like the Splunk dashboard and search engine."
 

Cons

"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."
"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."
"One thing that Icinga lacks is the capability to create advanced and customized dashboards within the tool itself."
"Icinga’s automation could be improved."
"The user interface should be improved."
"There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved."
"In general, the product does not look good. However, it does what it is supposed to do. So, the improvements should focus on usability and UI."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"It needs to improve the way to install third-party apps and enable installation without logging into splunk.com."
"Splunk Enterprise Security would benefit from a more robust rule engine to reduce false positives."
"It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support."
"It's missing some features that other solutions have, such as the ability to upgrade the endpoint and perform endpoint universal forwarders from a deployment server instead of using a third-party solution, such as Puppet or Ansible."
"My organization does not completely utilize risk-based alerting in Splunk Enterprise Security as it's not fully mature."
"Professional support is great, but too expensive."
"If you monitor too much, you can lose performance on your systems."
"For on-premise, it's more about optimization. With such a heavy byte scale of data that we are operating on, the search for disparate data sometimes takes about a minute. This is understandable considering the amount of data that we are pumping into it. The only optimization that I recommend is better sharding, when it comes to Splunk, so that data retrieval can be faster."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"The solution is cheap."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"The solution is free to use."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"It's an open-source solution."
"Splunk is not free."
"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."
"The Splunk licensing is high."
"Splunk's costing is a little more difficult. The pricing method is complicated, and the way that costing is calculated in Splunk is a little more difficult."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is affordable."
"It can be tough to determine if you are getting all of the value out of your investment at times."
"The pricing seems good relative to the other vendors that we have had here. However, they need to find ways to be more flexible with the licensing and be able to deal with situations where we start generating more logs. Maybe having some controls in the Splunk interface to turn it off, so we don't have to change anything in our application."
"It is economical than other solutions."
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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
Comms Service Provider
13%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business110
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise257
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Icinga?
The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?
It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...
What needs improvement with Icinga?
There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...
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...
 

Also Known As

Icinga Cloud Monitoring
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
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 Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: October 2025.
872,922 professionals have used our research since 2012.