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ServiceNow Cloud Observability 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

ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (41st)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
308
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. ServiceNow Cloud Observability is designed for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability and holds a mindshare of 0.4%, down 0.4% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 9.5% mindshare, down 12.6% since last year.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

VinayKumar16 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting
The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
"The UI is very intuitive."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
"The connections to the database are very good and updating the data files is simple to do. The dashboards are useful and user-friendly."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's most valuable features are its stability and the robust Splunk Search Processing Language, allowing extensive customization and analysis capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is that it's very good for log aggregation."
"Splunk has significantly helped with aggregation and correlation of critical logs. Not having to grep on each individual server has made everyone more efficient."
"The client site login is pretty extensible and probably cost-effective."
"The risk-based alerting is excellent."
"Splunk's schema on demand is incredibly useful. I do not have to worry about what my users will need when we onboard their data."
"The fact that Splunk is a platform and not just a SIEM solution is a key benefit."
 

Cons

"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
"At Splunk .conf24, I saw a demo for Splunk Enterprise Security 8. All the things that they have done in Splunk Enterprise Security 8 are what it can be better at."
"Could be more user friendly."
"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."
"This is a costly solution."
"I've noticed that onboarding data from various multi-cloud sources and diverse products, such as security network devices, can be challenging."
"Splunk Enterprise Security offers a vast amount of information to learn and comprehend, resulting in a challenging initial learning curve."
"It is a hugely complicated product."
"The incident response technique should be available out of the box. That isn't as available as we would expect."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
"It is not cheap."
"My customers have found the price of the solution to be high."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"Some of the insights that we have obtained as a part of using Splunk have greatly helped us in increasing our revenue in terms of selling our products."
"While some clients find the cost of Splunk Enterprise Security to be on the higher end, its pricing is comparable to other SIEM solutions."
"We have seen ROI and improvements as we have continued to use the product, but they are more reactive."
"Although Splunk is an expensive product, it is designed to be utilized across your organization in order to maximize your ROI and lower your TCO."
"Splunk differs from other SIEM solutions by using a gigabyte-based pricing model, rather than the agent-based licenses common with its competitors."
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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
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with LightStep?
There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...
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

LightStep
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
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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