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Packetbeat vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 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

Packetbeat
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
65th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (8th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Packetbeat is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 1.3%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud1.3%
Packetbeat0.3%
Other98.4%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

SG
CEO at Services insitu-it
Robust clustering and quick results streamline monitoring and observability
I've been using Packetbeat for call centers, for logs, for observability, network monitoring, and some search engine optimization Elastic's scalability, in terms of cluster robustness, is definitely the most valuable feature. Kibana is also a nice tool that comes with the solution. It's easy to…
Taiwo Ige - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.
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

"Elastic's scalability, in terms of cluster robustness, is definitely the most valuable feature."
"The feature I appreciate the most about Splunk Observability Cloud is Synthetic Monitoring."
"Splunk APM provides a holistic view of the application. Unlike other APMs, Splunk's service map is quite effective."
"What I appreciate most about Splunk Observability Cloud is the correlation feature, specifically the ease of correlating logs and issues to those traces to see where within the path of the business function is failing."
"The most valuable feature is dashboard creation."
"Dashboards help the application support teams to have a quick look at how their systems are running. It helps other teams as well."
"The most valuable feature in this solution is the log searching."
"I have definitely seen a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud, particularly through how fast it has grown and how comfortable other teams are in relying on its outputs for monitoring and observability."
"Splunk APM has helped us to standardize logging and monitoring procedures."
 

Cons

"The scalability of the agent itself could be improved."
"There are some predefined metrics.......we may want to create customized metrics."
"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."
"Once you see the issues related to the scalability part, you need to understand that it is a warning triangle. After seeing the warning triangle, you need to realize that you cannot trust any of the numbers you see in the chart because it is not a complete, full data set."
"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."
"If a customer utilizes third-party tools and wants to forward data from Splunk Observability Cloud, seamless integration would be beneficial."
"The price has room for improvement."
"It does not have a user-friendly interface and it is difficult to use."
"The cost needs to be re-examined. It's extremely expensive to run. It's also expensive to expand. That's the number one complaint all of my customers have when it comes to Splunk. It's way too expensive compared to other solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is based on several factors, including the scale of deployment."
"The solution's pricing is costly."
"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
"Splunk offers a 14-day free trial and after that, we have to pay but the cost is reasonable."
"Splunk Observability Cloud is expensive."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is an expensive solution."
"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."
"I would rate the price of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring as an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise46
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Packetbeat?
Elastic is pretty cheap for large enterprises but unaffordable for small ones.
What needs improvement with Packetbeat?
I think that the scalability of the agent itself could be improved. It is also a bit limited in terms of capabilities. When a customer needs to customize the collection, I think it's tougher there.
What is your primary use case for Packetbeat?
I've been using Packetbeat ( /products/packetbeat-reviews ) for call centers, for logs, for observability, network monitoring, and some search engine optimization.
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

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: November 2025.
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