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Pandora FMS vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 6, 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

Pandora FMS
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
40th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
28th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (41st), Server Monitoring (16th), Log Management (40th)
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
9th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (10th), Container Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.5%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
"The administration of the console is very easy. I like that Pandora FMS is interactive and easy to manage."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."
"Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data."
"It has been beneficial for our IT infrastructure."
"Splunk has drawn our attention to how the network is running. If there are alarms on things that are not functioning, it gives us early warning on problems that could arise."
"It supports proactive management, enhances security, and improves operational efficiency."
"The product's deployment phase is good and very easy because it is done with OpenTelemetry for most of the parts."
"The solution's service map feature allows us to have a holistic overview and to see quickly where the issues are."
"Splunk APM provides a holistic view of the application. Unlike other APMs, Splunk's service map is quite effective."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The ability to create custom dashboards is one of the best features and that's typically why most people deploy Splunk. Users can create dashboards for just about anything."
 

Cons

"Their support is good, but it is just online communication. It would be great to be able to just call someone and talk to them instead of always writing. It works well for me because I am a decent communicator in email, but some people might find it difficult to describe in a written fashion and communicate with them that way. There is a learning curve to the interface, but once you get used to it, it is actually very powerful. They have a lot of options, but people struggle with the interface. They've improved it though, and it is getting better. They need to keep improving the learning curve to help buy-in. I'm the guy that manages it, so I'm comfortable with it. They can refine the upgrade agents to be easier. They can also do more refinement in end-user usability because not everyone is strong technically, and people who aren't strong technically might be averse to the product, even though it has come a long way. It has a complete GUI and everything."
"I would like to have a dashboard with all assets displayed, with a quick hover-over status."
"I sincerely believe that Pandora needs new ideas for functionality closer to advanced device security monitoring."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products."
"It would be useful if Pandora FMS included an ISO image (or «software appliance») for each big company that leases virtual private machines (VPS), just like in AWS."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"In the future, we may have double the number of devices, and we do not want to have any issues with performance in the data display."
"The monitoring of workloads when using SignalFx could be improved."
"The product collects a lot of data but it does not assure that it collects all of it."
"The dashboards are used mainly to visualize information about the infrastructure, but it isn't easy to construct or use the dashboards. While we tried to resolve the issue by calling support, it would be easier if they had an AI co-pilot to identify the problem and help you solve it."
"There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience."
"The cardinality is pretty low."
"In Splunk Observability Cloud, I notice room for improvement in synthetic monitoring. It does not provide output based on server names."
"They need more EDR functionalities."
"A lot of customers had a hard time effectively searching within the data in Splunk. There is a learning curve from searches to indexes and using all the macros that we have created. It is a little difficult for somebody who has not used it quite a bit and does not have a lot of practice with it, but the AI features that we have been hearing about through Splunk will make it a lot easier for us to use human language to search this data. That is big. That is pretty powerful, and that will help a lot with our customers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"The solution's pricing is costly."
"Splunk offers a 14-day free trial and after that, we have to pay but the cost is reasonable."
"I would rate the price of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring as an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
"The product is a bit expensive considering the competition but the company may negotiate the price."
"Splunk APM is expensive."
"This is an expensive solution."
"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."
"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
9%
Media Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts. The custom detector could be m...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The main purpose of using Splunk APM is to optimize our application. We use Splunk APM primarily to understand how the application works, how it uses resources, and its response time in connection ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Pandora FMS vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.