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SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 19, 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

SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (12th), Active Directory Management (10th)
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th), Container Management (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.6%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Camargo - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides user-friendly API features and has straightforward deployment process
One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when adding new modules or additional pollers. Additionally, the granularity of polling times for specific components could be enhanced to better meet individual customers' needs without impacting the entire polling pool.
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

"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"The solution overall is very valuable for me."
"The product's deployment phase is good and very easy because it is done with OpenTelemetry for most of the parts."
"The features are pretty much ready out of the box."
"Detectors are a powerful feature."
"Splunk APM has helped us to standardize logging and monitoring procedures."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to customize dashboards based on my queries or any other customization I may need."
"This solution is very quick to deploy as it is a SaaS solution and integrates with tools like ServiceNow."
"The solution monitors attacks or unauthorized access to the information we want to protect."
 

Cons

"Mapping interactions between systems."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"Support from Splunk is not very helpful because Splunk doesn't have a dedicated APM; they only have one APM engineer in Korea."
"The product collects a lot of data but it does not assure that it collects all of it."
"They need more EDR functionalities."
"Splunk isn't an ideal tool for application performance management due to the extensive setup required."
"In Splunk Observability Cloud, I notice room for improvement in synthetic monitoring. It does not provide output based on server names."
"We never had any issues when it comes to the type of use cases we are using it for. We did not need more advancement on it, but I know that, in general, everything can be updated. There are tiny little tweaks that can be made regardless of whether it looks better or has a different flow to it than it does right now, but it works pretty well for what we use it for."
"There are some predefined metrics.......we may want to create customized metrics."
"The cardinality is pretty low."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"The price is too high."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"The product is expensive."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"The solution's pricing is costly."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is an expensive solution."
"It is expensive."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The pricing is based on several factors, including the scale of deployment."
"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
"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 am not in that circle, but we are currently licensing based on our queries. That is working out for us. Previously, it was by volume of data, and now, we can store as much data as we want."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
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

SolarWinds SAM
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.