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Elastic Observability vs Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Elastic Observability enhances efficiency, reduces incidents, and provides cost-effective visibility, with benefits in data management and availability.
Sentiment score
7.5
Splunk ITSI quickly delivers ROI by enhancing visibility, reducing costs, and improving performance with centralized data and efficient analytics.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Elastic Observability users praise responsive, knowledgeable support, valuing quick problem-solving, though rely on documentation for added assistance.
Sentiment score
6.3
Splunk ITSI support is generally good, but experiences vary by company size and issue, with occasional delays reported.
Elastic support really struggles in complex situations to resolve issues.
The technical support is excellent, and I would rate it at ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Elastic Observability offers scalable performance and ease of use, with user satisfaction varying based on specific implementations and preferences.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk ITSI is scalable for various deployments, though costly; supports large datasets with predictive analysis for resource optimization.
Elastic Observability seems to have a good scale-out capability.
Elastic Observability is easy in deployment in general for small scale, but when you deploy it at a really large scale, the complexity comes with the customizations.
What is not scalable for us is not on Elastic's side.
Splunk is highly scalable, with the ability to expand efficiently.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Elastic Observability is stable, efficiently handles analytics, and is well-regarded by users, though monitoring storage is recommended.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk ITSI is stable and reliable, managing large datasets efficiently, with minor challenges mainly during updates and configuration.
There are some bugs that come with each release, but they are keen always to build major versions and minor versions on time, including the CVE vulnerabilities to fix it.
It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it.
Elastic Observability is really stable.
The setup, however, must be done correctly as incorrect deployment can lead to issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Elastic Observability needs improved automation, ease of use, dashboard customization, advanced metrics, compatibility, and streamlined deployment processes.
Splunk ITSI needs better integration, user interface, predictive analytics, machine learning, real-time alerting, automated response, and user support.
For instance, if you have many error logs and want to create a rule with a custom query, such as triggering an alert for five errors in the last hour, all you need to do is open the AI bot, type this question, and it generates an Elastic query for you to use in your alert rules.
It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side.
Some areas such as AI Ops still require data scientists to understand machine learning and AI, and it doesn't have a quick win with no-brainer use cases.
I would appreciate additional features in the next release of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) such as cloud infrastructure monitoring including CICDs, Kubernetes, and similar technologies.
Splunk ITSI could benefit from including more features that other solutions support, such as vulnerability management modules.
 

Setup Cost

Elastic Observability offers cost-effective, flexible pricing for enterprises, though high-tier licensing may be expensive for smaller users.
Splunk ITSI is a costly but comprehensive tool, valued for its observability despite complex licensing and high pricing.
The license is reasonably priced, however, the VMs where we host the solution are extremely expensive, making the overall cost in the public cloud high.
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing.
Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not indexing huge blobs of text and trying to parse those.
Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Elastic Observability enhances incident response with powerful search, centralized logging, machine learning, and scalable integration for seamless monitoring and alerting.
Splunk IT Service Intelligence enhances incident management with agile data handling, advanced analytics, and effective troubleshooting features for quick issue resolution.
The most valuable feature is the integrated platform that allows customers to start from observability and expand into other areas like security, EDR solutions, etc.
the most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities.
All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important.
The predictive analysis can give you proactive information about potential bottlenecks that can occur on applications, desk, storage, SQL servers, databases, or other systems.
Splunk ITSI allows for integration with threat intelligence, enabling my organization to correlate more than two events for generating alerts.
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th), Log Management (14th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Int...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 3.9%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Observability3.9%
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)0.7%
Other95.4%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
Ahmed Naguib - PeerSpot reviewer
Identifying complex diagnostics and alert management improvements needed
The best features of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) are the APM, the Application Performance Monitoring, and the diagnostic capabilities. It is state-of-the-art. The intelligent alerting in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is very good. The predictive analysis can give you proactive information about potential bottlenecks that can occur on applications, desk, storage, SQL servers, databases, or other systems. It is very effective. The customizable dashboards in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) facilitate our customers because they are highly adaptable. We have multiple types of dashboards, depending on who will be utilizing them, such as engineering, middle management, IT heads, or NOC teams that will be monitoring systems. The metrics I rely on for monitoring in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) depend on what kind of asset or CI we are monitoring. For applications, we have the number of concurrent transactions, response time from the database, and write time on the desk. There are multiple parameters and metrics that we utilize in the monitoring part within ITSI.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
Out-of-the-box use cases have room for improvement in Elastic Observability. They don't invest a lot in building out-of-the-box observable use cases, and they are more focusing on giving a very fle...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Pricing can vary significantly based on the selected modules and deployment choices. Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
What needs improvement with Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) can be improved in terms of the service management function, which is the only drawback, and there are some limitations in terms of event correlation, specific...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
TransUnion, Cox Automotive, Carnival Cruises, Leidos, Econocom, National Ignition Factory, Entrust Datacard, Molina Healthcare, United States Census Bureau
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.