ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

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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

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (38th)

Splunk Enterprise Security

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

375

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 0.7%, up 0.4% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 7.1% mindshare, down 9.8% since last year.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ServiceNow Cloud Observability	0.7%
Dynatrace	6.3%
Datadog	5.3%
Other	87.7%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security	7.1%
Wazuh	6.4%
IBM Security QRadar	5.4%
Other	81.1%

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Featured Reviews

VinayKumar16

Senior DeliveryManager at ITC Infotech

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.

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reviewer1469784

Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Helps us detect cyber threats quickly and integrate multiple feeds effectively

Overall, the product is good, but when it comes to some infrastructure issues, we have to dig into more logs. There is no straightforward indication of an issue. Health check kind of dashboards are not available. More AI would help us, and more optimization, since security products run more queries. The AI module could suggest solutions, optimizing queries or workload balancing. If the product itself advises on running queries during peak times, it would be similar to what ChatGPT currently offers. We see quite a few issues on stability. Even last week, we faced something, and identifying bottlenecks is not easy. We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues. Self-monitoring dashboards could be beneficial. The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side. The primary support team has very limited knowledge to provide.

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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."

"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."

"The UI is very intuitive."

"The solution's newly developed dashboard is pretty amazing."

"I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Enterprise Security as typically very good, with minimal downtime or crashes."

"I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Splunk Enterprise Security."

"Its usability is the best part. It is easy for our developers to use if they want to search their logs, etc."

"The investigation feature helps the team seamlessly put everything together, providing a consistent view of all relevant artifacts for incidents."

"The biggest advantage I can see in Splunk Enterprise Security is the big data analytics."

"Splunk simplifies real-time problem identification and resolution by seamlessly integrating existing customer and vendor systems."

"Out-of-the-box, it seems very powerful."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pros

Cons

"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 design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."

"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."

"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."

"Endpoint access is the only issue I can think to mention, even though the endpoint access we have with Cisco is fine."

"Splunk Enterprise Security could be cheaper."

"I'm not as familiar as I should be to answer how Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved, however, one of the improvement points that Enterprise Security could offer is on-prem training."

"I feel as though a major focus of upcoming releases should be set on Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, and I would enjoy to see more security focused add-ons and apps developed by the vendor."

"To improve Splunk Enterprise Security, I would suggest allowing third-party SOAR solutions to work with it."

"Its interface could be improved."

"We do have to educate developers on how to not blow it up. It is a little to easy to write an expensive query and overly stress the system. This could be improved."

"Certain sections of the developer documentation could use some updating and clarification."

More Splunk Enterprise Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."

"Splunk Enterprise Security is cheaper than competitors, but I do not know whether it is just our contract."

"As a team, we prefer the old pricing model with a perpetual license. We are still evaluating the whole subscription-based model."

"Splunk Enterprise Security incurs a significant cost because of the amount of data we send, but we are fine with the value we're getting for that price."

"Splunk is not free."

"Splunk has always been on the expensive side."

"Most people share the same thought that the ingestion rates can get pretty pricey. There is a lot of work we do to curate the data that we send to Splunk so that it is not too noisy or too expensive."

"The price of Splunk is too high for our market."

"The Splunk licensing is high."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Comparison Review

Vinod Shankar

Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	109
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	264

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 advice do you have for others considering LightStep?

I recommend the product to others. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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...

Snyk vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Comparisons

Compared 11% of the time

Datadog vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 10% of the time

Instana Dynamic APM vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 9% of the time

Cribl vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 8% of the time

More ServiceNow Cloud Observability Competitors

IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 10% of the time

Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 5% of the time

Sentinel vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 4% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 4% of the time

Datadog vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 3% of the time

More Splunk Enterprise Security Competitors

Product Reports

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Download ServiceNow Cloud Observability product report

Splunk Enterprise Security

Download Splunk Enterprise Security product report

Also Known As

LightStep

No data available

Overview

ServiceNow Cloud Observability is a comprehensive platform designed to enhance visibility, control, and performance monitoring of your IT infrastructure and applications. It seamlessly integrates log management, trace management, metrics monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring in real-time, leveraging AI and machine learning for automated tasks and actionable insights. With benefits including improved visibility, faster incident resolution, enhanced application performance, simplified IT operations, and reduced costs, this cloud-native solution is ideal for businesses of all sizes with complex IT infrastructures. It integrates seamlessly with ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM), supports OpenTelemetry standards, and provides AI-powered insights along with pre-built dashboards and reports.

ServiceNow

Splunk Enterprise Security delivers powerful log management, rapid searches, and intuitive dashboards, enhancing real-time analytics and security measures. Its advanced machine learning and wide system compatibility streamline threat detection and incident response across diverse IT environments.

Splunk Enterprise Security stands out in security operations with robust features like comprehensive threat intelligence and seamless data integration. Its real-time analytics and customizable queries enable proactive threat analysis and efficient incident response. Integration with multiple third-party feeds allows detailed threat correlation and streamlined data visualization. Users find the intuitive UI and broad compatibility support efficient threat detection while reducing false positives. Despite its strengths, areas such as visualization capabilities and integration processes with cloud environments need enhancement. Users face a high learning curve, and improvements in automation, AI, documentation, and training are desired to maximize its potential.

What Are the Key Features of Splunk Enterprise Security?

Log Management: Efficiently manages and organizes a vast amount of logs for better data handling.
Rapid Data Search: Quickly retrieves relevant data for fast decision-making.
Flexible Dashboards: Customizable dashboards provide clear data visualization.
Comprehensive Threat Intelligence: Offers detailed insights to preemptively defend against threats.
Real-Time Analytics: Analyzes data in real-time to enhance response times.
Integration with Third-Party Feeds: Streamlines information flow from multiple sources.

What Benefits Should Users Investigate in Reviews?

Efficient Incident Response: Enhances the ability to respond promptly to threats.
False Positive Reduction: Minimizes incorrect threat alarms, making monitoring more efficient.
Threat Detection Speed: Accelerates the identification and evaluation of security threats.
Cost-Effectiveness: Potential savings through better licensing options and operational efficiency.
User Adaptability: Enhancements in documentation and training resources aid in overcoming the learning curve.

In specific industries like finance and healthcare, Splunk Enterprise Security is instrumental for log aggregation, SIEM functionalities, and compliance monitoring. Companies leverage its capabilities for proactive threat analysis and response, ensuring comprehensive security monitoring and integration with various tools for heightened operational intelligence.

Splunk

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.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability