ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download the complete report

Helped 881,114 peers since 2012

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 (37th)

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 0.6%, up 0.4% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 7.4% mindshare, down 10.0% since last year.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ServiceNow Cloud Observability	0.6%
Dynatrace	6.6%
Datadog	5.5%
Other	87.3%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security	7.4%
Wazuh	7.3%
IBM Security QRadar	5.6%
Other	79.7%

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The UI is very intuitive."

"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."

"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."

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

"The technical support has been very good. They are very responsive and have been helpful."

"From the class that I took this week, being able to create notable events from whatever you find in the data set is pretty useful."

"Splunk gives my clients the ability to bring multiple, disparate types of data together, then correlate and report on them."

"The product is adept at log mining."

"Splunk can extract all kinds of data. There's no limitation on what kind of structured and unstructured data one needs to extract — it can access any kind of data, including machine-generated data."

"Integrity with many vendors: This simplifies the implementation and integration with different devices"

"The feature I appreciate the most about Splunk Enterprise Security is the CIM data model, which allows users to bring in data from different technologies, such as firewalls, endpoints, and perimeter DMZs, enabling every device to pump data into Splunk Enterprise Security, with the data model normalizing all the data and placing it in a common plane."

"Splunk Enterprise Security streamlines the creation of what they call notables, which takes a lot of the effort that we would have to put into creating our own solution off the table and does it for us."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pros

Cons

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

"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 dashboard and graphics must be improved."

"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."

"There is a learning curve in order to start using machine learning. We have been trying to do it for three years, and we have not managed anything. It is too complex."

"The incident response dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"Data retention can be better. If we want to look at the data for five months or six months, that is not available to us. We only have a history of 20 or 30 days. After that, the information gets lost. That is a drawback."

"The main issue that I have with it is that the field transformations sometimes overlap with those in Splunk Enterprise, and then you get permissions issues that lead to troubles."

"Splunk can improve regex/asset analysis as we do not want to crawl until it is done."

"One main change I would suggest is related to the incident board: when an incident is resolved, it should not appear on the incident board. It's just a rare occurrence that we open up the incident."

"I would like to have fraud detection features. Fraud is within the same turf as with security operations. Fraud and cybersecurity work hand in hand. I would like to have detection capabilities, or at least dashboards in Enterprise Security for fraud."

"I do not like the pricing model. It is expensive."

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."

"Pricing can be a limiting factor. You have to continuously tune what you are bringing in and make sure what you bring in is of value."

"Our ROI is high."

"In terms of pricing, I believe Splunk is unreasonably costly for the majority of mid and small-sized companies."

"Splunk licensing model might seem expensive but with all the gain in functionalities you will have compared to traditional SIEM solutions I think it’s worth the price."

"It would be nice if the pricing were cheaper. However, we did purchase it."

"It is possible to use a developer's license, which is up to 10GB per day of volume traffic, which is usually enough for most use cases."

"We have seen ROI and improvements as we have continued to use the product, but they are more reactive."

"Splunk's costing is a little more difficult. The pricing method is complicated, and the way that costing is calculated in Splunk is a little more difficult."

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.

See recommendations

881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

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...

Datadog vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Comparisons

Compared 13% of the time

Snyk vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 12% of the time

Cribl vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 8% of the time

Instana Dynamic APM vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 8% of the time

Sentry vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Compared 4% of the time

More ServiceNow Cloud Observability Competitors

IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 9% of the time

Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 5% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 4% of the time

Sentinel 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