Splunk Reviews & Pricing

by Splunk | Founded 2003, San Francisco, CA

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What is Splunk?

Industry Specialties: IT, Security, DevOps

Splunk is a leading platform for analyzing machine data. Gathering this data helps your business analysts recommend process improvements to save money and time. More than that, enterprises rely on it to stay on top of cybersecurity, including data breaches.

Collect process data and let your business analysts peek under the hood and identify risks in advance. Besides data ingestion, transformation, analysis and reporting are built in. Dashboards and reports provide interactive views.

It deploys wherever you need it — in the cloud, on-premise or as part of a hybrid setup. Pricing is complex but flexible and includes term and annual subscriptions.

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User Sentiment

Based on 2623 reviews:

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Splunk Pricing

Based on our most recent analysis, Splunk pricing starts at $150 (Per GB, Monthly).

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Starting From: $150
Pricing Model: Per GB, Monthly
Free Trial: Yes, Request for Free

Training Resources

Splunk is supported with the following types of training:

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars

Support

The following support services are available for Splunk:

Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Help Desk
Knowledge Base
Tickets
Training
24/7 Live Support

Splunk Benefits and Insights

Why use Splunk?

Key differentiators & advantages of Splunk

Maximize ROI: Design tailored campaigns and realistic budgets. Get a combined view of buyer and usage data from social media, email and web analytics tools, thanks to its data ingestion ability.
Predict Sales: Convert more visitors with targeted email campaigns or ads that remind them about specific products they viewed. Predict sales trends accurately by gathering market data from different sources.
Delight Customers: Keep buyers happy by solving their issues in the first call using personalized insight and product data, thanks to improved processes.
Boost Efficiency: Stop scrambling to fix unplanned downtime. Schedule predictive maintenance with sensor data from machines. It forecasts potential issues before they happen.
Support Finance: Combine your on-site and cloud data for a unified view. It acts like a real-time financial dashboard, giving you a clear picture of market activity and automating tasks to manage risk and save time.
Scale Seamlessly: Handle enterprise workloads efficiently by scaling vertically and horizontally. It scales by adding nodes, CPUs and data storage to ensure fast results even when dealing with a lot of information.
Manage Resources: Identify blockers and gaps in business processes. Monitor system usage with logs and dashboards and get notified when resource consumption exceeds limits.
Monitor Performance: Track everything from applications to hardware and get alerts if anything goes wrong. Splunk Observability acts like a watchful eye on system health.

Industry Expertise

Splunk helps hospital systems run smoothly and assists retail stores, banks and finance companies. Government agencies, colleges and universities rely on it to protect their systems from bad actors. IT, manufacturing and telecom companies trust it with their data.

Splunk Reviews

Average customer reviews & user sentiment summary for Splunk:

2623 reviews

88%

of users would recommend this product

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Based on an aggregate of Splunk reviews taken from the sources above, the following pros & cons have been curated by a SelectHub Market Analyst.

Pros

Data Visualization: About 92% of users mentioning dashboards praised its rich displays and many options to create custom views.
Functionality: Around 84% of users reviewing capabilities praised its rich feature set.
Ease of Use: Almost 65% of users citing user-friendliness praised the platform for making log analytics accessible.
Deployment: About 61% of users reviewing deployment said the system was easy to set up.

Cons

Pricing: Around 96% of users mentioning cost found it expensive.
Learning Curve: Deep learning is required to use the platform, approximately 77% of users referencing training said.
Performance: About 61% of users reviewing performance said it slowed down when handling complex queries.

Researcher's Summary:

Splunk is a robust security and incident-monitoring platform for operations support. Event logs, alerts, security management and KPI tracking make it a robust enterprise solution. Search, storage and analysis are its strong points.

We referenced online reviews for the past 18 months for this synopsis.

About 92% of data workers said its incident review dashboard enables easy system monitoring. The capability to design dashboards with the option to drill down into data is an asset. Some users said they would like to have more visualizations.

It garnered high praise for real-time incident monitoring. During our research, an oft-repeated sentiment was that users would not want to revert to previous tools.

About 84% of knowledge workers reviewing functionality said the solution had substantial data collection and analysis capabilities. Around 65% of reviewers reported it was easy to use and had a readable log format.

About 96% of the users citing pricing said it was costly but praised it for delivering on its promise and worth every penny. It can be complex to learn, and there’s a significant learning curve, according to around 77% of data workers who mentioned adoption.

Slow loads and delayed responses were at the top of the minds of around 61% of users when discussing performance. According to Enlyft, mid-sized enterprises form a large chunk of the user base, and understandably so, as its steep price can deter small players.

Key Features

Data Integration: Pull data from on-premise, cloud, streaming sources and machines. Include relational databases using Splunk DB, an add-on module. Splunk doesn’t support SQL databases otherwise.
Device Diversity: Gather user and system data from personal and network devices, servers and IoT sensors. Access reports and dashboards on a web interface from iPads, TVs and phones.
SPL: Search, filter and analyze data with a powerful query language. Boost adoption with natural language commands using Splunk AI.
Interactive Dashboards: Create custom KPI displays using the dashboard editor. Click on visualizations to link to other dashboards, drill down and run new searches.
Reporting: Understand data using statistics and create advanced reports using the existing BI tech stack. Calculate typical values in a dataset using averages and medians. Measure how each value differs from the mean and each other.

Splunk Enterprise

Available on-premise and on the cloud, the Enterprise version provides reporting and visualization.

Automate: Take advantage of AI and machine learning. Plan for unplanned demand spikes or downtime and identify fraud.
Predict: Forecast trends by analyzing time-series data with the predict command. Train and deploy deep learning models on the ingested data. It works with Jupyter Notebooks, PyTorch and TensorFlow.
Control Data: Transform data before it enters Splunk with Ingest Actions. Modify it as desired, choose where to send it and decide where to store it.

Splunk Observability

As is evident from its name, the module provides tools to observe processes and support business decisions with usage data. It includes app and user management and infrastructure monitoring.

Gather Data: Collect data using an event collector and a universal forwarder. Pull information about how users interact with the app, how different parts of the system are performing, and machine data using the OpenTelemetry Collector.
Understand: See how users interact with your app and how code changes affect performance.
Remediate: Detect issues using streaming data and root-cause analysis.

Approach to Common Challenges

Data Integration: Unreliable connections and messy data management can ruin everything. Splunk provides readymade connections and tools to clean and transform data. It even takes care of it after its usefulness is over by archiving it.
Data Quality Issues: Dirty data can result in unusable results. Splunk tackles this by monitoring quality with a dedicated console. Governance rules also act as gatekeepers for controlling access.
Data Complexity: Splunk saves on data storage by archiving older data in low-cost locations, ensuring speed and affordability. Plus, it can search all data without moving it from the source, making complex analyses super fast.
Data Storage: Data issues arise from the various types and also due to inefficient storage. Splunk has a powerful indexing engine that can scale with complex and high-speed data streams.
Scalability: Lags when handling large volumes are the bane of enterprises. Splunk is built to scale on demand and has analytics maturity, thanks to machine learning. It deploys additional indexers and search heads when needed.

Cost of Ownership

Frequently asked questions regarding Splunk pricing include

Q: What are Splunk’s three pricing options?

A: Picking the best pricing model depends on the data flow and usage patterns. Here’s a breakdown.

Ingest pricing depends on the amount of daily ingested data measured in GB/day. Enterprises with predictable data volumes might find it a good fit. However, data manipulation and analysis will incur additional charges.
Workload pricing incurs charges for searches and analysis measured in Splunk Virtual Compute units. It’s suitable for organizations with fluctuating data needs, and the upside is that no data gets left behind.
Entity-based pricing depends on the number of devices. It’s ideal for enterprises seeking security or IT service management.

Splunk Observability Cloud costs start from $15 per host monthly. The vendor offers term licenses for on-premises and annual subscriptions for cloud solutions.

Q: What is SVC?

A: SVC is a unit of computing power for search and data ingestion in Splunk. Plus, it includes memory and input/output resources. The vendor charges fees for the maximum number of consumed SVCs. It enables businesses to handle data surges without breaking a sweat.

The more SVCs consumed, the lower the cost per SVC, making workload pricing an attractive option for organizations using high processing power.

Q: Ingest vs. workload pricing — which should I choose?

A: Ingest pricing might be a good fit for organizations with consistent data volumes. And since it depends on the peak ingested volume in a day, opting for a higher tier would be a good idea to account for volume spikes. If the daily ingested data is 45 GB, consider opting for the next higher tier of 50 GB data.

Discuss with stakeholders if uploading only selected data is an option. You might be able to opt for a lower-priced slab.

If volumes fluctuate often, opt for workload pricing to cater to data surges. Pay for data processing and loading without worrying about exceeding storage.

Splunk offers discounts for higher volumes. Opt for a free trial to determine the right fit and check its compatibility with the selected Splunk edition.

Q: Is Splunk free for personal use?

A: Yes, but it’s a standalone, so user management, alerting and data forwarding aren't available.

The free edition allows ingesting up to 500 MB of data daily, which might be enough for individual use but can dry up fast when connecting to multiple sources. If extensive connectivity is a requirement, consider opting for a paid subscription.

As an alternative, a 14-day Splunk Cloud trial is available. It provides access to full features of the cloud platform.

Limitations

These drawbacks based on user feedback are accurate at the time of this review

Due to high CPU usage, it might not be able to handle complex queries without risking system slowdowns or even crashes.
Extensive connectivity requires additional effort and customization.
There’s a steep learning curve.

Training Resources

Training: Access free courses and eBooks on the vendor’s website.
Certification: The vendor conducts regular boot camps as part of Splunk University. Opt for a one-year basic subscription and follow it up by getting certified as a power user, cloud administrator or search expert.
Use Cases: Read about the product in action with the Splunk blog.
Documentation: Learn about system architecture, requirements, apps and services, tutorials and onboarding guides on the vendor’s website.
Community: Ask and answer questions in online communities of Splunk students and users. Sign up to join user groups that meet online and in person to share tips, use cases and learnings.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions regarding Splunk include:

Q: Is Splunk SQL or NoSQL?

A: It has SQL-like capabilities, but it’s not a SQL/NoSQL database.

It isn't a traditional SQL or NoSQL database but uses its proprietary indexing technology to store and analyze machine data.
It uses SPL, not SQL, for querying.
Unlike SQL databases that have pre-defined schemas, it designs schemas on the fly, enabling the ingestion of unstructured data.
It stores data in a particular format for use cases, not in a traditional database.

Q: Is learning Splunk independently possible?

A: Though the vendor offers self-paced free courses, Splunk is a complex platform that requires technical skills and an understanding of concepts like log analysis. Beginners without prior experience may find it challenging at first.

Though it hides most of the code from end users, building custom apps and integrations might require using programming languages. The level of coding required can vary depending on the use case and customization.

Q: Is Splunk a big data tool?

A: Yes, it is, on account of handling massive volumes of machine data and scaling to the enterprise level. It uses late-binding schema, a trait of big data tools. Plus, live insights are proof of its capability to handle real-time data, irrespective of the volumes.