Likelihood to Recommend I have been using AWS Elastic Beanstalk for more than 5 years, and it has made our life so easy and hassle-free. Here are some scenarios where it excels -
I have been using different AWS services like EC2, S3, Cloudfront, Serverless, etc. And Elastic Beanstalk makes our lives easier by tieing each service together and making the deployment a smooth process. N number of integrations with different CI/CD pipelines make this most engineer's favourite service. Scalability & Security comes with the service, which makes it the absolute perfect product for your business. Personally, I haven't found any situations where it's not appropriate for the use cases it can be used. The pricing is also very cost-effective.
Read full review Pros: Splunk is very well suited if you have multiple log sources of related data. All of them can be correlated and tasks can be automated based on the requirement. Other than alerts, Splunk can also run a specific script of your choice, based on some defined conditions. Cons: If you have a few logs but a large number of log sources, Splunk can be very expensive.
Read full review Pros Getting a project set up using the console or CLI is easy compared to other [computing] platforms. AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a variety of programming languages so teams can experiment with different frameworks but still use the same compute platform for rapid prototyping. Common application architectures can be referenced as patterns during project [setup]. Multiple environments can be deployed for an application giving more flexibility for experimentation. Read full review Real-time + Scheduled alerts - i-e you can set up alerts which are actively monitoring your logs Pretty good response time for search results. With our key/value logging, Splunk makes it blazing fast to query the data. Dashboards provide insights into historical data Love how Splunk indexes all of the data and provides keys to search on Read full review Cons Limited to the frameworks and configurations that AWS supports. There is no native way to use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a Go application behind Nginx, for example. It's not always clear what's changed on an underlying system when AWS updates an EB stack; the new version is announced, but AWS does not say what specifically changed in the underlying configuration. This can have unintended consequences and result in additional work in order to figure out what changes were made. Read full review At times some queries can run slowly if indices are not on a portion of the query you use. Setup time initially can be difficult if your logs aren't stored in common locations or in a common way to write the log. Ability to ingest logs from different locations without having to change code to put logs in a certain place (pro and con). Searches can be a bit more difficult to look through if your log isn't pulled in a manner that is easy to read through splunk. Read full review Likelihood to Renew As our technology grows, it makes more sense to individually provision each server rather than have it done via beanstalk. There are several reasons to do so, which I cannot explain without further diving into the architecture itself, but I can tell you this. With automation, you also loose the flexibility to morph the system for your specific needs. So if you expect that in future you need more customization to your deployment process, then there is a good chance that you might try to do things individually rather than use an automation like beanstalk.
Read full review We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.
Read full review Usability It is a great tool to manage your applications. You just need to write the codes, and after that with one click, your app will be online and accessible from the internet. That is a huge help for people who do not know about infrastructure or do not want to spend money on maintaining infrastructure.
Read full review You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.
Read full review Reliability and Availability When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.
Read full review Support Rating As I described earlier it has been really cost effective and really easy for fellow developers who don't want to waste weeks and weeks into learning and manually deploying stuff which basically takes month to create and go live with the Minimal viable product (MVP). With AWS Beanstalk within a week a developer can go live with the Minimal viable product easily.
Read full review Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.
Read full review Online Training The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.
Read full review Implementation Rating - Do as many experiments as you can before you commit on using beanstalk or other AWS features. - Keep future state in mind. Think through what comes next, and if that is technically possible to do so. - Always factor in cost in terms of scaling. - We learned a valuable lesson when we wanted to go multi-region, because then we realized many things needs to change in code. So if you plan on using this a lot, factor multiple regions.
Read full review Smooth without too many major issues.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We also use
Heroku and it is a great platform for smaller projects and light Node.js services, but we have found that in terms of cost, the Elastic Beanstalk option is more affordable for the projects that we undertake. The fact that it sits inside of the greater AWS Cloud offering also compels us to use it, since integration is simpler. We have also evaluated
Microsoft Azure and gave up trying to get an extremely basic implementation up and running after a few days of struggling with its mediocre user interface and constant issues with documentation being outdated. The authentication model is also badly broken and trying to manage resources is a pain. One cannot compare Azure with anything that Amazon has created in the cloud space since Azure really isn't a mature platform and we are always left wanting when we have to interface with it.
Read full review I wanted to learn a new language that I can quickly master and implement. Splunk is easy, fun to use and best of all, it can be developed in hours not days or weeks. Splunk is fundamentally a programming language that is minimal but yet powerful enough to collect, analyze and visualize data.
Read full review Scalability Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome
Read full review Return on Investment till now we had not Calculated ROI as the project is still evolving and we had to keep on changing the environment implementation it meets our purpose of quick deployment as compared to on-premises deployment till now we look good as we also controlled our expenses which increased suddenly in the middle of deployment activity Read full review Overall very positive. It has provided visibility to what is going on within our network. One drawback is the time it takes to get up to speed with the application, but this is up to the user, and Splunk education is excellent. In my field, IT Security, there are few other friends to have in your back pocket better than Splunk. They are just that good. Read full review ScreenShots