CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.
$0
for up to 6,000 build minutes and up to 5 active users per month
Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Splunk supports IT operations analytics with the Splunk IT Service Intelligence premium offering, a software application available to subscribers to Splunk Cloud or Splunk Enterprise log analytics and SIEM platforms.
Based on our experience, CircleCI is well-suited for automating mobile app release cycles. For example, to release an iOS app, you would need to build, sign, and upload it to TestFlight, which requires a dedicated Mac in the office. But with CircleCI, you can have macOS executors, so you don't have to manage a physical build machine. Another benefit is that CircleCI's certified AWS Orbs abstract away complex authentication and deployment logic, allowing us to build, push, and deploy Docker containers to Amazon ECS with minimal configuration and high reliability. CircleCI is less suited for smaller projects where the development and deployment are not that extensive, for example, a static site. Once you have built a static site, you probably won't make any further changes, so there's no point in paying for it.
Splunk ITSI is a great tool (and toolbox) for combining together numerous and varied monitoring regimes to bring more holistic analysis and reduce alert fatigue. By leveraging the Splunk ITSI service and KPI modeling regime, ecosystem telemetry can be turned into a more reliable, clearer, high-level perspective on the current state of your components and services.
Automated builds! This is really why you get CircleCI, to automate the build process. This makes building your application far more reliable and repeatable. It can also run tests and verify your application is working as expected.
Simple. Unlike Jenkins, Teamcity, or other platforms, CircleCI doesn't need a lot of setup. It's completely hosted, so there's no infrastructure to set up. The config file does take a bit to understand, but if you follow their example and start with something small and add to it, you can get it up and going quicker than it first looks.
Scales easily. Again, since it's all cloud-based, you don't have to manage or scale infrastructure. Simply subscribe to the number of containers you want, and scaling up just means buying more containers.
We have replaced our monitoring platform with Splunk & ITSI, and with the success, it's seen at our organization thus far we would be hard-pressed to pivot to another tool. Frankly, our business partners and application teams love Splunk & ITSI.
The reliability & speed, it just works. The ability to spin up macOS runners and Docker containers on demand without managing hardware is a huge win. The Orbs system makes integrating with AWS and Slack incredibly easy, saving us weeks of custom scripting and providing real-time updates in our Slack channel. This makes it easy for us to track and ensures that everyone involved knows the status. Of course, it has drawbacks related to configuration complexity and, in some cases, cost transparency, but overall, it is an industry-standard, robust tool that solves our core infrastructure problems well.
Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) is a platform with extended functionality and provides various functionalities which can be utilized to improve the efficiency and accuracy in analyzing the data and detecting the attacks.
It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.
Unless you have a reasonably large account, you're going to be mainly stuck reading their documentation. Which has improved somewhat over the years but is still extremely limited compared to a platform like Digital Ocean who invested in the documentation and a community to ensure it's kept up to date. If you can't find your answer there, you can be stuck.
During POC, pre-planning, and implementation, we have had interactions with numerous folks at Splunk. Everyone from sales & engineering to markets analysts to specific IT component SMEs, and a small professional services engagement to get started. They have all been exceptionally helpful and go above and beyond the call of duty. They actively reach out to ensure success is being realized and find ways to help proactively, instead of having to simply open support cases with the vendor.
Jenkins is usually self-hosted, Travis CI's infrastructure is largely unreliable (lots of tests time out for no discernable reason), and Semaphore encourages you to configure your CI/CD from a web UI. We like CircleCI because its hosted, our tests run largely as expected on their infrastructure, and we can configure it from a config file that we track in GitHub.
Splunk has raised itself as a platform not just as a tool unlike other products in the market. If I talk about Moogsoft it also has similar capabilities but Splunk ITSI has more visibility and its GUI is making a different impact on the users. ServiceNow and Splunk are equally capable products however Splunk seems to have more tech-savvy people tools than ServiceNow.
We pay over $5K/ month and we have high expectations for service. Sometimes I feel that we don't get the value, but only sometimes.
We have had to build our own application to keep state and broker releases and deployments. We call our app deployer. I feel that CircleCI could do more to understand our needs and possibly build additional features that would enable us to invest less in build and deployment infrastructure and justify paying more for Circle.
Splunk ITSI has reduced the number of alerts exposed to our Network Operations Center by 100x while increasing the context around outages.
Splunk ITSI has increased the accuracy of our incident detection by leveraging the Event Analytics system to weigh the behavior of the many characteristics of each component together instead of independently.
Splunk ITSI has reduced our incident MTTR (mean time to restore) by detecting issues faster, presenting them more clearly, and surfacing the salient details about the underlying issue.
