Confluent Cloud is a cloud-native service for Apache Kafka used to connect and process data in real time with a fully managed data streaming platform. Confluent Platform is the self-managed version.
$385
per month
Splunk Enterprise
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Splunk is software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface. It captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.
N/A
Pricing
Confluent
Splunk Enterprise
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0
Standard
Starting at ~$385
per month
Enterprise
Starting at ~$1,150
per month
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Confluent
Splunk Enterprise
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Confluent monthly bills are based upon resource consumption, i.e., you are only charged for the resources you use when you actually use them:
Stream: Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs/CKUs ($/hour), networking ($/GB), and storage ($/GB-hour).
Connect: Use of connectors is billed based on throughput ($/GB) and a task base price ($/task/hour).
Process: Use of stream processing with Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink is calculated based on CFUs ($/minute).
Govern: Use of Stream Governance is billed based on environment ($/hour).
Confluent storage and throughput is calculated in binary gigabytes (GB), where 1 GB is 2^30 bytes. This unit of measurement is also known as a gibibyte (GiB). Please also note that all prices are stated in United States Dollars unless specifically stated otherwise.
All billing computations are conducted in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
If you have a need to stream data, real time or segmented structured data then Confluent is a great platform to do so with. You won't run into packet transfer size limitations that other platforms have. Flexibility in on-prem, cloud, and managed cloud offerings makes it very flexible no matter how you choose to implement.
I'm liking the newer products, and I'm looking forward to how they integrate with the overall product when they come together. Just log in and be able to query a large number of systems for similar issues or a unique one. That is a great fit for Splunk Enterprise, looking for a simple case or a simple String or something of that nature across multiple machines. It's a great fit for that to identify issues or particular software, whatever your scenario is, String, to find it across any particular server or group of servers, so that you can update or do a deployment or whatever it is you're looking to do.
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.
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.
The support from the Confluent platform is great and satisfying. We have been working with Confluent for more than a year now. They sent out resident architects to help us set up Confluent cluster on our cloud and help us troubleshoot problems we have encountered. Overall, it has been a great experience working with the Confluent Platform.
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.
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.
For our use case it was very important that the technology we were working with fit into our Azure architecture, and met our data processing size requirements to stream data within certain SLAs. Confluent more than met our performance requirements and compared to the others scale options and cost to run it was more than financially viable as a platform solution to our global operations.
A lot of products have natively inside their own dashboards and or their own logging repositories. And each one is difficult to learn or they're too complex or they're not verbose in the sense that they're not easy to mine the data that you're looking for. So that could be anything from the native logging that you find in other Cisco products. It's easier to use Splunk to draw the data that you're looking for as opposed to going to the individual's products themselves to get the logs that you're looking for.
Splunk has allowed developers to diagnose production issues when access of control was taken away from them to be allowed to view items in production environments and I believe that is invaluable.
At times some developers weren't super happy about using it, but it was more of the fact that they were used to having production access and not creating their splunk queries to get information.
Going one place to view logs was very beneficial to have.