Dynatrace vs. Splunk Enterprise

Dynatrace is well suited to a number of tasks. It is important to determine who the end users are and gather good information to tailor their experience accordingly. For instance, business/marketing should not have access to some of the more technical data, and business metrics can be a distraction for IT operations personnel.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We loved Dynatrace's ability to show the data flow - from the front end points through the back end points straight to the database and various API's. It was advanced in its data visualization. This is useful for debugging - showing when/where the errors are. It can even enable non-technical individuals in the corporation to help debug
• Dynatrace has some great highly customizable integration options as well as monitoring. You can configure your layout & integration options to create custom monitoring alerts for your applications performance. Further you can increase the extensibility of using a REST API on your architecture.
• Some advanced dev-ops systems are utilizing Kubernetes/docker aswell as Node.JS - Dynatrace was able to log and help understand all of our dev-ops needs. It gave us native alerts based off of deviations from the baseline that we set during initial configuration. These metrics are priceless.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Dynatrace does not monitor easily on AIX OS.
• Dynatrace does not monitor easily on a C-based application.
• The way DPGR is addressed by Dynatrace is not very complete, and not clear. One thing is to mask the IP and request attributes but is not enough, the replay session feature is great but raises serious questions about user tracking.

Incentivized

• 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.

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We have already renewed our purchase with the company. They make it easy for us to get a temporary license for our contingency site that is only used for testing twice a year. We are expanding our license with for this tool. We find it very useful and will renew it again.

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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.

I really liked how easy it was to deploy the SaaS vesion of Dynatrace in our environment. We have a lot of tools that have plenty of capability but they don't get a whole lot of use because they would require someone who is an expert to use them. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, all the admin functions are taken care of by the Dynatrace team (updates, patches, new features, bugs, etc.) and our small shop can focus on getting valuable metrics, alerts and issue resolution from the product.

Incentivized

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.

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Our environment, it never goes down therefore is always available.

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When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.

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We have not seen where it does slow down an application.

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Given that Dynatrace has become an informal industry standard, the plethora of information available on forums is massive. Most problems or roadblocks you come across are most likely (almost certainly, in fact) already solved and solutions available on these forums. The tech support at Dynatrace is also quite good, with prompt and knowledgeable people at their end.

Incentivized

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.

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We did both online and in house training - they used our system so it made more sense.

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The training was done on our time and with our system.

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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.

Using Dynatrace support services to assist (and lead) the implementation was extremely important.

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Smooth without too many major issues.

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Synthetic Monitoring automatically does what other products do only through the use of other tools or through the development of user applications that still have a high cost of maintenance. The other products are not immediately usable and require many customizations. Through the use of configuration automatisms, you can be immediately operational and, in our case, we detected several imperfections in the applications.

Incentivized

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.

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Dynatrace can be used to monitor may software tools

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Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome

• Thanks to Dynatrace we have been able to effectively challenge and collaborate with service providers and outsourced IT teams.
• Thanks to Dynatrace we have reduced MTTR on troubleshooting by a magnitude of four.
• The performance analyses our team has done with Dynatrace earned us trust among management, business teams, and IT teams.

• 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.

Incentivized