SolarWinds Papertrail vs. Splunk Cloud Platform

SolarWinds Papertrail is great if you have multiple separate applications and you want to be able to view and search all the logs in one place. It also works well for alerts based on certain keywords in log entries (for example, ERROR, WARN, etc.) Since only the first four weeks of logs are searchable in Papertrail, it may not work well for use-cases where much older log entries need to remain searchable.

Incentivized

I will highly recommend this software because using Splunk
Cloud has helped us become more proactive about handling our security concerns
and better manage our environment. It is one of the finest security software
that is easy to use and also provides analytics. It has excellent features like
creating dashboard security and managing features etc. So you must give it a try once!

Incentivized

• Collects logs from many sources in real time.
• Makes it really easy to filter logs to dig into the logs of many services working simultaneously.
• Alerts triggered on certain search matches.

Incentivized

• With Splunk Cloud you get the advantage of moving from POC to Production in a matter of days rather than in months allowing the Business to gain a lot.
• Takes you away from managing infrastructure/administration, allows saving time & money. Reduce the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
• Move from Reactive to Proactive Monitoring
• Highly secure environment at your finger-tips

Incentivized

• The CLI was a bit clunky and required some Linux-y thought to get right (obviously more designed with scripting in mind)
• Tracking logs in real time (think something like `tail`) wasn't wildly intuitive
• Accessing/searching archives required a lot of CLI-style pulling/extracting/reg-exing

Incentivized

• Some of their more advanced features, like ITSI, Machine Learning, or Security Analytics, can be very challenging to setup and configure.
• Splunk Cloud support has been a challenge in the past. They are getting better, but they have had problems responding in a timely manner to issues.
• These are only some minor observations of things I have had to deal with. In general, Splunk is a solid product that is fantastic to use.

Incentivized

We are definitely going to continue using Papertrail. It's been a lifesaver.

Incentivized

Ease of use and have all the features we need

Incentivized

It's extremely easy to use. I and new colleagues have never had any issues configuring this tool or setting it up, it works almost out of the box with very simple instructions to follow to configure it to our own environment. I would highly recommend it on that ability alone.

Incentivized

What it does well:

- Powerful SPL query language for advanced users

- Excellent visualization dashboards

- Comprehensive documentation and community support

Where it needs work:

- Steep learning curve for SPL syntax

- Non-Intuitive UI for beginners

- Complex administration and data model configuration

- Search performance degrades with poor query optimization

Bottom line: Enterprise-grade tool requiring dedicated training investment. Best for teams with experienced analysts.

Incentivized

I honestly have never had the need to use the support team, as we have not run into any issues so far. If we did however, judging from how the tool itself works, I don't doubt that the team would provide excellent support for any issues that we may possibly run into.

Incentivized

Splunk Cloud support is sorely lacking unfortunately. The portal where you submit tickets is not very good and is lacking polish. Tickets are left for days without any updates and when chased it is only sometimes you get a reply back. I get the feeling the support team are very understaffed and have far too much going on. From what I know, Splunk is aware of this and seem to be trying to remedy it.

Incentivized

I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates that were required to make them usable.

Incentivized

Microsoft Dynamics is far more complex and far more costly to implement and configure in comparison to Splunk. It can be useful for integrations into existing Microsoft databases. Grafana is quick and easy to deploy and configure. However, it lacks the scale required for an enterprise of our size. It is great for smaller test cases.

Incentivized

• We are alarmed properly so it makes it easy for us to monitor the server.
• Very easy to debug our apps when something's gone wrong (bug) in the production server.
• Noticed whenever any third party scan was going on our server.

Incentivized

• Splunk Cloud has had a positive ROI in helping more efficiently track the cause of Help Desk Tickets.
• The billing model which is based on the amount of data from logs uploaded doesn't alert if a threshold is approaching. This can have a negative ROI.
• The training that I have taken while in-depth and focused is pretty expensive.

Incentivized