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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Splunk Enterprise Security

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/ASplunk Enterprise Security is an analytics-driven SIEM that helps to combat threats with actionable intelligence and advanced analytics at scale.N/A

    SolarWinds SQL Sentry

    Score10 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help data professionals optimize SQL Server database performance in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. SQL Sentry delivers metrics to help users find and fix database performance problems and provides scalability, boasting demonstrated success monitoring 800+ SQL Server instances with one monitoring database. With SQL Sentry, the user can monitor: SQL Server Azure SQL Database SQL Server Analysis…

    $0

    Free

    Pricing
    Splunk Enterprise SecuritySolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Plan Explorer (SQL Server Query Tuning)
    $0
    Free
    SQL Sentry for Azure SQL Database
    $161
    Per year per database (annual subscription)
    SQL Sentry
    1,450
    Per year per instance (annual subscription)
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Splunk Enterprise SecuritySolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Splunk Enterprise SecuritySolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    99%
    Would buy again
    109 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    90 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    103 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    91%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    80 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    90 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    Features
    Splunk Enterprise SecuritySolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
    Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Splunk Enterprise Security and SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Feature
    Splunk Enterprise Security
    8.4
    107 Ratings
    6% above category average
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    Centralized event and log data collection7.1105 Ratings00 Ratings
    Correlation8.9104 Ratings00 Ratings
    Event and log normalization/management8.9105 Ratings00 Ratings
    Deployment flexibility7.9106 Ratings00 Ratings
    Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools8.9101 Ratings00 Ratings
    Custom dashboards and workspaces9.8107 Ratings00 Ratings
    Host and network-based intrusion detection7.9101 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data integration/API management7.9103 Ratings00 Ratings
    Behavioral analytics and baselining8.899 Ratings00 Ratings
    Rules-based and algorithmic detection thresholds7.9100 Ratings00 Ratings
    Response orchestration and automation7.992 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting and compliance management8.9100 Ratings00 Ratings
    Incident indexing/searching8.0106 Ratings00 Ratings
    SQL Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of Splunk Enterprise Security and SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Feature
    Splunk Enterprise Security
    -
    Ratings
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    8.4
    102 Ratings
    3% above category average
    Performance dashboard00 Ratings9.1102 Ratings
    Intelligent alerting00 Ratings7.996 Ratings
    Top SQL00 Ratings8.6102 Ratings
    Historical trend data00 Ratings8.6100 Ratings
    Virtualization support00 Ratings8.764 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Splunk Enterprise SecuritySolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Security QRadar SIEM
    Score8.9 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
    Score8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Splunk Enterprise SecuritySolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.1
    (109 ratings)
    8.6
    (102 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (4 ratings)
    8.8
    (16 ratings)
    Usability
    7.0
    (12 ratings)
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (4 ratings)
    7.1
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    7.0
    (4 ratings)
    7.1
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.3
    (8 ratings)
    7.5
    (14 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    8.8
    (8 ratings)
    Configurability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    7.9
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.7
    (98 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Professional Services
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Splunk Enterprise SecuritySolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Based on my experience, Splunk is a strong git for some environments and a poor match for others. The distinction is primarily based on infrastructure complexity and budget. It's perfect for large enterprises with a mix of on-prem/cloud infrastructure. It's not a perfect match for small teams with restricted resources.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • Writes Powerful Queries: The queries that can be written using the Splunk Query Language are very powerful and highly customizable to meet every need. Ex: Writing queries to search the intersection of two different sources like Network and Endpoint Logs.
    • Offers Dashboard Abilities: Helps build complex panels for Dashboards in addition to providing several out-of-the-box panels. Ex: creating panels to calculate the performance of analysts in a given timezone.
    • Helpful Search Aids: It helps to set up complex custom alerts very easily. The interesting fields section is very helpful while threat hunting. Ex: It shows all the users and the frequency of each in a failed login event. The user list on the interesting fields is useful to look for suspicious logins.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    • The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption.
    • The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform.
    • Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Cisco
    • Improved User Interface Customization: While the interface is generally intuitive, providing more options for users to customize their dashboards and views would enhance the overall user experience. Tailoring the interface to specific roles or use cases could be a valuable addition.
    • Simplified Alert Management: Streamlining the process of managing alerts, such as grouping or categorizing them based on severity or type, would make it easier for security teams to prioritize and respond to incidents effectively.
    • Expanded Threat Intelligence Feeds: Increasing the variety and sources of threat intelligence feeds available within ES would provide a broader context for identifying and mitigating emerging threats, ensuring a more comprehensive defense against evolving attack vectors.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    • Tuning advice: With all the graphs and data available, it's not always easy to determine the best thing to do. I'd like to see SentryOne provide some best practice analysis based on the historical information collected for the server being looked at.
    • They could add help tips or links to help documents, when you select a graph on the dashboard. Inexperienced users tend to put blinders on and focus on one thing when they see a high counter or something out of the ordinary. It would be very useful to include a link that provides underlying help. The link would provide an explanation of the counter in detail and offer possible explanations as to why the counter is off.
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    We are very happy with Splunk and would advise anyone to take a serious look at it. It might look pricey but the rewards Splunk offers seem endless.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    Absolutely. SQL Sentry is an absolute must have for any company with a SQL Server estate. It provides a force multiplier to effectively manage SQL Server, and the feature sets are second to none. The support and expertise at SentryOne is incredible. They are very supportive of both the platform users and helping your business with the product
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Cisco
    Maintaining hundreds or even 1000+ SOC use cases is really difficult, considering that the Data sources may not always send the data. A module that detects data freshness issues and detect data format changes would be a great help. the main challenge today using Splunk Enterprise Security is making sure that the detection rules are still working properly given all the changes that occur in data source applications. Also, maintaining the data collects on tens of thousands of servers and more than 100k workstations is a real company IT challenge: the splunkbase forwarder may not support old OS anymore, while these are the most important to monitor. Moving to the Open Telemetry collector has become essential so that only 1 agent is required for both SIEM and application observability.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    I accept that the flexibility of the alerting comes at a price. Other than the alerting SQL Sentry's interface is intuitive. Connecting to a new SQL instance, given that all the needed ports are open in your firewalls is straight forward. Reviewing the performance and queries for an instance is available in with a right click. As you dig in new tabs are created to present the detailed data. I find the ability to filter and rollup metrics on a query very helpful in dealing with the "it's running slow". You can easily compare the metrics of run times for the same query to let the user know, it's probably data your doing a billion reads instead of the usual 100 thousand.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    I don't think I've ever seen Splunk ES go fully offline or have any downtime greater than a few minutes on rare occasions.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    The system is working perfectly in capturing data, but we do experience issues with SQL Timeout when viewing results in the remote clients. This may be due to the fact that our monitoring service is consuming most of the CPU, and it is the same server that is hosting the SQL Repository. We could probably fix the issue by separating the SQL instance from the monitoring service.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Cisco
    It takes a long time for items to load if you are just generally searching through logs. It is best to use the data models which load faster but can be strange in terms of what is coming from which logs where. Yes, you can look it up, but this also requires familiarity with where things are and how to look them up.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    In most cases the pages load very quickly. In our particular case, we need to do some movement of services to separate our monitoring service to separate infrastructure from the repository. When we first started with SQL Sentry on 5 licenses, we did not have any issues. Since we have now grown that to 25, we are experiencing some challenges. We do not believe this to be a tool problem
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    It's good when it's responsive, but I've had times where I had to wait quite a while for a response. But these are typically the exceptions rather than the rule. When you do get a response it is always well-informed and appropriate. I would say they've been trending better over time with this.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    From their infancy as a smaller company to now as a global player they have always kept focus on prioritising he customer. They know their product and the technology it supports and are easily accessible for both resolving problems with the product all the way to adding value through additional training and assisting with getting return on investment through utilisation of the many features the product provides.
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    I experienced only on-line training, but the trainers were very professional and competent. Maybe it could be more useful if they also have an experience in projects because sometimes they didn't have a real project experience to communicate to the students. Anyway, it was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself, aven if I have more than 10 years of Splunk activity experience.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    Cisco
    It was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself. The only problem was that, when I worked with the Splunk Professional Services, I found some difference between the training contents and the information from PS. In addition is required a long experience on Splunk Enterprise for the data ingestion part, in other words I'm able to work with ES because I'm worling on Splunk since 11 years, otherwise I'd some problem.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    It's a fantatic product and it was very useful the presence of Splunk Professional Services for the Design Phase and the final Health Check.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    Was suggested that we install the process monitors on a dev or qa database server, but we found it more useful to create an IT db server and put it there (along with a few other apps that we use for monitoring).
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    Splunk enterprise is the only solution that we’ve been able to identify that provides risk based alerting, which allows our SOC to reduce analyst fatigue which would be a huge problem without it. Before RBA, there were thousands of alerts a day and it was impossible to review all of them
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    SQL Sentry offers more features and is customize-able to fit our business needs. It has more centralized management and support. The company's technical support is also top notch. It is also worth mentioning that SentryOne Team Blog is an excellent source. One can find lots of valuable troubleshooting skills on the blog site - very educational and informational.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    for my exterience, unit pricing and billing frequency are correct. As I already said, I hint to have more discount flexibility, expecially with new customers, because there are competitors less expensive and very aggressive that are dangerous. In addition the possibility to don't pay the license for the development period could be a very interesting feature for the final customers.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Cisco
    - 8 out of 10 and took 2 for the data pipeline and administration part. Even if you'd like to improve yourself or your team, you have to pay a lot of money and it could be more than GIAC education + cert. - Normalization for Data models and CPU-based searches can be a problem sometimes.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    We are running 25 instances through a single monitoring service and it is able to keep up. We are finding that this many instances in our environment is about as many as can be handled. We will need to deploy additional monitoring services. Luckily, there is no additional licensing costs to deploy additional monitoring services. For us, it's just an additional Azure VM.
    Incentivized
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    Professional Services
    Cisco
    I had a fantastic experience with Splunk Professional Services: they worked with us in our last SON project (a SOC migration for a very large customer) and helped to build a multi tenent environment even if ES isn't a multi tenant platform. Th Splunk PS was a very professional and competent people, he is italian and was able to speak with our italian customers.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • We have a 100% success rate on all our ES implementations due to the amazing documentation and Splunk enablement on the subject.
    • Our Splunk ES business has grown 100% YoY for the last 3 years.
    • In terms of long term management and maintenance, ES has been highly stable and predictable, reducing our overhead on costly services team for ad hoc maintenance work.
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    SolarWinds
    • Better customer service as it alerts me automatically to loss of service issues so I can react and either get things fixed before it impacts the customers or to let my management know as soon as possible
    • It helps me find expensive SQL so our customers get better performance and we make better use of our resources
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

    Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL