Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring vs. StackState

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is well suited for any complicated environment where you have apps and servers across multiple clouds and platforms and products. If you have a data centre where all your apps and servers are in one single network, you could probably get away with older solutions. But for any modern, complex, hybrid-cloud microservices environment, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is a must-have.

Incentivized

StackState is suitable for 1000+ hosts. Sometimes specific applications can take higher development time. Well suited for hybrid platforms to build end to end service alarms and service views. Advanced UI navigation might require some training. It is not a simple download and deploy software. It will require development in an agile model. Where newer versions are deployed to suit exact client requirements. Support contract with the StackState Engineer for development of use-cases is required and very useful.

• SignalFX handles historical metric aggregation exceptionally well, providing a multifaceted approach to event detection based on anomalies.
• SignalFX's cost is incredibly flexible with their pricing model of DPM (data-point per minute) vs the traditional "per host" model that most monitoring SaaS use.
• SignalFX support is responsive and knowledgeable, very eager to help solve your immediate problems.
• SignalFX integrations is vast and constantly growing, making adoption easy even when multiple different open-source technologies are used in your stack.

Incentivized

• Giving observability of the entire IT stack
• Custom alerting options.
• Ingesting many different types of data.
• Requesting new features is encouraged and they often add them quite quickly.

• Better integration with our clients (native mobile clients SDKs will be great).
• A way to easily tag filters and move them across metrics/formula.
• Alert system to easy false [alarm] and hard to configure.
• Be able to have group more dimensions (and have more values on each).

Incentivized

• Can't think of anything yet.

Good: Stable system with low error rate Easy to use for simple use cases Bad: UI is not very clear for complex usage Mobile view (when logged in from phone) is bad No library for .net

Incentivized

I find that learning the interface can take some time. We need a better show-and-tell on how the Teams pages, Dashboard Groups, Dashboards and charts delay. Advance SignalFlow is sometimes hard to build. Some better samples of advanced SignalFlow would be helpful. For example, Splunk SPL has a vast resource of examples.

Incentivized

Some elements of the product haven't had the usability upgrade yet and can be a bit technical. This is to be expected as they are trying to solve complex problems. I am sure that in the future, steps will be made to simplify this as well for the users / administrators / developers of the platform.

It's swift, they're thinking along with us. It's a "collaboration approach" rather than a (traditional) customer-supplier relation. Out new ideas are taken in concern and often ends up in enhancements of StackState

They’re not for the same purpose but we’re using NewRelic and Honeycomb for monitoring purposes. NewRelic is used for HTTP client monitoring for system related throughput, error, database and external client monitoring. Honeycomb is used to monitor actual HTTP request/response values. Splunk [Infrastructure Monitoring] is used for real-time application related throughout and error monitoring.

Incentivized

• Reduced downtime.
• Caused us to get a lot of spam when we redeployed apps and old instances stopped sending metrics. Muting alerts solves this, but people often forget to do it or do it incorrectly.
• Helped us find historical info about instances/apps.

Incentivized

• Increased visibility of all resources in cloud to 100%.
• Deviated stages are able to detect problems before their occurrence. However, [it] needs tunings for false alarms.