Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring vs. Symantec Server Management Suite

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

The SMP suite is great at what it does, but it can be very complicated to learn how to get it to do what you want. It's a beast! However, when you learn how to the things you want to do, it comes as second nature and you complete them like they're supposed to be done that way. A lot of these things are done to be able to be completed a number of different ways. Take Patch Management, you can deploy patches automatically, via Jobs, or via the "Start Software Update Cycle Now" link in the SMP Agent!

Incentivized

• 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

• Software deployment through policy
• Engage with customers for feedback
• Understands the future needs of customers

• 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

• The SMP solution is a beast. Each piece is complicated in itself let alone how everything ties together!
• There is plenty of documentation online on how to perform a specific task, but you need to pay attention to what VERSION the article is written for. I've been halfway through implementing something only to hit a roadblock since I'm running a newer version and the option the article says to click on doesn't exist anymore...

Incentivized

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

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

The decision to use Symantec was not my own but I believe it competes well against other products such as SCCM offering more features.

• 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

• Being able to report on the majority of things you want all from one interface, makes it really easy to get the results you want.
• Because my employer didn't provide training, it took working with support, reading technical documentation, and just playing around on my own to learn how to do certain things.
• I've had a lot of help from the SMP Support staff and they're great people and very helpful!

Incentivized