Item: Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Rating: 9
Author: Igor Zeiger

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Splunk APM to monitor the bulk of our production clusters consisting of different AWS services - EKS, EC2, Lambdas, and many more. We have a NOC and production support team within my organization that uses Splunk APM for real-time issues analysis, root cause analysis and which is most important for real-time alerting of the issues that happen in production.

Pros and Cons

The ability to create many dashboard with dynamic metrics
The ability to use Explore function with map of components
Ability to create trend based alerts

Price model based on traces amount is not very user frendly
Save tags
Rendering components on Explore map performance with many components

Return on Investment

The ability to resolve issues in real time increased for us.
The ability to see the issues before they start to happen by monitoring trends improved our uptime.
The visual component increases team collaboration

Usability

The "Explore" map and the tracing analysis allows us not to look at independent component but to look at the full flow to see how each event flows thru the components, including the errors and performance analysis for latency between components, database queries, and their performance, including the different component APIs.

Troubleshooting

Before implementing the Splunk APM solution, our production support engineers had to jump from component to component manually, investigate logs from different sources and base an investigation on specific application knowledge. With Splunk APM the speed of investigation increased and time of investigation decreased cause we can see all the flow in one place with all the errors and with all the latency numbers.

Alternatives Considered

New Relic, LogicMonitor, Dynatrace and Epsagon

The speed of integration of the existing components is much faster with Splunk APM. The amount of AWS components we use that can be tracked and monitored with Splunk APM is much wider. The ability to integrate the tracing solution with the Splunk Loggin solution is also adding up. The ability to create alerts based on trends and deviations.

Key Insights

Do you think Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Kibana, elastic.io Integration Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

The best scenario is production monitoring, where we have a real-time dashboard with our NOC team monitoring trends and alerting the production support team and developers in case something is going sideways. For our staging monitoring, Splunk APM is too expensive, since with debug we have much more traces than in production.

Good product for real time tracing and production support

Overall Satisfaction with Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM)