10 Best Splunk Alternatives to Consider in 2024 | Better Stack Community (2024)

Introduction

Splunk is a data management and analysis platform that allows you to observe,search, analyze, visualize, and create reports on vast amounts of machine dataso that you can easily make sense of the data and use it to increase theefficiency and productivity of your business.

As machine data is often complex and unstructured, making sense of it can be atedious process, especially when considering the volume of the data. By using aplatform like Splunk, you can process such data in real-time and extract therelevant data so that you can pinpoint the source of the problems on yoursystem.

It is an enterprise-ready solution with several offerings that you can takeadvantage of to reach full-observability of your infrastructure. For example,you can ingest and index all kinds of data from your entire stack and use thisdata to detect anomalies, identify performance trends, or correlate events.Splunk is also a big data analytics platform and SIEM solution.

The most significant downsides to Splunk are its setup complexity, price tag,performance with large datasets, and outdated user interface, which make it anunsuitable solution for many businesses especially for small and mid-sizedorganizations. Several Splunk alternatives may prove a better fit formonitoring, observability, and log management.

In this article, We'll discuss 10 of the best ones along with their pros and cons to help you make the best choice.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is an observability platform that helpsyou collect insights across your stack, detect critical incidents, and escalateappropriately. It does this through its two main products:Logtail, which is focused on log managementand Better Uptime for monitoring andincident management.

Logtail is a ClickHouse-powered log management and analysis tool that offerssophisticated data collection, processing and reporting features. It is anexcellent Splunk alternative that provides tools for collecting data across yourentire stack and centralizing them in one place.

It integrates seamlessly with a host of technologies like Kubernetes, Heroku,Logstash, Rails, Docker, AWS, etc, and you can ingest and ship your data usingany log shipper of your choice. Thanks to custom-built technology andClickHouse, you can search and filter your logsquickly and efficiently, and receive automated alerts when something goes wrong.

Tighter security is one of the main priorities in log monitoring, and Logtailitself is one of the most secure tools available. Using industry-standard bestpractices and cooperating only with data centers compliant with DIN ISO/IEC27001certifications, your data is safe during both transit and storage.

With Better Uptime, you can also set up uptime monitoring for your applications,APIs, Cron jobs, and more, with on-call scheduling, so that the right persongets notified promptly if something happens. Several integrations are availableand you can also create a branded status page to communicate incidents, plannedmaintenances and other developments with your users.

Both products provide a free plan with generous limits where you can get toexperience them and evaluate if they meet your needs and the paid plans for eachstart at $24/month.

2. Elastic Stack (ELK Stack)

The Elastic Stack (formerly known as the ELK Stack) is an open-source logmanagement solution that comprises four distinct tools:

1. Elasticsearch: a distributed JSON-based search and analytics engine.
2. Logstash: for log ingestion and pipeline processing.
3. Kibana: data visualization for Elastic search.
4. Beats: a set of lightweight single-purpose data shippers.

Since Elastic Stack's core components are open source, you can download and runit without cost. When you install the stack, you'll immediately get access toall the tools you need to collect data from multiple sources, process it, andstore it in one centralized location that can scale as data grows. You'll alsobe able to view and analyze the data through a web-based user interface.

A crucial advantage of the Elastic Stack over Splunk (due to its open sourcenature) is access to a massive community of developers and library of pluginsfor extending the capabilities of the stack. On the other hand, the ElasticStack can be quite complex to setup and configure before it can function as aproduction-grade log management tool, and your data needs to be well structuredbefore you can get the most out of it, while Splunk is more usable withunstructured data.

3. New Relic

New Relic is another observability tool primarily used to monitor applicationand infrastructure performance. It started as an APM but has evolved into a fullobservability suite with tools for log management, network monitoring,Kubernetes monitoring, and many more for monitoring mobile, web, and cloudapplications in real-time. These features overlap with Splunk's infrastructuremonitoring solutions making New Relic a worthy alternative to consider if suchmonitoring feature in your primary observability needs.

Their standard offering provides the ability to ingest up to 100 GB of data forfree with just one full platform user. Additional costs depend mostly on theamount of data ingested ($0.30/GB beyond the free limits) and how many fullplatform users are required. You can check out their pricing page for furtherdetails.

4. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a Splunk alternative that offers a plethora of observabilityproducts ranging from application and infrastructure monitoring to cloudautomation, security, and log management. It uses its OneAgent technology tocollect performance metrics for the various kinds of entities in yourenvironment (servers, databases, containers, and more) and unifies them in oneplace. Once the data collection pipeline is setup, you'd be able to use thefollowing proprietary technologies to gain insights into your infrastructure:

• Smartscape for detecting causing dependencies across your entire environment.
• PurePath for end-to-end application tracing.
• Davis AI for automated remediation of detected problems.

Note that Dynatrace can be deployed on-premise or adopted as a SaaS solution,whichever is more appropriate for your use case. Dynatrace also offers a quiteunique pricing model based on the monitoring units that are utilized in yourDynatrace deployment. A free trial is also offered so that you can evaluateDynatrace's products and services without cost.

5. Datadog

Datadog is a platform of monitoring and application management tools that allowyou to monitor application logs, performance, errors, and overall reliability.Thanks to over 600+ vendor-backed integrations, Datadog's offerings apply to awide variety of technology stacks and environments. You can track your entireservice's performance in one place thanks to auto-generated service views and awell-thought-out user interface.

Datadog's log management solution automatically parses structured logs in JSONformat but it can also parse and enrich records in other formats. It's friendlyUI also makes it easy to filter and analyze the ingested data without learningyet another complex query language. The Datadog platform also featuresinfrastructure and database monitoring, cloud and application securitymanagement, user monitoring and session replay, and many more services toprovide full observability.

Regarding pricing, Datadog offers different pricing plans depending on thespecific products you opt for, but they all offer a free trial so you can trythem out before committing.

6. Graylog

Graylog offers a log management solution that is based on Elasticsearch andMongoDB. It allows you to collect and centralize logs from your infrastructure,explore them, trace errors, detect threats and analyze the data in anunderstandable way. The service operates under multiple models: you can choosefrom either Graylog Open (open-source, self-managed and free), GraylogOperations, and Graylog security. The latter two can either be self-managed orcloud-hosted depending on your needs, giving you more flexibility and controlover how your data is handled.

A critical concept in Graylog is inputs which describe how to receive messages.It supports various log formats and can accept logs over UDP or TCP. Theseinputs are routed to streams (collections of records) which can be configured toaccept only records that match a pattern. You also have extractors to extract ortransform the information in a log record, or even remove sensitive data beforeit is stored.

Graylog also offers advanced anomaly detection features with pre-built securityscenarios, risk models, and alerting and correlation engine. In addition, allthe data can be visualized using Graylog’s Log View Widget, which helps you findpatterns and track performance-related trends. It can also be configured torelay log messages that match a specific pattern to another instance.

7. Logz.io

Logz.io is an observability and security platform based on open-source toolssuch as the Elastic Stack, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Opensearch, and Jaeger. Itis a SaaS platform that provides log management, cloud SIEM, infrastructuremonitoring and distributed tracing features using the aforementioned open sourcetechnologies.

Essentially, it aims to provide end-to-end monitoring and observability byunifying logs, metrics, traces, and security events in one place. Furthermore,it abstracts away all the complex parts of using the Elastic Stack so you canuse such tools without the complicated process of setting them up. They alsoprovide log shipping options in the form of SDKs, daemons, and cloudintegrations, making it easy to integrate it into your application.

Its crowdsourcing and machine-learning features can help you discover otherwiseinvisible events, and it also provides a live tail feature to observe data inreal-time, providing you with an option to monitor and analyze data frommultiple sources at once. Logz.io delivers a safe way to store your in-transitdata with its support for SSL encryption and robust AES 256-bit encryption.

8.Mezmo (formerly LogDNA)

Mezmo is a scalable log management solution that is also built on Elsaticsearch.It supports logs from any source, including those directly from applications,hosts, cloud services, or containers. Its deployment models are also quiterobust, with cloud-based, on-premise, private cloud, and hybrid solutionsavailable to give maximum flexibility for various organizations.

Its fully-featured web application provides an interface for live tail, queries,visualization, or alerting. You can filter your data by fields or group them bysource, and create custom views, graphs or dashboards. Regarding pricing, Mezmooffers three main tiers: Community (free), Professional and Enterprise withvarying features and limits. It also follows a pricing model where you pay foronly what you use.

9. Sematext

Sematext is a monitoring and logging service. It allows for centralized logging,allowing you to aggregate and store logs from any data source in one location.You can collect data from servers, applications, databases, containers, systems,and more. In addition, Sematext allows you to view your logs in real-time asthey arrive into the cloud from multiple data sources.

It uses Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana to collect and transform data,search, filter, and analyze, and finally, data management and visualization. Youcan troubleshoot faster with real-time alerting on both metrics and logs. Loganalyzing and looking for anomalies are used to make the whole process quicker.You can integrate it with email, PagerDuty, Slack, HipChat, BigPanda, OpsGenie,VictorOps, WebHooks, Nagios, Zapier, and more.

Sematext runs on AWS, whose infrastructure follows strict IT security bestpractices. For example, your logs are encrypted via HTTPS and sent throughTLS/SSL channels. On top of that, you can restrict specific permissions to someteam members to increase your service's integrity and security.

10. SolarWinds

SolarWinds is a unified monitoring, observability, and service managementplatform that provides various tools for collecting, visualizing, and analyzingsecurity events and application log records to help you improve your securityand compliance practices, and manage your log data in a centralized location.

The company offers solutions for performance monitoring, tracing, metrics, logmanagement, network and database management, threat detection and response, andmore. It can serve as an excellent Splunk alternative if you need to collect andcentralize data generated from your entire network, and categorize/normalizethem to facilitate problem detection.

For example, its Security Event Manager (SEM) offers real-time threat detection,monitoring, and alerting. It does this by collecting and organizing raw log datafrom your network stack so that anomalies can be automatically detected, andinformed decisions can be made regarding the next steps. Most of their productsoffer a 30 day free trial, and the pricing varies significantly from product toproduct.

Conclusion

In this article, we've covered the best Splunk alternatives and discussed howthey can replace Splunk in your observability infrastructure. The best solutionfor you will depend on your requirements and the specific problems you wish tosolve. However, we believe Better Stack ticks mostboxes with a user-friendly interface, a powerful range of features, and flexiblepricing plans. You can try eitherBetter Uptime orLogtail for free.

Other useful resources if you are considering Splunk alternatives:

• Splunk vs ELK stack
• Splunk vs Datadog
• Splunk vs New Relic
• New Relic alternatives