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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Aggregation
  5. PagerDuty vs Splunk

PagerDuty vs Splunk

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Stacks1.0K
Followers703
Votes119
Splunk
Splunk
Stacks772
Followers1.0K
Votes20

PagerDuty vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Introduction:

PagerDuty and Splunk are both widely used in the IT industry, but they serve different purposes. While PagerDuty focuses on incident management and alerting, Splunk is primarily a data analytics and log management platform. Understanding the key differences between the two can help organizations in deciding which tool best suits their needs.

  1. Integration Capabilities: PagerDuty offers seamless integrations with various monitoring tools and services, allowing organizations to consolidate all their alerts and incidents in one place. On the other hand, Splunk provides intuitive integration capabilities with a wide range of data sources, enabling users to ingest and analyze data from different systems, applications, and devices.

  2. Functionality: PagerDuty primarily focuses on incident management and alerting, providing features like on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and incident response workflows. In contrast, Splunk is more versatile and multifunctional, offering capabilities for log management, data analysis, visualization, and correlation of events.

  3. Ease of Use: PagerDuty is known for its user-friendly interface and quick onboarding process, making it easy for teams to adopt and start using the platform efficiently. Splunk, while powerful, may require more technical expertise to fully utilize its capabilities, which might result in a steeper learning curve for some users.

  4. Data Retention: PagerDuty offers a limited data retention period, typically up to 6 months, for incidents and alerts. Splunk, on the other hand, provides flexible data retention options, allowing users to store and analyze data for longer durations based on their specific requirements.

  5. Pricing Structure: PagerDuty follows a per-user pricing model, where the cost is determined by the number of users accessing the platform. Splunk, however, utilizes a data volume-based pricing model, which considers the amount of data ingested and indexed within the platform.

  6. Deployment Options: PagerDuty is a cloud-based SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution, which offers the advantage of easy setup, scalability, and accessibility from anywhere with an internet connection. Splunk, on the other hand, provides both cloud-based and self-hosted options, allowing organizations to choose the deployment method that aligns with their security, compliance, and infrastructure preferences.

In Summary, PagerDuty and Splunk differ in terms of integration capabilities, functionality, ease of use, data retention, pricing structure, and deployment options.

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Advice on PagerDuty, Splunk

Michael
Michael

Systems Engineer at BetterHelp

Apr 8, 2020

Needs adviceonPagerDutyPagerDutySquadcastSquadcast

I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.

90.6k views90.6k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Splunk
Splunk

PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from your monitoring tools, gives you an overall view of all of your monitoring alarms, and alerts an on duty engineer if there's a problem.

It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

Alerting that works (and wakes you up)- When your systems go down, PagerDuty will wake you up. You choose how you want to be alerted - via phone, SMS or email, to multiple numbers, with retries.;Integrate all your existing monitoring tools- PagerDuty works great with almost all monitoring tools including: Nagios (and Icinga), Keynote, New Relic, Pingdom, Circonus, Red Gate SQL Monitor, Server Density, Zenoss, Monit, Munin, SolarWinds and many others. If it can send email, it will work with PagerDuty.;Native apps with push notifications- iOS and Android native apps with push notifications and a cross-platform mobile website ensure you can respond to alerts wherever you are, even on the go.;On-call duty scheduling- Easily set up schedules to fairly share on-call duty responsibilities with your team.;Automatic escalation of alerts- If you're paged but don't respond in time, the alert is auto-escalated to a team member. Ensures nothing slips through the cracks - ever.;Reliable, distributed architecture- PagerDuty's infrastructure is fully replicated in multiple data centers, with fast failover when problems occur.;Works internationally (Yes, really!)- Phone alerts can be delivered to over 170 countries and territories; SMS alerts are available virtually world-wide. (Is my country included?)
Predict and prevent problems with one unified monitoring experience; Streamline your entire security stack with Splunk as the nerve center; Detect, investigate and diagnose problems easily with end-to-end observability
Statistics
Stacks
1.0K
Stacks
772
Followers
703
Followers
1.0K
Votes
119
Votes
20
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 55
    Just works
  • 23
    Easy configuration
  • 14
    Awesome alerting hub
  • 11
    Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management
  • 9
    User-customizable alerting modes
Cons
  • 7
    Expensive
  • 3
    Ugly UI
Pros
  • 3
    API for searching logs, running reports
  • 3
    Alert system based on custom query results
  • 2
    Ability to style search results into reports
  • 2
    Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc
  • 2
    Dashboarding on any log contents
Cons
  • 1
    Splunk query language rich so lots to learn
Integrations
Scout
Scout
Nagios
Nagios
New Relic
New Relic
HipChat
HipChat
Datadog
Datadog
Logentries
Logentries
Sensu
Sensu
Logstash
Logstash
Jira
Jira
Okta
Okta
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to PagerDuty, Splunk?

Papertrail

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Logmatic

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Apache Spark

Apache Spark

Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

Logentries

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

Graylog

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

Presto

Presto

Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Sematext

Sematext

Sematext pulls together performance monitoring, logs, user experience and synthetic monitoring that tools organizations need to troubleshoot performance issues faster.

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