PagerDuty vs Splunk

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PagerDuty

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119
Splunk

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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.

Advice on PagerDuty and Splunk
Michael Aldridge
Systems Engineer at BetterHelp · | 4 upvotes · 76.9K views
Needs advice
on
PagerDutyPagerDuty
and
SquadcastSquadcast

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.

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Replies (2)
Chris Riley
Software Architect at Fixate IO · | 3 upvotes · 33.8K views
Recommends
on
VictorOpsVictorOps

Disclosure I work at Splunk and VictorOps is a Splunk product. But I would suggest in addition to trying the others adding VO to your list. It's important to note that some of the tools are designed as Incident Response tools, others started as mass notification tools. For on-call stick to those designed for incident response.

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Piyush Shrivastava
FrontEndDev at Transfin · | 2 upvotes · 21.6K views
Recommends
on
SquadcastSquadcast

I would say to use Squadcast, the configuration is easy, provides a lot of features such as war room, RCA tracking postmortem, RBAC and they are quick to add features on request as well, recently I asked for custom on call reminders and I am sure they will add it really soon.

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Pros of PagerDuty
Pros of Splunk
  • 55
    Just works
  • 23
    Easy configuration
  • 14
    Awesome alerting hub
  • 11
    Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management
  • 9
    User-customizable alerting modes
  • 4
    Awesome tool for alerting and monitoring. Love it
  • 3
    Most reliable out of the three and it isn't even close
  • 3
    API for searching logs, running reports
  • 3
    Alert system based on custom query results
  • 2
    Dashboarding on any log contents
  • 2
    Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing
  • 2
    Ability to style search results into reports
  • 2
    Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc
  • 2
    Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc
  • 2
    Rich GUI for searching live logs
  • 1
    Query any log as key-value pairs
  • 1
    Granular scheduling and time window support

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Cons of PagerDuty
Cons of Splunk
  • 7
    Expensive
  • 3
    Ugly UI
  • 1
    Splunk query language rich so lots to learn

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What is PagerDuty?

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.

What is Splunk?

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

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What companies use PagerDuty?
What companies use Splunk?
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