Splunk vs Dynatrace

In this modern digital world, enterprises rely heavily on the web and mobile applications to complete business operations. However, they have to select one tool to operate among several applications. For selecting one application, they have to evaluate its performance, user interface, and functionality. To do this, organizations are using application performance monitoring tools.

Splunk and Dynatrace are the most prominent tools in the APM(Application Performance Management) field, yet they differ in their features and approach. We have prepared this Splunk vs Dynatrace blog to help you explore those differences and guide you in choosing a suitable tool.

Table of Contents

• What is Splunk?
• Splunk Applications
• Splunk Features
• What is Dynatrace?
• Dynatrace Applications
• Dynatrace Features
• Advantages of Performance Monitoring Tools
• Difference between Splunk and Dynatrace

What is Splunk?

Splunk provides integrated IT operations management software that gathers, visualizes, indexes and correlates real-world operational data throughout the IT infrastructure. Moreover, Splunk constantly monitors the complete environment - applications, security systems, servers, and networks.

It offers universal access to real-world information for business executives and IT managers who seek to monitor their key measures. Splunk enables us to monitor what is happening through IT assets for identifying the problems before they impact users or business operations.

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Splunk Applications

1) We can deploy Splunk for web analytics for understanding KPIs and enhancing performance.
2) IT operations use it to detect network abusers, breaches, and intrusions.
3) Fine-tuning, Analyzing, and Tracking the digital marketing initiatives with Splunk
4) It is utilized in the automation systems for checking whether everything is working as expected.
5) Working collectively with IoT plays a big part in Splunk future.
6) Advising the CyberSecurity professionals on the right approach to secure the IT systems.

Splunk Features

1) Speed up Development and Testing
Splunk has a rich development interface that allows you to develop applications using approved programming languages and frameworks.

2) ROI Creation
Developers can quickly set up and work with Splunk without needing extensive development or significant spending on the hardware. This offers a good return on investment(ROI) and rapid time-to-value return.

3) Developing Real-World Data Applications
Splunk users will develop real-world data applications through software development kits(SDKs) for driving significant data insights. This eliminates the requirement for extensive development.

4) Reports and Statistics with Real-world Architecture
Splunk offers strong analytics that allows organizations to analyze the data more efficiently and rapidly.

5) Visualization, Analysis, and Search Capabilities
Splunk's intuitive user interface assures enhanced productivity by offering immediate access to content and applications. This enables users of all kinds to take benefit of search and visualization capabilities. 

What is Dynatrace?

Dynatrace is the APM solution developed for monitoring the extensive business applications that analyze and capture the digital experiences at the runtime for making applications rapidly, more reliable, and easier to build. The platform offers teams extensive visibility into the application's performance through machine learning and advanced analytics for rapidly processing vast amounts of data.

It monitors all the advanced applications and services layers throughout the networks or devices. It replaces the inherent monitoring tools through the single solution traces application throughout the cloud, virtual machine, data center, or center, irrespective of the deployment model.

Applications

1) When we talk about application performance, it is not only application working that is taken into consideration. Every performance detail from scratch is offered by this tool in the system. The performance measures are provided in the real world, and all the problems are identified automatically in the system. This helps you resolve the issues with appropriate solutions.

2) Full-stack monitoring is the main strength of this tool. Thus, the monitoring is performed at the infrastructure level and cloud. While using Dynatrace in the system, users don't need to worry about applications. We can monitor all the transactions at any level to provide appropriate dependency in the system.

3) Artificial intelligence is utilized to make the applications available, and all the transactions are maximized to resolve any issues through real-world data. A transaction is not left without a trace. Through all the technologies, greater efficiency and productivity is achieved in the system.

Features

1.OneAgent: It is a lightweight agent software that can be installed on the containers, servers, and host environments being monitored by the Dynatrace. OneAgent collects in-depth performance data from the host environment, like application data and processes running on it. 

2.PurePath: In the Dynatrace Platform, PurePath gives you detailed transaction-level data on application performance, allowing users to detect the underlying cause of performance issues.

3. Smartscrape: Smartscrape offers a graphical representation of the relationships and dependencies between different elements of the application and its environment. It can also be utilized for visualizing the complete application environment, like processes, services, infrastructure, and applications.

4. Grail: Grail utilizes machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms for identifying patterns and analyzing performance data and correlations that are not visible to the users.

5. Davis AI: It is the feature of Dynatrace that uses AI(Artificial Intelligence) for analyzing synthetic data and identifying trends and patterns. By analyzing the real-time monitoring data, Davis AI can detect performance issues and exceptions that can affect the end-user.

Advantages of Performance Monitoring Tools

• Analyzing Historical Data Every 

APM tool enables us to access historical data and information about the user activities on the site or application. This gives you a wider perspective on how your software performs over time.

• Diagnosing Bottlenecks

Using application performance tools, we can quickly identify where errors or exceptions exist in the software and then figure out why they occur.

• Trace user interactions and behavior

APM Solutions allows you to trace particular kinds of behavior within the application or website, including page views and sessions to scrolls and clicks.

• Discover Security Vulnerabilities

Since Cybersecurity attacks continue to rise in severity and frequency, Security is becoming the biggest concern for enterprises. A promising APM solution will automatically discover the vulnerabilities and security flaws by scanning your code.

Differences between Splunk and Dynatrace

Splunk and Dynatrace are the best tools for monitoring your application performance. However, they differ in the range of capabilities they provide to the users. Here are some of the critical differences between Splunk and Dynatrace:

1. Configuration and Installation

Dynatrace: Dynatarce offers a simplified installation process with an automated setup, making it quick and simple to work with Dynatrace.

Splunk: Splunk needs more manual configuration and proficiency, making the installation more difficult.

2. Performance and Scalability

Dynatrace: Dynatrce has excellent performance and Scalability, even for complex and large environments.

Splunk: Splunk offers good scalability and performance; however, it can be resource-intensive for massive data sets.

3. User Interface

Dynatrace: Due to its amazing user interface, Dynatarce is simple to use and learn for beginners.

Splunk: Splunk offers an easy-to-use user interface; however, it will take a lot of work to learn and use, particularly its advanced features.

4. Alerting and Notification

Dynatrace: The alerting and notification capabilities of Dynatrace are limited in comparison to Splunk.

Splunk: The AI-driven troubleshooting of Splunk allows for finding issues and rapid alerts and minimizes time for repairing.

5. Functionality

Dynatrace: Dynatrace offers functionalities like Application Performance Management, Digital Experience Monitoring, Observability, etc.

In the above screenshot, we can see the features and functionalities of Dynatrace.

Splunk: Splunk provides Log Management, Machine Learning-powered analytics, and Security Information and Event Management(SIEM).

6. Integration

Dynatrace: Dynatrace can integrate with over 600 third-party platforms and tools, including Splunk.

In the above image, we can see the integration supported by Dynatarce.

Splunk: Splunk can integrate with a broad range of third-party platforms and tools.

7. Focus on Applications

Dynatrace: It is mainly focused on application performance management and monitoring. Dynatrace gives you in-depth insights into application performance, like transaction tracing and code-level analysis.

Splunk: Splunk is an extensive platform that handles several data types beyond the application performance, like security events, network data, and log files.

8. Data Visualization and Analytics

Dynatrace: Dynatrace offers more predefined and focused visualization and analytics features for application performance monitoring.

Splunk: Splunk has good data visualization and analytics capabilities. It provides strong speech and analysis capabilities, enabling us to extract and explore insights from massive amounts of data. It also offers a wide variety of visualization options like dashboards, graphs, and charts.

9. Artificial Intelligence

Dynatrace: Dynatrace Davis serves as the deterministic AI that analyzes complete stack data automatically and provides insights from the trillions of dependencies. Davis reduces the difficulties and offers real answers using the root cause analysis. Using Dynatrace, we don't need to convert using loads of disorganized data for identifying the root cause of performance issues.

Splunk: Since Splunk is a traditional log management tool, you need to use log data for analyzing and discovering the root cause of errors and exceptions.

10. Observability data platform

Dynatrace: The Grail data lakehouse of Dynatrace is developed for observability data. It is the single integrated digital solution for all observability, Security, and enterprise data. The data stored in Grail is interlinked with real-world models that impact the monitored environment's dependencies and topology.

Splunk: Splunk contains a disintegrated observability platform, and crucial capabilities like Application Performance Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, Tracing, and Synthetics have been obtained. It is the conventional log management vendor, and the acquirements are broadly incorporated with Splunk log management provisioning.

11. Pricing

Dynatrace: Dynatrace's pricing approach is flexible, enabling users to select between individual product pricing and full stack pricing. Individual products are valued as per their functionality, while the full-stack tier begins from $74 per 8GB per server.

Splunk: Splunk pricing depends on how many GBs of data are consumed in the Splunk products. The consumption pricing model is entirely based on data volume needs and decides the total price by multiplying the required daily volume by unit price per GB.

Conclusion

Splunk and Dyntarce are robust monitoring tools that give unique advantages. Splunk is good at log management, whereas Dynatrace excels in application performance monitoring. While selecting between these two, you should consider your budget, requirements, and organizational requirements. I hope this Splunk vs Dynatrace gives you sufficient information about Splunk and Dynatrace offerings. If you have any queries, let us know by commenting below.