This article was originally posted on SigNoz Blog and is written by Joseph Chege.

Splunk is a powerful unified security and observability tool that analyzes data and logs. Splunk allows you to monitor and visualize data in real-time. It analyzes machine-generated data and logs through a web interface. While Splunk is a powerful platform, it might not suit your needs. In this post, we discuss 11 top Splunk alternatives that you can consider.

Splunk provides a wide range of tools for analyzing and visualizing your data fast and at scale. This way, you identify patterns, detect anomalies and make informed decisions. At its core, Splunk provides capabilities such as:

• Unified security and observability
• Data collection and indexing
• Search and analysis
• Alerting and reporting

Based on these capabilities, Splunk is a versatile platform. It can be used for a wide range of use cases.

Splunk Usecases

Let's briefly discuss these use cases:

• Log Management As a log management tool, it collects and indexes logs from your application. This way, you can quickly search, analyze, and visualize log data in real time. The major importance of Splunk logs is to enable you to identify patterns, insights, and trends and troubleshoot issues faster.
• Security Analysis Splunk monitors and analyze security-related data. This mainly includes analyzing network traffic and system logs to detect and respond to potential security threats. This helps organizations meet compliance requirements by providing visibility into security-related data and tracking user activity.
• Application Performance Traffic data allows Splunk to monitor the performance of applications. Splunk collects traffic, page load times, and user engagement data. This allows you to identify performance bottlenecks and improves the user experience where needed.
• Network infrastructure monitoring Splunk monitors network-related issues such as network traffic, device performance, and availability. This allows you to identify and diagnose issues within your network infrastructure.

Splunk has many use cases. However, there are some situations where you might consider using Splunk alternatives.

When not to use Splunk

Let's discuss scenarios that you would like to explore the Splunk alternatives:

• Scale - Splunk is designed for large machine-generated datasets. A basic log management and analysis tool would be ideal for analyzing and monitoring smaller data volumes.
• Cost constraints - Splunk's advanced capabilities can be costly to set up and maintain. Therefore, exploring other Splunk alternatives, especially when you have limited resources, is good to ensure a cost-effective approach.
• Limited technical expertise - Tools such as Splunk may require certain technical expertise to set up and maintain their advanced features and use cases. Without such necessary expertise, you can consider solutions that are easier to use and require less technical skill.

Let's discuss the Splunk alternatives you may consider based on your specific needs, resources, and goals.

Top Splunk Alternatives

SigNoz

SigNoz is a full-stack open-source observability and performance monitoring platform. It provides features such as log aggregation, metric collection, traces, and alerting.

The key features of SigNoz include:

• Provides metrics, traces, and logs under integrated UI to help you visualize and quickly identify and resolve issues as they arise.
• It natively supports OpenTelemetry, which generates and manages telemetry data to enable effective observability.
• It builds with developers in mind using the latest technologies such as Go Typescript and React.js.

SigNoz makes a good alternative for your system observability because:

• It is open source and thus easy to get started.
• It uses OpenTelemetry; which is quietly becoming the world standard for application instrumentation.
• Apart from monitoring application metrics such as latency, requests per second, and error rates, SigNoz allows you to monitor critical infrastructure metrics such as CPU utilization and memory usage.
• SigNoz allows you to create custom metrics dashboards based on infrastructure needs.

Logstash

Logstash is an open-source data collection tool with real-time capabilities. It provides an easy-to-build pipeline for collecting data from different sources.

It's part of the Elastic Stack (ELK). Logstash lets you collect, parse and transform data. You can then send the data to multiple destinations. These destinations include Elasticsearch, a search and analytics engine, log management and analysis tools, databases, monitoring systems, etc.

Like Splunk, Logstash collects data from various sources, such as log files, system metrics, and network traffic. It then processes that data using a variety of filters. These filters can be used to extract, transform, and simplify the data into a more structured format to make it easier to search and analyze.

However, they have key differences in terms of their functionality and architecture that you can consider choosing Logstash over Splunk. For example:

• Logstash is open-source and free to use. Thus a cost-effective alternative.
• It is part of the Elastic Stack ecosystem.
• Platform-agnostic for portability capabilities making it easier to run it on platforms of your choice.
• Seamless integration with other tools such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Grafana, and Prometheus.
• Customization flexibility as its plugin system allows you to create customization and extension that meets your data inputs, outputs, and processing options.

Fluentd

Fluentd is an open-source log management and data collection tool. Just like Logstash, Fluentd uses a pipeline-based architecture. This allows it to collect data from various sources and network traffic and forward it to various destinations.

Fluentd excels in real-time data processing and forwarding. Its main advantages include:

• Great support for different input sources for log collection with multiple destination choices.
• Fluentd is focused on data processing, forward, and transformation, while Splunk has more advanced search, reporting, and visualization capabilities.
• Fluentd is open-source and free to use.
• Provide a pipeline of distributed architecture, while Splunk is a monolithic all-in-one platform and processes data internally.

Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics tool designed for infrastructures, cloud-scale applications, and logs. It offers a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Datadog provides integrations with other tools and services to make it easier to collect and analyze data from different sources.

You may consider choosing Datadog because of the following reason:

• Datadog is focused on monitoring and troubleshooting cloud-native applications and infrastructure. This makes it well-suited for monitoring the performance and health of cloud-native applications and infrastructure.
• Being cloud-native, it is easier to target cloud infrastructures, distributed systems, and microservices.
• Datadog has an extensive library of integrations with other tools and cloud-based services.
• Based on the fact Datadog is cloud-based, it becomes a great alternative for your cloud-native infrastructures such as Kubernetes.

Logz.io

Logz.io is an observability and security monitoring tool that provides cloud-based log analytics targeted at data security and minimizing the need for capacity management.

Logz.io is geared toward utilizing the most open-source tools for monitoring and analytics integrations. For example:

• It enables log analytics with OpenSearch.
• The log metric analytics are powered by Prometheus.
• It uses OpenTelemetry and Jaeger for trace analytics.

Logz.io offers a free trial for its platform. Its cost-effective plan allows you to only pay depending on the scale and usage of the volume of data you ingest. It also natively supports cloud-based platforms, allowing you to analyze data instantly without needing installation, configuration, or maintenance.

Graylog

Graylog is an open-source centralized log management and analytics tool. It collects, enhances, correlates, searches, and visualizes all your log data in one location to uncover patterns and trends for application and IT infrastructure.

Graylog provides similar capabilities to Splunk. However, unlike Splunk, it is open-source and provides more native support for cloud deployment solutions.

New Relic

New Relic is a performance monitoring and analytics platform. It provides capabilities such as

• Improved observability
• Application Monitoring
• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Kubernetes Monitoring
• Log Management
• Errors inbox
• Browser Monitoring

New Relic provides about 470+ integrations for seamless integration with other technologies. Its dashboard allows you to comfortably collect and analyze data to improve real-time monitoring, alerting, and historical data analysis for your entire stack.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an AI-powered data platform. It uses AI-based technologies throughout your technology stack. This makes cloud processes more efficient, automates DevSecOps, and enables organizations to do more with less in the cloud.

This allows Dynatrace to automate performance monitoring, analytics, and infrastructure monitoring with digital experience and application security across different technologies and platforms.

Appdynamics

AppDynamics is an observability tool for performance monitoring and analytics. It provides a comprehensive view of performance and applications health, cloud services, and IT infrastructure. AppDynamics provides features such as:

• Application Performance Management
• Business Transaction monitoring,
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Real-time alerting
• Root cause analysis

It uses customizable dashboards with a deeper understanding of user and application behavior.

It also provides multi-cloud support. AppDynamics Cloud provides visibility with context via AIOps-driven alerts that assist organizations in identifying, prioritizing, and resolving the most business-critical matters first.

Mezmo

Mezmo is an observability pipeline platform for log analysis. It collects data from various sources, process it in real-time, and distributes it to multiple.

Its context utilizes real-time data enrichment and correlation to gain valuable insights and take action quickly. It then uses real-time alerts and access top-notch log analysis tools to let you take meaningful action on time.

Loggly

Loggly is a cloud-based log analysis management tool. It provides full-stack observability to help you aggregate and analyze logs over massive volumes of data from different log sources. Loggly includes features such as:

• Log management to collect, store, and analyze log data from various sources.
• Real-time alerting to trigger alerts and notifications when specific conditions are met in the log data to identify and address performance issues quickly.
• Historical data analysis to analyze log data over time and identify trends and patterns.
• Search and filter to quickly find and analyze specific data in their log data.

Conclusion

The above tools help you centralize your application monitoring and observability practices. These Splunk alternatives can be used for your monitoring prerequisites. If you’re looking for a comprehensive tool that can serve all your observability needs, then you can choose SigNoz.

As SigNoz is a full-stack APM, it can act as a one-stop solution for metrics monitoring, distributed tracing, and log management. It is also based on OpenTelemetry, which frees you from any vendor lock-in.

Getting Started with SigNoz

SigNoz can be installed on macOS or Linux computers in just three steps by using a simple install script.

The install script automatically installs Docker Engine on Linux. However, on macOS, you must manually install Docker Engine before running the install script.

git clone -b main https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz.git
cd signoz/deploy/
./install.sh

You can visit our documentation for instructions on how to install SigNoz using Docker Swarm and Helm Charts.

If you liked what you read, then check out our GitHub repo 👇

Related Posts

SigNoz - an open source lightweight ELK alternative

A practical guide to logging in microservices