Our IT department recently went through the process of evaluating Splunk competitors such as Elasticsearch and a couple of other vendors. Although we had our list of required features, the more pricey solutions demonstrated clear benefits over the cheaper more affordable systems.
Features to Consider
To Begin, companies need to carefully consider the in house labor necessary to deploy and maintain the system when taking advantage of open source solutions such as ELK. Here is a partial list of criteria to consider:
- Ease of use and maturity of the interface: How intuitive is the navigation and will typical end users be able to use it?
- What are the abilities to configure alerting for specific events or trends?
- Can it provide security across different logins and provide the ability to limit visibility to sensitive data?
- Is there good documentation on how to configure, maintain and expand?
- Scalability and time tested testimonials from actual users of the system: Are you looking to save 10 GB, 100 GB or 10 TB of data per day?
- Is there a way to integrate the existing 3rd party solution such as NetFlow collection with the solution? We provide both Splunk NetFlow and Elasticsearch NetFlow integration.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) from the initial investment to scaling out the system: What will be the ongoing labor to maintain the solution?
- Can existing in house IT service the solution? Will it require developers to grow into the solution?
- What is the financial standing of the support organization behind the ongoing development of the source code?
Splunk vs Elasticsearch
Once we had our decision narrowed down to Splunk vs Elasticsearch, we were able to see clear advantages of one solution over the other. As we worked with both solutions, we documented our findings and worked it all into a webcast titled: Splunk vs Elasticsearch. The goal of the webcast is to compare the features and benefits of both solutions.
“I have done extensive research, spoken with vendors, and spent hours running different searches on both products to ensure a comprehensive understanding of both solutions,” Justin Jett, Technical Marketing Manager of Plixer said. “This webcast will leave listeners with a healthy understanding of the benefits of both solutions and an understanding of what sets them apart.”
Registering for the Webcast
Choosing a solution that allows for ample storage, ability to scale, good indexing, and very fast reporting are paramount concerns for today’s businesses. How these solutions must be navigated to dive into data will be discussed as well as a side by side comparison of the two. The full installation process including configuration and integration with other solutions will be covered. At the end, initial pricing and maintenance costs will be reviewed, as well. The webcast will be held at 2 p.m. EST on January 28, 2016. To view the webcast, visit: https://www.plixer.com/splunk-vs-elasticsearch-webcast.html