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Apache SkyWalking VS Splunk

Compare Apache SkyWalking VS Splunk and see what are their differences

Apache SkyWalking logo Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source application performance monitoring solution that provides tracking, metrics analysis, service mesh observability, alarm, and visualization.

Splunk logo Splunk

Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.
  • Apache SkyWalking Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-21
  • Splunk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20

Apache SkyWalking features and specs

  • Comprehensive Observability
    Apache SkyWalking provides end-to-end observability of distributed systems including service, process, and container metrics, as well as logs and events, enabling holistic monitoring and performance optimization.
  • Distributed Tracing
    SkyWalking offers robust distributed tracing capabilities that allow users to trace requests end-to-end across various services and platforms, aiding in root cause analysis and performance monitoring.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project under the Apache umbrella, SkyWalking benefits from community contributions, regular updates, and improvements, offering transparency and flexibility.
  • Wide Protocol Support
    SkyWalking supports a wide range of protocols and platforms, such as HTTP, gRPC, Dubbo, and supports multiple languages including Java, .NET, Python, and more, making it versatile across different tech stacks.
  • Dashboarding and Visualization
    The platform provides powerful dashboards and visualization tools, allowing users to easily interpret data, create custom dashboards, and derive insights from visual metrics.

Possible disadvantages of Apache SkyWalking

  • Complex Setup
    Setting up and configuring SkyWalking can be complex, especially for organizations unfamiliar with distributed observability tools, potentially requiring significant time and expertise.
  • Scalability Challenges
    While SkyWalking is designed for distributed systems, scaling its deployment for very large environments might present challenges, necessitating careful architectural planning.
  • Resource Intensive
    SkyWalking can be resource-intensive, as it collects a large amount of telemetry data, which might lead to high overhead on system resources like CPU and memory.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its comprehensive feature set and various configurations, there can be a steep learning curve associated with effectively utilizing SkyWalking, particularly for new users.
  • Limited UI Customization
    The user interface, while functional, offers limited customization options compared to some commercial observability solutions, which might be a limitation for users needing highly tailored dashboards.

Splunk features and specs

  • Powerful Data Analysis
    Splunk provides robust data indexing and search capabilities, allowing users to analyze large volumes of log data with high flexibility and efficiency.
  • Real-Time Processing
    Splunk enables real-time monitoring and analysis of data, which helps in immediate detection of anomalies and operational issues.
  • Scalability
    Splunk can efficiently scale to handle large amounts of data from various sources, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Wide Range of Integrations
    Splunk offers extensive integration options with numerous third-party applications and services, enhancing its functionalities and utility.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    Splunk comes with a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface, which makes it easier for users to navigate and leverage its features without extensive training.
  • Advanced Security Features
    Splunk includes comprehensive security features such as access controls, data encryption, and auditing capabilities to ensure data protection and compliance.

Possible disadvantages of Splunk

  • High Cost
    Splunk is considered expensive compared to other data analytics tools, which can be a significant constraint for smaller organizations or those with limited budgets.
  • Complex Licensing
    The licensing model for Splunk can be complex and confusing, often leading to issues in predicting costs and understanding the full extent of required licensing.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a steep learning curve associated with mastering Splunk’s advanced features and query language, which can be challenging for new users.
  • Resource Intensive
    Splunk can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial computational power and storage, which might necessitate additional hardware investments.
  • Custom App Development
    Building custom apps and dashboards in Splunk may require specialized knowledge of its proprietary language, which can limit customization for users without technical expertise.

Apache SkyWalking videos

Chapter04 Session10 - Apache Skywalking by Sheng Wu

More videos:

  • Review - Apache SkyWalking | Top 42 Alternatives of Apache SkyWalking
  • Review - Observability in Service Mesh Powered by Envoy and Apache SkyWalking - Sheng Wu & Lizan Zhou

Splunk videos

"Splunk Product Overview"

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Splunk in 60 Minutes | Splunk Tutorial For Beginners | Splunk Training | Splunk Tutorial | Edureka
  • Demo - Splunk Incident Review Demo

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache SkyWalking and Splunk)
Monitoring Tools
16 16%
84% 84
Log Management
13 13%
87% 87
Performance Monitoring
17 17%
83% 83
Development
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Apache SkyWalking and Splunk

Apache SkyWalking Reviews

We have no reviews of Apache SkyWalking yet.
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Splunk Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
What sets Splunk apart, likely contributing to its premium price, is its expansive network. With over 2,200 partners spanning various industries, Splunk ensures users can fully leverage the platform. Additionally, boasting a community of over 18,000 active members and 1,800 Splunk experts, users have access to support for problem-solving, architecture, deployment, and...
Source: betterstack.com
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Splunk’s security and data monitoring features make it a potent alternative to Grafana. The platform helps collect and store extensive data from multiple platforms like databases, messaging systems, and network devices.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Splunk's strengths lie in its adeptness at handling large-scale data ingestion and robust analytics capabilities. This makes it invaluable for organizations with complex data monitoring needs, particularly in enterprise security and observability.
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
Splunk is a well-known log management solution that’s been around forever. It offers a variety of observability solutions, making it an ideal Grafana alternative in terms of functionality. Splunk offers users Log Management, Synthetic monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Security Monitoring, and more.
Source: sematext.com
Top 11 Best SIEM Tools in 2022 For Real-Time Incident Response and Security
Splunk provides improved security operations like customizable dashboards, asset investigator, statistical analysis, and incident review, classification, and investigation. It has features of alerts management, risk scores, etc. It provides security services to the public sectors, financial services, and healthcare.

Social recommendations and mentions

Splunk might be a bit more popular than Apache SkyWalking. We know about 19 links to it since March 2021 and only 18 links to Apache SkyWalking. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache SkyWalking mentions (18)

  • I gave up on self-hosted Sentry
    A good APM tool I’ve been using for a few years is Apache Skywalking: https://skywalking.apache.org/ It might not do everything Sentry does but it definitely has helped with tracking down some issues, even production ones and runs in a fairly manageable setup (in comparison to how long even the Sentry self-hosted Docker Compose file is). What’s more, if you want, you can even use regular PostgreSQL as the backing... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • OpenTelemetry Tracing in < 200 lines of code
    > I maintain that any platform that isn’t using some sort of tracing system is practically negligent in their engineering duty. For some, it's difficult because many of the self-hostable out there are rather complex and have high requirements, like https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-compose.yml but it's not exactly ideal either. I wonder what other good options are out there, something... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • 14 Monitoring Tools for Full-Stack Developers
    Apache SkyWalking is an open-source APM tool meant for distributed systems. It has support for distributed tracing, agents in multiple languages, and support for an eBPF agent. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Release Radar · May 2024 Edition: Major updates from the open source community
    Are you working on microservices, cloud native, and container-based architectures? Then you need to check out Apache Skywalking. It's an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) system, that provides monitoring, tracing, and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. This latest update has hundreds of changes including support for Java 21 runtime, new functions and parameters,... - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

Splunk mentions (19)

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
    Splunk (A Cisco Company) [https://splunk.com] | Principal Software Engineer, Backend | Remote (Vancouver / Toronto, Canada) Splunk is here to build a safer and more resilient digital world. The world's leading enterprises use our unified security and observability platform to keep their digital systems secure and reliable. The role I'm hiring for is to lead the effort for a new API that will power Splunk's new... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Can I install apps on Free 60 day Enterprise?
    I'm using the free 60day Enterprise license and tried to install different apps from the "Browse more apps" menu in Splunk Enterprise, but it doesn't accept my credentials when I try to log in. I tried my username and password from splunk.com(which I'm sure it works, because I tried it straight away on the official website). Also I tried using my username and password with which I'm accessing Splunk Enterprise,... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Can someone explain this before I go a little crazy? xD
    I'm noticing a questionable trend in Splunk question/answer structure for these free courses on splunk.com So I go to an exam dump to try and compare to something I have studied thus far. (Prepping for entry level 1002). Source: over 1 year ago
  • Where exactly can I start to learn?
    With your splunk.com username, you can login to Splunk trainings portals as well https://www.splunk.com/en_us/training.html .. There are lots of free trainings available. Enroll yourself, complete them, you will gain more confidence. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • VAST 3.0 released. Open-Source Security Data Pipelines with Kusto-like syntax
    VAST is an open-source SecDataOps project for working with data from open-source security tools. Version 3.0 adds a pipeline syntax similar to splunk, Kusto, PRQL, and Zed. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache SkyWalking and Splunk, you can also consider the following products

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

Open Telemetry - An observability framework for cloud-native software.

Graylog - Graylog is an open source log management platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing both structured and unstructured data.