Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Open Telemetry VS Splunk

Compare Open Telemetry VS Splunk and see what are their differences

Open Telemetry logo Open Telemetry

An observability framework for cloud-native software.

Splunk logo Splunk

Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.
  • Open Telemetry Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-27
  • Splunk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20

Open Telemetry features and specs

  • Standardization
    OpenTelemetry provides a standardized set of APIs, libraries, and agents for collecting traces, metrics, and logs, helping to ensure consistency across different platforms and tools.
  • Vendor-neutrality
    OpenTelemetry is vendor-agnostic, allowing you to integrate with various backends, reducing lock-in with any specific monitoring solution.
  • Extensibility
    Its modular architecture allows developers to extend its functionalities easily, with support for custom instrumentation and exporters.
  • Community Support
    Being part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry benefits from a large, active community contributing to its development and providing support.
  • Ease of Integration
    Pre-built instrumentation libraries and SDKs for multiple languages simplify the process of integrating telemetry into your applications.

Possible disadvantages of Open Telemetry

  • Complexity
    The broad scope of OpenTelemetry, which includes tracing, metrics, and logging, can make it complex to understand and configure correctly.
  • Performance Overhead
    The process of collecting and exporting telemetry data can introduce performance overhead, which needs to be managed carefully.
  • Evolving Ecosystem
    As an emerging standard, aspects of OpenTelemetry are still under active development and can change, potentially leading to frequent updates and maintenance.
  • Learning Curve
    Engineers might face a steep learning curve when adopting OpenTelemetry due to its comprehensive nature and the need to understand various components and best practices.
  • Limited Maturity of Some Components
    Some of the libraries and features may not be fully mature yet, potentially leading to bugs or incomplete implementations in certain environments or languages.

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.

Open Telemetry videos

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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 Open Telemetry and Splunk)
Monitoring Tools
44 44%
56% 56
Performance Monitoring
53 53%
47% 47
Log Management
22 22%
78% 78
Open Source
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 Open Telemetry and Splunk

Open Telemetry Reviews

We have no reviews of Open Telemetry 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

Based on our record, Open Telemetry should be more popular than Splunk. It has been mentiond 190 times since March 2021. 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.

Open Telemetry mentions (190)

  • Log me Baby
    All these aspects are normally handled by the log forwarding daemon, but in this case, we have to take care of them while making sure we don't drop any logs or crash the application. To my delight, the OpenTelemetry project has made great advances. And this feels like the right time to jump into it. - Source: dev.to / 8 days ago
  • If You Can’t Observe It 🔭, You Can’t Operate It
    In this episode, we’ll integrate OpenTelemetry with our ASP.NET minimal API and trace everything from database calls to cache hits — all visualized in Jaeger. We’ll also learn how to spot inefficiencies, validate cache behavior, and instrument our code for insights. - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • 10 open-source MCPs that make your AI agents smarter than your team lead
    OpenTelemetry if you’re building at serious scale. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • Working with OpenTelemetry Metrics
    Then I stumbled upon OpenTelemetry. It is a project that aims to provide a unified way to collect, process and export telemetry data. From a hundred thousand feet, it looks like they know what they are doing: standardized data definitions and protocols, semantic conventions, etc. To me, it is like a rulebook for telemetry data --something I find reassuring to rely on. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Pomerium’s OpenTelemetry Tracing Support: Deeper Observability, Made Easy
    OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that standardizes how applications collect, process, and export telemetry data such as metrics, traces, and logs. It’s the successor to OpenCensus and OpenTracing, and is now the de facto industry standard for modern observability. - Source: dev.to / 20 days ago
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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 Open Telemetry and Splunk, you can also consider the following products

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

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.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

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.

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

Zipkin - Zipkin is a distributed tracing system.