Dynatrace vs Splunk: Which DEM Is Better (+ Our Recommendation for Small Businesses)
Dynatrace vs Splunk? Well, that’s a tough choice to make.
While Dynatrace is one of the most popular DEM tools, the leader as per Gartner’s magic quadrant, many users prefer Splunk to Dynatrace.
Network security consultant Alex said that Splunk goes beyond being a simple DEM tool. He says, “Splunk provides real-time data monitoring, analysis, and visualization capabilities that take business intelligence and analytics to the next level.“
In this article, we’ll compare Dynatrace vs Splunk and suggest an alternative – appNeura – with specific capabilities suitable for small businesses and startups.
We aim to equip you with the knowledge and confidence to select the right DEM platform particularly for the front end of the applications.
Dynatrace vs Splunk at a Glance
Dynatrace is an end-to-end observability platform that provides monitoring tools for modern infrastructures, distributed applications, user experience, and business intelligence.
Dynatrace has a more advanced and better integrated AI-powered engine, especially for DEM.
Alternatively Splunk is one of the leading log management solutions focusing on enterprise-grade log analysis and security incident and event management (SIEM).
All types of machine data, including event logs, server logs, files, and network events, are ingested, and indexed by the Splunk tool.
Such data can be used to track activity and problems with your infrastructure, find patterns in operational performance, send out warnings when odd behavior is noticed, and link related occurrences.
It’s worth noting Dynatrace is better for data observability and application monitoring, while Splunk is better for log analyzing and indexing.
We’ve also compared Dynatrace to Datadog. Learn how they compare to each other: Dynatrace vs Datadog
Unveiling the Core Features: A Comparison of Basic Functionalities
Technical Capabilities
Dynatrace offers a range of monitoring capabilities, including infrastructure monitoring, application performance, and digital experience. Dynatrace DEM empowers you to deliver real-time customer experience across every app.
With Dynatrace’s monitoring capabilities, you can gain insights into how every visitor action and application update impacts key business KPIs.
On the other hand, Splunk APM offers application performance monitoring that uses AI to drive the troubleshooting of issues that arise within applications.
Splunk analyzes logs and other application performance data fed into it and presents the result as vibrant dashboards for users. Splunk helps you capture custom metrics to monitor and connect serverless performance data with business KPIs.
Analytics and Reporting
Dynatrace uses an AI-powered analytics engine to automatically identify problems, measure your business impact, and share root cause information with your teams.
With Dynatrace, you can get customizable dashboards, custom graphics, and real-time data streaming, giving you a comprehensive monitoring solution.
Splunk’s platform offers comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities to extract insights and generate valuable reports. Using robust search and query language, Splunk enables users to analyze diverse data sources and uncover patterns and trends.
With Splunk’s reporting features, you can create visually appealing reports with suitable visualizations.
Alerting and Notification
Dynatrace’s alerting and notification capabilities are relatively limited. Users can access issues from the problems UI and set up monitoring based on events in several categories, such as monitoring availability, errors, slowdowns, resource usage, and custom events.
However, Dynatrace lacks many advanced features that other monitoring tools offer. Explore Dynatrace alternatives for small business.
Splunk’s AI-driven troubleshooting enables quick alerts, proactively finding and flag issues, and reduces mean time to repair. Splunk allows you to set alert limits based on time or adjusted automatically to manage alerts more effectively.
Splunk allows you to define alerts based on search queries, thresholds, or patterns within your data.
Ease of Use
Dynatrace is easy to use, and the user interface is carefully crafted. The dashboards are quite easy to configure and share.
Splunk has a more complex interface that caters to users with advanced technical skills, although recent updates have improved its overall user experience.
Easy Integration With Existing Systems
Dynatrace makes it simple for users to start with a streamlined and user-friendly deployment process. Users only need to execute three code snippets provided by Dynatrace to deploy the agent.
Users can set up the agent through the web UI, making it easy to set up log monitoring and APM.
Splunk interoperability allows for the integration of Splunk with other tools and systems. Splunk’s key strength lies in integrating with more than 250 out-of-the-box integrations.
Price Comparison
Dynatrace’s price approach is flexible, allowing customers to select between full-stack and individual product pricing.
Individual products are priced based on their specialized functionality, while the full-stack tier starts at $74 per 8GB per server. However, the price does not cover add-ons like Application Security.
Splunk’s pricing is based on how many gigabytes of data are ingested daily in Splunk products.
The Ingest pricing model is based purely on data volume requirements and determines the total plan price by multiplying the desired daily index volume by the unit price per GB.
Splunk Enterprise software is priced by how much data is sent into the Splunk installation daily. Splunk Cloud Platform offers unlimited users and the ability to scale to hundreds of terabytes of data. The pricing for Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise Security is based on volume and license lifetime, per year or perpetual.
Contact the Splunk team for more details on the pricing part.
Customer Reviews on Pricing
Dynatrace’s pricing can be complex because it employs diverse billing units, which customers often find expensive. Take a look at the review below for more details.
Source: Gartner
On the other hand Splunk’s pricing model can also be difficult to understand with different pricing tiers for different tools. Customers feel it can be expensive for startups as license cost is based on the size of ingested data.
Source: G2
Customer Support
Dynatrace customers find product support challenging, with limited chat functionality. Below is a screenshot of a customer review on Dynatrace’s customer support.
Source: G2
Splunk’s customers are dissatisfied with Splunk’s support due to inexperienced staff, disorganized documentation, and unintuitive internal log messages. Check out below what one of the customers said.
Below is a screenshot of a dissatisfied customer’s review expressing their dissatisfaction with Splunk’s customer support.
Source: Gartner
Introducing appNeura – The Better Choice
Avekshaa’s comprehensive grasp of performance engineering has laid the foundation for appNeura, a digital experience monitoring (DEM) solution.
appNeura offers AI/ML-powered products in the DEM and AIOps space. appNeura’s powerful analytical approach, represented in the most user-friendly dashboard, differentiates it from competitors.
With the help of appNeura, you can generate actionable insights to troubleshoot glitches in your end-customers experience across geographies, operating systems, devices, networks, and servers.
appNeura can be a game-changer for chief digital officers, CIOs, and business owners, says the CEO.
Source: avekshaa.com
Unlocking the Power of appNeura: 8 Reasons to Make a Switch
Based on numerous user reviews, Dynatrace and Splunk are criticized for their high costs, limited customization options, complex implementation processes, inadequate support documents, and unfriendly web interfaces.
To validate these claims, refer to the Dynatrace reviews on Gartner and Trustradius and the Splunk reviews on Gartner and Trustradius.
To address the needs of small businesses seeking an affordable and robust digital experience monitoring (DEM) solution, appNeura is a promising alternative with appNeura’s real-time performance monitoring and AI-powered analytics.
Here are nine compelling reasons to consider appNeura.
Harness the Power of Lightweight Integration
Unlike Dynatrace and Splunk, you can easily integrate appNeura’s light-weight SDK into your existing infrastructure with a few lines of code.
appNeura’s simple design ensures seamless integration allowing your app to run smoothly and efficiently.
appNeura does not require the installation of agents or command lines on every server or device, making it easier to integrate and manage.
Elevate Insights with Advanced Analytics
appNeura offers detailed insights into the root causes of problems with advanced analytics:
- Gain insights into the performance of AJAX calls in your web apps to HTTP or HTTPS domains. You’ll be able to identify time-consuming calls and take corrective actions.
- Visualize page loads with static assets, viewing the entire user session on informative graphs without needing log extraction from multiple services.
- Analyze and troubleshoot JavaScript errors in your web apps by aggregating details like Stack Traces, Browser, OS, URL, and User, determining the cause of crashes.
Optimize User Experience by Monitoring Web Vitals
appNeura analyzes website metrics to provide actionable user experience insights, enabling businesses to optimize their web pages for improved user experience.
appNeura helps you measure following key metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures the time a website takes to show the user the main content on the screen
- First Input Delay (FID): measures the duration it takes for the browser to respond to a user’s initial click on a link, tap on a button, or interact with a custom JavaScript-powered control.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability of visible content.
- Total Blocking Time (TBT): Cumulative duration of unresponsiveness to user input. Increased TBT leads to abandoned actions and hampers critical tasks.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures page layout shifts during loading. Unexpected layout shifts disrupt user interactions and degrade the user experience.
While appNeura’s features partially overlap with Google Analytics, it offers unique features such as TCP monitoring, and waterfall support for tracking page load activity.
Harness the Power of Smart Alerting
appNeura, with the power of AI/ML, cuts down the alerts and notifies you only about what is critical via its smart alerts feature.
The comprehensive reporting provides you with multi-level intelligent insights that enable product owners, IT/Ops Managers, and developers to take corrective actions to enhance the performance and scalability of your app.
Get Real-time Insights With Customizable Dashboards
With appNeura’s customizable dashboards, businesses access real-time insights on application performance and user experience. This enables swift issue identification and resolution before end users are affected.
Unlock the App’s Performance Insights With the Power of the ApDex Health Indicator
The proprietary ApDex function of appNeura assists you in monitoring the health of your app and displays the application’s health as an Apdex score.
The Apdex score feature enables users to rapidly assess the overall performance of their app by using a percentage score, a numerical scale, or color-coded signs like green, amber, and red.
The Apdex score deducts the number of app crashes and buffering incidents during a session from the original formula.
Be Proactive by Leveraging Predictive Analytics
appNeura employs predictive analytics to foresee and prevent probable problems, proactively resolving issues and improving the customer experience across channels.
Through predictive modeling, hypothetical scenarios and their potential impact on an application are analyzed. This evaluation facilitates capacity planning, improves resource distribution, and guides decisions by simulating alterations in elements such as infrastructure, application code, user load, or new features. It offers a distinct understanding of how these shifts might influence the application’s performance.
Solve Critical Issues With appNeura’s AI/ML
appNeura’s AI/ML technology helps cluster and group problematic JavaScript and PNG files that affect your website’s response time. appNeura can categorize pages based on their load times, identifies outlier anomalies like slow-rendering images and style sheets, and analyzes user session lengths.
With training on over 1000 performance, availability, and scalability problems, its AI/ML capabilities excel at detecting and resolving intricate IT performance issues within enterprises.
Unlock Your Business Potential with appNeura: A Smart Choice for Your Success
appNeura is the superior choice for small businesses and startups in need of a DEM (Digital Experience Monitoring) tool.
appNeura focuses on enhancing end-user experience through AI and ML, which sets it apart from its competitors.
With easy integration, proactive monitoring, and comprehensive performance analysis, appNeura offers the advanced capabilities needed to thrive in today’s digital landscape.
At appNeura, we believe in the customer success formula of “Happy Customers + Loyal Customers = Increased Business.”
Sign up for a free trial and unlock the DEM and AIOps potential for your business.
Interested in learning more? Contact us today.