SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server vs. Splunk Enterprise

The SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server does what it's supposed to do. It's a bare-bones Syslog Server. If your company is just trying to fulfill security requirements or doesn't need all the advanced features of a product such as Splunk, then Kiwi will work well and not break the bank. Using the tool is very straightforward as there aren't a lot of options outside of just viewing logs.

Incentivized

Pros: Splunk is very well suited if you have multiple log sources of related data. All of them can be correlated and tasks can be automated based on the requirement. Other than alerts, Splunk can also run a specific script of your choice, based on some defined conditions. Cons: If you have a few logs but a large number of log sources, Splunk can be very expensive.

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• Collection of SNMP traps a reliable and stable collection server for these is crucial to troubleshooting and time to ROS. Kiwi excels at this.
• Easy to install set up and train users on.
• The free version is a good free tool and handy to use for personal labs and other smalle use cases.
• SNMP traps to user readable format is great, sometimes syslog and smnp messages can be hard to interpret and read with out a knowledge of how to do this.

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• Real-time + Scheduled alerts - i-e you can set up alerts which are actively monitoring your logs
• Pretty good response time for search results. With our key/value logging, Splunk makes it blazing fast to query the data.
• Dashboards provide insights into historical data
• Love how Splunk indexes all of the data and provides keys to search on

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• Minimalistic; If you're looking for something with analysis features look elsewhere.
• Operating System support is Windows only.
• Some management features cannot be configured via web interface.

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• Even though there is a search tool as a help function, you still have to read through many documentation to find the answers you're looking for and sometimes you don't find it. The help function in Splunk could be improved to be more intuitive or have a built-in help per report, panel or dashboard.
• Creating a Splunk dashboard is rather straightforward however, customization is not. Splunk could be improved to provide more tools or features for customization such as adding colors and font options for text and graphs or graphics.
• My dashboard has a lot of useful information and I want the important panels and reports at the top but there is no easy way to do this. Perhaps Splunk could be improved to allow features such as adding URL links to other dashboards or some other clever way to emphasize the important data in my dashboard without compromising space.

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We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.

Kiwi Syslog has the best usability of any syslog server. While not being able to offer the most features, the ones it does have are intuitive and easy to work with. Everything that it has is where you think it should be. If you can't find it in the menus, it doesn't exist.

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Splunk Enterprise has plenty of storage space for security logs and can search and correlate suspicious activities up to 30+ days back. Splunk Enterprise can integrate with a ticketing system to track threats and correlate with IoC between security events. Splunk Enterprise can provide reports of account lockouts. Splunk Enterprise can consolidate multiple security alerts into one entry with a number showing how many events occurred.

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When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.

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Because the solution is so simple to use and implement, support wasn't very necessary. The one time I did call them to better understand where logs were stored, they were very helpful and friendly. Kiwi has been around for some time and not a lot has changed over the years, so support for it is pretty straightforward and quick.

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Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.

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The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.

Smooth without too many major issues.

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Syslog-ng don't have customer support or technical support .But its a free software and no clarity on limitations ingestion bandwidth. No gui feature and everything should be done from backend. Gui can easily help to start and stop service ,easy to configure. Unlimited technical and customer support . Even when server got shutdown will get on-call or immediate support that will helps a lot to resolve errors

A lot of products have natively inside their own dashboards and or their own logging repositories. And each one is difficult to learn or they're too complex or they're not verbose in the sense that they're not easy to mine the data that you're looking for. So that could be anything from the native logging that you find in other Cisco products. It's easier to use Splunk to draw the data that you're looking for as opposed to going to the individual's products themselves to get the logs that you're looking for.

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Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome

• SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server has made it easier for me to monitor events on all of my network devices and servers.
• As a small business, we needed something powerful but inexpensive and SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server is exactly that.

Incentivized

• Splunk has allowed developers to diagnose production issues when access of control was taken away from them to be allowed to view items in production environments and I believe that is invaluable.
• At times some developers weren't super happy about using it, but it was more of the fact that they were used to having production access and not creating their splunk queries to get information.
• Going one place to view logs was very beneficial to have.

Incentivized