Datadog vs. Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)

A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers.

Incentivized

[Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)] is well suited when you have a system that you want to visualize, and then layer in information from many different sources. This will allows ITSI to intelligently create alerts based on the system as a whole vs the individual components. In some cases, a simple splunk dashboard would really suffice over using ITSI. Teams deploying ITSI should really understand the use cases and consider using simple dashboards where they make sense, and use ITSI for topological views.

Incentivized

• Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
• Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
• Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
• DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
• Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.

Incentivized

• Monitor hundreds of IT services by continuously tracking thousands of KPIs in a scalable way.
• Quickly identify problem areas by a combination of default visualizations and ability to create custom dashboards.
• Extremely configurable to effectively monitor nearly any KPI imaginable from Splunk.

Incentivized

• Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
• I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
• I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame

Incentivized

• The terminology takes some getting used to: Aggregation policies, notable events, correlation searches, glass tables. If you're not familiar with ITSI, these terms can be a bit overwhelming and steepens the learning curve.
• We have had some technical issues with the underlying support when used in a multisite cluster. We've had to build in several points of redundancy to make sure it works as expected.
• I'd like to see additional types of notable events, like informational events that come in for when an incident is created or when an alert is acknowledged so all of those action steps can be viewed on the episode timeline without affecting the count of events.

Incentivized

We have replaced our monitoring platform with Splunk & ITSI, and with the success, it's seen at our organization thus far we would be hard-pressed to pivot to another tool. Frankly, our business partners and application teams love Splunk & ITSI.

Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.

Incentivized

Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) is a platform with extended functionality and provides various functionalities which can be utilized to improve the efficiency and accuracy in analyzing the data and detecting the attacks.

The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.

Incentivized

During POC, pre-planning, and implementation, we have had interactions with numerous folks at Splunk. Everyone from sales & engineering to markets analysts to specific IT component SMEs, and a small professional services engagement to get started. They have all been exceptionally helpful and go above and beyond the call of duty. They actively reach out to ensure success is being realized and find ways to help proactively, instead of having to simply open support cases with the vendor.

I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way.

Incentivized

Splunk has raised itself as a platform not just as a tool unlike other products in the market. If I talk about Moogsoft it also has similar capabilities but Splunk ITSI has more visibility and its GUI is making a different impact on the users. ServiceNow and Splunk are equally capable products however Splunk seems to have more tech-savvy people tools than ServiceNow.

Incentivized

• Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
• Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
• Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.

Incentivized

• Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) has improved our efficiency and accuracy in detecting the attacks and mitigating them.
• It helped us in discovering various kinds of logins within our organization, such as failed logins, interactive logins, admin logins etc etc
• With the help of Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) we can now keep an eye on real time data as well.