Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Prometheus

3.5K
3.6K
+ 1
239
Splunk

728
937
+ 1
14
Add tool

Prometheus vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Prometheus: An open-source service monitoring system and time series database, developed by SoundCloud. Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true; Splunk: Search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data. Splunk Inc. provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use Splunk to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

Prometheus belongs to "Monitoring Tools" category of the tech stack, while Splunk can be primarily classified under "Log Management".

Prometheus is an open source tool with 25K GitHub stars and 3.56K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Prometheus's open source repository on GitHub.

Uber Technologies, Slack, and DigitalOcean are some of the popular companies that use Prometheus, whereas Splunk is used by Starbucks, Intuit, and Razorpay. Prometheus has a broader approval, being mentioned in 244 company stacks & 85 developers stacks; compared to Splunk, which is listed in 31 company stacks and 29 developer stacks.

Advice on Prometheus and Splunk
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 700.8K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

See more
Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 485.4K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

See more
Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.

Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?

What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?

Regards, Sunil.

See more
Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.

Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.

See more
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose

See more
Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 633.3K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

See more
Replies (2)
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

See more
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Prometheus
Pros of Splunk
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
  • 22
    Extensive integrations
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 12
    Beautiful Model and Query language
  • 7
    Easy to extend
  • 6
    Nice
  • 3
    Written in Go
  • 2
    Good for experimentation
  • 1
    Easy for monitoring
  • 2
    Ability to style search results into reports
  • 2
    Alert system based on custom query results
  • 2
    API for searching logs, running reports
  • 2
    Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc
  • 1
    Query any log as key-value pairs
  • 1
    Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc
  • 1
    Granular scheduling and time window support
  • 1
    Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing
  • 1
    Dashboarding on any log contents
  • 1
    Rich GUI for searching live logs

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Prometheus
Cons of Splunk
  • 12
    Just for metrics
  • 6
    Bad UI
  • 6
    Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
  • 4
    Not easy to configure and use
  • 3
    Supports only active agents
  • 2
    Written in Go
  • 2
    TLS is quite difficult to understand
  • 2
    Requires multiple applications and tools
  • 1
    Single point of failure
  • 1
    Splunk query language rich so lots to learn

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

What is Splunk?

It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Jobs that mention Prometheus and Splunk as a desired skillset
CBRE
United States of America North Carolina Research Triangle Park
CBRE
United States of America Texas Richardson
CBRE
United States of America Washington Redmond
CBRE
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland England London
What companies use Prometheus?
What companies use Splunk?
See which teams inside your own company are using Prometheus or Splunk.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Prometheus?
What tools integrate with Splunk?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

Dec 8 2020 at 5:50PM

DigitalOcean

GitHubMySQLPostgreSQL+11
2
2227
May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

Rancher Labs

KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
5
1415
PythonDockerKubernetes+14
12
2433
Node.jsnpmKubernetes+6
1
1303
Jul 9 2019 at 7:22PM

Blue Medora

DockerPostgreSQLNew Relic+8
11
2177
Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

Twilio SendGrid

GitHubDockerKafka+10
11
9760
What are some alternatives to Prometheus and Splunk?
Datadog
Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Grafana
Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
New Relic
The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.
InfluxDB
InfluxDB is a scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics. It has a built-in HTTP API so you don't have to write any server side code to get up and running. InfluxDB is designed to be scalable, simple to install and manage, and fast to get data in and out.
Graphite
Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand
See all alternatives