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Sentry vs Splunk Cloud: What are the differences?
Introduction
Sentry and Splunk Cloud are two popular platforms used for monitoring and managing software applications. While both platforms offer similar functionalities, they have key differences that set them apart from each other. In this article, we will discuss these differences in detail.
Pricing Model: Sentry follows a usage-based pricing model, where users are charged based on the volume of data they send and the features they require. On the other hand, Splunk Cloud uses a subscription-based pricing model, which offers fixed pricing plans with different tiers based on data ingestion limits and additional features.
Deployment Model: Sentry is primarily offered as a cloud-based solution, where the platform is hosted and managed by Sentry. It provides ease of use and eliminates the need for infrastructure management. In contrast, Splunk Cloud offers the flexibility of both cloud-based and on-premises deployments. Users can choose to host Splunk Cloud on their own infrastructure or leverage the cloud-hosted option provided by Splunk.
Data Retention: Sentry provides a default data retention period of 90 days for event data, which can be extended up to 1 year with the purchase of additional data retention packs. Splunk Cloud, on the other hand, offers flexible data retention options based on the subscription tier chosen by the user. The retention period can range from 15 days to 5 years, depending on the selected plan.
Ease of Integration: Sentry integrates seamlessly with a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, making it easier for developers to integrate error monitoring into their applications. Splunk Cloud offers extensive integration capabilities as well, but it requires more configuration and setup compared to Sentry.
Advanced Analytics and Search Capabilities: Splunk Cloud offers powerful search and analytics capabilities, allowing users to explore and analyze their data using a query language called SPL (Splunk Processing Language). The platform also provides machine learning capabilities and pre-built dashboards for visualizing data. While Sentry offers basic search and filtering functionality, it does not provide the same level of advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities as Splunk Cloud.
Focus on Application Performance Monitoring: Sentry focuses primarily on error monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM). It provides detailed insights into errors and performance issues, helping developers identify and troubleshoot issues quickly. Splunk Cloud, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive platform that offers a wide range of monitoring and analysis capabilities beyond just APM.
In summary, Sentry and Splunk Cloud differ in their pricing models, deployment options, data retention periods, ease of integration, analytics capabilities, and focus on application performance monitoring.
We would like to detect unusual config changes that can potentially cause production outage.
Such as, SecurityGroup new allow/deny rule, AuthZ policy change, Secret key/certificate rotation, IP subnet add/drop. The problem is the source of all of these activities is different, i.e., AWS IAM, Amazon EC2, internal prod services, envoy sidecar, etc.
Which of the technology would be best suitable to detect only IMP events (not all activity) from various sources all workload running on AWS and also Splunk Cloud?
For continuous monitoring and detecting unusual configuration changes, I would suggest you look into AWS Config.
AWS Config enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. Here is a list of supported AWS resources types and resource relationships with AWS Config https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/resource-config-reference.html
Also as of Nov, 2019 - AWS Config launches support for third-party resources. You can now publish the configuration of third-party resources, such as GitHub repositories, Microsoft Active Directory resources, or any on-premises server into AWS Config using the new API. Here is more detail: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/customresources.html
If you have multiple AWS Account in your organization and want to detect changes there: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/aggregate-data.html
Lastly, if you already use Splunk Cloud in your enterprise and are looking for a consolidated view then, AWS Config is supported by Splunk Cloud as per their documentation too. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/Splunk-Inc-Splunk-Cloud/B06XK299KV https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/Splunk-Inc-Splunk-Cloud/B06XK299KV
While it won't detect events as they happen a good stop gap would be to define your infrastructure config using terraform. You can then periodically run the terraform config against your environment and alert if there are any changes.
Consider using a combination of Netflix Security Monkey and AWS Guard Duty.
You can achieve automated detection and alerting, as well as automated recovery based on policies with these tools.
For instance, you could detect SecurityGroup rule changes that allow unrestricted egress from EC2 instances and then revert those changes automatically.
It's unclear from your post whether you want to detect events within the Splunk Cloud infrastructure or if you want to detect events indicated in data going to Splunk using the Splunk capabilities. If the latter, then Splunk has extremely rich capabilities in their query language and integrated alerting functions. With Splunk you can also run arbitrary Python scripts in response to certain events, so what you can't analyze and alert on with native functionality or plugins, you could write code to achieve.
Well there are clear advantages of using either tools, it all boils down to what exactly are you trying to achieve with this i.e do you want to proactive monitoring or do you want debug an incident/issue. Splunk definitely is superior in terms of proactively monitoring your logs for unusal events, but getting the cloudtrail logs across to splunk would require some not so straight forward setup (Splunk has a blueprint for this setup which uses AWS kinesis/Firehose). Cloudtrail on the other had is available out of the box from AWS, the setup is quite simple and straight forward. But analysing the log could require you setup Glue crawlers and you might have to use AWS Athena to run SQL Like query.
Refer: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/cloudtrail-logs.html
In my personal experience the cost/effort involved in setting up splunk is not worth it for smaller workloads, whereas the AWS Cloudtrail/Glue/Athena would be less expensive setup(comparatively).
Alternatively you could look at something like sumologic, which has better integration with cloudtrail as opposed to splunk. Hope that helps.
I'd recommend using CloudTrail, it helped me a lot. But depending on your situation I'd recommed building a custom solution(like aws amazon-ssm-agent) which on configuration change makes an API call and logs them in grafana or kibana.
I essentially inherited a Shopify theme that was originally created by an agency. After discovering a number of errors being thrown in the Dev Console just by scrolling through the website, I needed more visibility over any errors happening in the field. Having used both Sentry and TrackJS, I always got lost in the TrackJS interface, so I felt more comfortable introducing Sentry. The Sentry free tier is also very generous, although it turns out the theme threw over 15k errors in less than a week.
I highly recommend setting up error tracking from day one. Theoretically, you should never need to upgrade from the free tier if you're keeping on top of the errors...
Pros of Sentry
- Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy238
- Email Notifications121
- Open source108
- Slack integration84
- Github integration71
- Easy49
- User-friendly interface44
- The most important tool we use in production28
- Hipchat integration18
- Heroku Integration17
- Good documentation15
- Free tier14
- Self-hosted11
- Easy setup9
- Realiable7
- Provides context, and great stack trace6
- Feedback form on error pages4
- Love it baby4
- Gitlab integration3
- Filter by custom tags3
- Super user friendly3
- Captures local variables at each frame in backtraces3
- Easy Integration3
- Performance measurements1
Pros of Splunk Cloud
- More powerful & Integrates with on-prem & off-prem7
- Free3
- Powerful log analytics3
- Pci compliance1
- Production debugger1
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Cons of Sentry
- Confusing UI12
- Bundle size4