Splunk vs Sumo Logic
When comparing Splunk vs Sumo Logic, the Slant community recommends Splunk for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Splunk is ranked 11th while Sumo Logic is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Splunk is:
It's human readable, intuitive, fast and with auto-complete to boot. And if you need more advanced functionality out of your queries, [120+ page search manual](http://docs.splunk.com/index.php?title=Documentation:Splunk:Search:Whatsinthismanual:6.0beta&action=pdfbook) will give you an insight in how much is actually possible.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use, powerful search
It's human readable, intuitive, fast and with auto-complete to boot. And if you need more advanced functionality out of your queries, 120+ page search manual will give you an insight in how much is actually possible.
Pro Widely used
De facto standard for log aggregation, monitoring, analysis and reporting.
Pro Scales effortlessly
It is built for enterprise use, meaning it scales easily.
Pro Real-time graphs
You can create visualizations that update in real time.
Pro Cross-platform
OS X, Linux & Windows are supported. You can also access Splunk from iOS and Android devices.
Pro Free version
With restrictions on log size and devices a free version is available.
Pro Alerts
Splunk can turn searches into alerts.
Pro Understands data in any format or language
Pro Extendable via a large selection of apps
Additional functionality can be added with over 500 apps.
Pro Scalable
Sumo logic is entirely cloud based and very scalable.
Pro Flexible licensing model
Licensing cost is primarily determined by daily ingest of logs, however this is averaged out over 30 days instead of locking a user out of their own data after an arbitrary number of license breaches.
Pro Truly multi-tenant
Sumo Logic is truly multi-tenant, a single instance running on the server can serve multiple groups of users.
Pro A large set of supporting Apps
Allows customers to quickly setup and start getting actionable insights from their infrastructure by using Apps that integrate with various different platforms out of the box.
Cons
Con Expensive
Splunk is pretty expensive compared to other solutions.
Con Antiquated
The interface and service are very antiquated
Con Seriously SLOW ingest
Their docs and sales say it will ingest up to 20k EPS, but reality is more like 1k eps per server.
Con Complex set up process
Con Useless need for collectors
You have to install a plugin on each host to collect logs, the collector is 89MBs and is written in Java. there's no reason to install a Java tool to send syslog data when Linux already does that natively. The memory footprint for Java-based apps is way too high and, in this case, completely unnecessary.
Con Does not support structured data
They don't support RFC5424 standard events
Con Install is very painful
Con Search is very difficult
Here's an example:_sourceCategory=*windows* _sourceName=Security (4771 OR 4768 OR 4776 OR 4625) | parse regex "EventIdentifier = (?<event_id>\d+?);" | parse regex "ComputerName = \"(?<hostname>.+?)\"" | parse regex "(?:Result|Failure|Error) Code:.+?(?<result_code>0x[A-Fa-f\d]+)\b" nodrop | where result_code !="0x0" AND event_id in ("4771", "4768", "4776","4625") | count by hostname
Con Indexing and search are very slow
Sending around 45000 events to it may take more than 3 minutes to show up in the interface.
Once they show up, a search may take up to 32 seconds to return results. On only 45000 events, the search should return in milliseconds.
Con Difficult / Confusing Interface
The service and interface are very confusing.
Con There can be issues with smaller vendors
There may be some issues when using devices and services for smaller vendors which are not officially supported by Sumo Logic.