When comparing Cloudlytics vs Splunk, 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 Cloudlytics is ranked 16th. 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 Traffic analysis is provided using CloudFront logs
CloudFront analytics allows tracking what content is accessed and organize requests based on origin, amount, data transfered, OS/device/browser used, time, etc.
Pro Allows analyzing CloudTrail's API calls
Cloudlytics can be used to analyze CloutTrail's API calls to understand the geographical origin of requests and identifying unauthorized access attempts.
Pro Helps manage expenditure
Provides tools for analyzing bills.
Can schedule turning EC2 instances on and off to optimize resource cost.
Allows setting expenditure threshold values that will trigger an alert if a bill of a service has consumed 80%, 100% or more of set threshold.
Pro Provides AWS ELB insights
Cloudlytics provides insight into requests made to load balancer, including average response time, request path, server responses and client IP addresses.
Pro Allows scheduling when certain EC2 instances should be turned on or off
Usage of development and test environments can be optimized via scheduler. EC2 instances can be turned off when not needed.
Pro A free trial is available
The free trial lasts a month and allows uploading 200 MB of logs.
Pro Comprehensive log analytics solution for AWS Cloud
Cloudlytics can gather logs from Amazon's S3, CloudFront, CloudTrail and ELB services and provide insight into access patterns, API calls, requests made to load balancer as well as identify unauthorized access attempts, spam attacks, and help manage expenditure.
Pro AWS cloud audit allows identifying unauthorized access attempts
Cloud audit can be turned on via CloudTrail. It allows identifying unauthorized access attempts, IP addresses and request statuses.
Pro Allows identifying spam requests
Spam Reports can be used to identify possible spam requests and the IP address making them.
Pro Custom reports
Custom reports can be used to get insights for specific needs. For example, it's possible to add filters for parameters like edge locations, status, URL query etc. on various available fields like total requests, edge result type.
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.
Cons
Con No Free Plan
Only 200 MBs are free for just the 1st month.
Con AWS services only
Highly focussed on AWS Cloud & if you are looking for analytics about your Cloud Infrastructure then this is your go to SaaS tool
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.