When comparing ODE 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 ODE is ranked 35th. 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 Scales easily
ODE instances are independent of each other, so they don't have to worry about a peer being added/removed. This allows the cluster to grow without any performance hit on the log aggregation. There is no redundancy built-in, but you can always use the forwarder to duplicate data. There is no sharding configuration or any other penalty that comes up with scaling a cluster. The clustering configuration is also very easy where you just list out peers for one of the node in order for it to run a search query on the whole cluster and merge the results. Scales better than any other open source log management tool out there.
Pro Add new parsers as you like
You can add any parser you want to ODE.
Pro Highly customizable
Pro Easy to use
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 Still in beta
Opallios ODE seems to be still in beta, as such there may be issues or missing features which are not yet implemented.
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.