Splunk Observability Cloud

My main use cases for Splunk Observability Cloud  include retail analytics.

The feature I appreciate the most about Splunk Observability Cloud  is Synthetic Monitoring. These features have benefited my organization by increasing availability and decreasing downtime, providing assurance that makes you feel good, and ultimately enhancing well-being.

The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards are very effective. At the same time, we also use Splunk Cloud to enhance them. The Splunk Cloud is a better dashboarding experience.

Our teams have utilized the ability to enrich data with custom metrics in Splunk Observability Cloud. We've been doing a lot of that with event management and linking that into IT as well. So we're using that to be able to tie systems together. The integration we have between Observability Cloud and ITSI for event management is where we're using that type of stuff.

Splunk Observability  Cloud could be improved by having more integration with Splunk Cloud because at the moment they're two separate products. They're making great moves on what they call unified access; tighter integration is always a good thing.

I have been using Splunk Observability  Cloud for three years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Observability Cloud as generally good. We have experienced the odd bug; however, nothing too serious, and Splunk has been quite good in terms of resolving issues; it's just routine stuff and nothing bad.

Splunk Observability Cloud scales incredibly with the growing needs of my organization. It just means the more we use it, the more expensive it is, but there are no issues reported.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as fantastic; nobody is better.

Positive

During the deployment, we only had some challenges when we switched on unified access. However, they were just teething problems.

I have seen a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud as we have averted some things that may otherwise have resulted in downtime. We have had it avert potential problems, and the first time it happens is a return on investment. The second time, nobody notices, making measuring business value a challenge.

I would advise other organizations considering this solution to give careful attention to the use cases they have and how they plan to proceed in terms of their roadmap over the next two to three years, as there are alternatives. Having an idea of where you want to go will help you make a better-informed decision.

Additionally, it's good advice to have a customer reference call to learn from someone's experience and avoid pitfalls.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Splunk Observability Cloud overall as a good eight; as soon as it's all integrated neatly together, then it's up in the high numbers.

My primary use cases for Splunk Observability Cloud  include creating dashboards for metrics, detecting incidents, and ensuring overall observability of applications, service connections, and integrations, along with reporting and Slack integrations.

By visualizing the integration of the service, I can understand the flow of the data, which is one of the features I appreciate most about Splunk Observability Cloud .

With the metrics collection, I can proactively find incidents and work on the major issues when they happen and predict these issues.

With alerting and the detectors, we can inform the engineers that are on call to take over the service responsibility.

With the metrics and the dashboards, we can have a clear view of how the system is performing. Splunk Observability  Cloud has helped improve my operational performance by detecting, analyzing tracings, and detecting alerts.

50% of our metrics on Splunk Observability Cloud are custom metrics, so we heavily rely on that. The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards provided by Splunk Observability Cloud are excellent, especially with the Amazon ones, AWS , memory cache, and Kubernetes  dashboards, which are complete for the Kubernetes  needs.

The UI of Splunk Observability  Cloud is one of the major issues; it's old and has been there for more than 10 years, acquired by other applications from other companies. It's time to reinvent how the UI is going to work with the AI modules and integrations, making it softer and cleaner.

Splunk Observability Cloud is comprehensive in terms of functionality and features, so educating users has to be more functional. Users need to know how to be educated about certain views or pages they're working on.

I have been using Splunk Observability Cloud for five years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Observability Cloud as built on top of reliability because of the Cisco networking and infrastructure. That's not a concern for me; I totally rely on it. I've experienced downtime, crashes, and performance issues with Splunk Observability Cloud, as with any other solution. Comparing it with other monitoring solutions, Splunk has been excellent with availability. When I experienced issues, they were communicated through maintenance windows, resulting in 100% satisfaction with how they conduct this.

Splunk Observability Cloud scales very well with the growing needs of my organization. We didn't have scaling issues as the application evolved. I expanded usage of Splunk Observability Cloud when the company opened new coverage areas in different countries. Adding those metrics or new indexes to Splunk wasn't much of an issue in scaling.

I evaluate customer service and technical support for Splunk Observability Cloud as having only great experiences working with people at Splunk.

Positive

Prior to adopting Splunk Observability Cloud, I was using Datadog , which would accomplish 70% of what Splunk does currently.

There have been so many challenges that I can't name one right now. There is always a challenge in deploying open source material, like the open telemetry modules, that don't have the reliance on Splunk. It's just an integration challenge that we have the most. Deploying Splunk itself wasn't that much of a big deal.

I see ROI with Splunk Observability Cloud. My company is heavily dedicated to analytics, so the Splunk deal is significant. I cannot imagine how the business would run without it currently.

I had low pricing and setup costs for Splunk Observability Cloud, and overall, my company has received a good deal on all the features that we have. We just have to understand how to explore it further.

Not directly because of Splunk, but the visualization that I have with the main aspects of scaling made us create custom dashboards that proactively detect the changes in scale, and then we can get ready for those changes. We don't have to spend time testing the new capacity when it's already being defined and envisioned by Splunk.

My advice to other organizations considering Splunk Observability Cloud is to watch out for your budget. If I could assess the impact of not having Splunk Observability Cloud, there would be a monetary impact with other solutions. For the business, we would lose resiliency of the system. To imagine the impact, it would be catastrophic.

Splunk has to think about how to redesign Observability Cloud. It came from SignalFx and AppDynamics to Splunk Cloud. It's a merge of different platforms into one, and this merge is being done at a pace where I expected more velocity.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Splunk Observability Cloud overall as a seven.

My main use cases for Splunk Observability Cloud  are indexing, dashboards, alerts, and reports.

The dashboards are the features of Splunk Observability Cloud  that I appreciate the most, providing visual representation of all data and text. These features have benefited my organization by speeding up people's jobs, allowing a place to monitor all logs, as there are usually thousands of entries coming in which can become very disorderly. Users can monitor everything and write queries to organize the data and build dashboards to visualize it. This creates one-stop shops to get answers on how products and applications are performing, as opposed to having to jump onto servers and look through numerous logs.

The main improvement I would suggest for Splunk Observability  Cloud would be offering the ability to implement custom apps, specifically allowing Python scripts that Splunk Cloud could host. Currently, we cannot create custom apps through Splunk Cloud. Additionally, continuous performance improvements for faster searching and indexing would be beneficial.

I have been using Splunk Observability  Cloud for over the last year.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Observability Cloud as good. There have been some performance issues, though not necessarily crashes, occurring approximately 20% of the time or less.

Splunk Observability Cloud scales smoothly with the growing needs of my organization. There have been some cases of performance loss due to rapid onboarding. We are handling multiple terabytes of data daily, so we expect some hiccups, but otherwise, it has scaled effectively for our fast-paced migration.

My experience with customer service and technical support has been very present and super responsive. When we submit a case on Splunk support, they usually reach out within the same day or next day. They have consistently helped us resolve any issues we've encountered.

Positive

I used Splunk Enterprise before adopting Splunk Observability Cloud. While other parts of the company were leveraging different logging tools, we primarily revolved around Splunk. When Splunk Cloud became available as the next option, we were ready to migrate.

I haven't had personal experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing as it's managed by our managerial side.

I have seen a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud through faster debugging and troubleshooting capabilities with enhanced observability. A significant return on investment comes from not having to host Splunk Enterprise ourselves. Having servers on Splunk's end allows us to focus more on development, monitoring, and our products, rather than maintaining our own local version of Splunk.

I would rate Splunk Observability Cloud overall as a solution 9 out of 10.

My main use case is end-to-end monitoring for the application.

We utilize the APM  and auto-detectors, as the core metrics and core alerts are available for us, which are the features of Splunk Observability Cloud  that I appreciate the most.

We lead the SRE, so our job is to ensure reliability, stability, and uptime, and without good observability monitoring, there is no way we can accomplish that. This is the main tool that we would use.

I would evaluate the effectiveness of Splunk Observability Cloud in improving digital resilience by saying that the idea is to minimize incidents. If any incident happens, the first thing I would do is go back to see why Splunk Observability Cloud did not detect that. I will take it back, do the reverse engineering to find out where it was missed out, and then work with the team to ensure these things are identified.

I have yet to experience the No-Sample Tracing feature in Splunk Observability Cloud, however, I am only in conversation with the teams where distributed tracing is required, and we want to provide the traces. My teams utilize the ability to enrich data with custom metrics in Splunk Observability Cloud, and I appreciate the feature supported within the Observability Cloud. Custom metrics could also be introduced from within the microservices, so I am yet to explore the OTEL library. I gave this feedback to the Splunk team that they should have their dedicated .NET library that customers can embed and start using; I do not think that is there today.

We are the first project within the company for a fully cloud-native application, so we will set the ground for the rest of the teams to get motivated. Therefore, I expect that I will have the best experience to become an example for others.

The integrations need to be improved for Splunk Observability Cloud . Currently, they do not have great support for Azure . We are on Azure , and I know they invested a lot of time in AWS  yet not in Azure.

I had given feedback to the teams here, as the integration from Azure Cloud, how we supply the logs and the metrics, is not clearly documented yet, which was acknowledged by the team. For example, the OTEL collector has a thousand parameters, and we need a very specific use case with 10 parameters required for our integration. We can't go through the thousand parameters; we can, however, that is basically why I think some integrations need to get better for Azure.

There's a lot of talk about AI-powered analytics and guidance in Splunk Observability  Cloud. I didn't get a great sense of how much of it is actually working; there are a lot of AI hallucinations. I think it probably needs much more improvement to contextualize it so that it is very clear and precise about what it randomly thinks, but it needs to match the context better.

Customer service and technical support need some improvement. We had issues with technical support, and the professional services were struggling as well.

I've been using Splunk Observability Cloud for six months.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Observability Cloud by saying no crashes or performance issues have been experienced.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service as eight.

Positive

My experience with deployment has been good. It's just the routing, the matrices, and the integration is where we were struggling a little bit. That said, having the cloud as observed to provision was never a problem.

I hope to see a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud. I have not applied this for production. That said, we already use Splunk Cloud for production, and we are good with that, so I see the value.

The cost is fine, and we are good with what is given. It's a centralized tool for my organization, so at the org level, a lot of things were decided, but we are actually happy with the cost we received because I know I have to approve my budget, and it's within our range, so we are okay with it.

My advice to Splunk is to mix Splunk Cloud and Splunk Observability Cloud into one. Don't make oObservability only needed in Splunk Cloud, too. You don't want to have two products competing with each other; you want to compete with someone outside your organization. Combine this, as there's a lot of confusion. Even in different classes and training sessions meant only for Splunk Cloud, they were not for Splunk Observability Cloud, and they are different today. The acquisition of SignalFx, which is not its own, adds to the confusion. So, to the customer, provide one interface, and combine them.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Splunk Observability Cloud an eight overall.

For the retail sector, we are building a solution for customer stores in order to know how the products are sold.

The feature of Splunk Observability Cloud  that I prefer most is the easy deployment on the cloud. The benefit of that feature for my organization is to optimize the deploys and implementation and the response to our customers, to quickly make a demo. Splunk Observability Cloud  has helped improve our operational performance, especially for our customers.

My experience with the out-of-the-box customizable dashboards provided by Splunk Observability Cloud is that they are effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders. For the initial point of contact, it helps and works nicely as a star point. Then, you have the basics and use that as a framework to deploy others, so they are very helpful.

Splunk Observability  Cloud can be improved. In terms of additional features I would want to see in future releases, since Cisco acquired Splunk, more Cisco integration could be beneficial.

I have been using Splunk Observability  Cloud for the last two years.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

Splunk Observability Cloud scales very well with the growing needs of my organization, as we just need to add a license or data ingestion.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for Splunk Observability Cloud as good. They respond effectively and in time.

Positive

Prior to adopting Splunk Observability Cloud, we used other solutions to address similar needs, such as Dynatrace  and ElasticSearch.

It is easy to deploy on the cloud.

I have not seen a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud yet, as we are relatively new to it.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Splunk Observability Cloud is that it is somewhat expensive, considering I am from Mexico and the market in Mexico is very different from the market in the USA. It is expensive, especially when there are other vendors that offer something similar for much cheaper.

The factors that led me to consider the change to Splunk Observability Cloud include performance and cost, and it depends on the customer. If the customer is a network user or partner with all Cisco solutions, Splunk Observability Cloud fits perfectly.

However, if we have a new customer that doesn't have any Cisco products, it might be better for them to use another solution that is easier to deploy and not as complete as Splunk Observability Cloud, especially if they only need one or two features.

My advice to other organizations considering using Splunk Observability Cloud is that if you want a comprehensive, consistent tool or solution, it is one of the leaders in the market because it integrates with the network side of their organization, including Cisco solutions. Regarding customers who don't come from the Cisco world, it is a good choice, depending on their use. However, for small customers or those that are not large companies, Splunk Observability Cloud may not be the best fit, as it is a comprehensive tool. In Mexico, we observe that customers claim they only need APM or infrastructure monitoring, a very basic requirement, and don't require the entire Splunk portfolio.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Splunk Observability Cloud a nine.