New Relic vs Splunk

November 12, 2023 | Author: Michael Stromann
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New Relic
New Relic gets you immediate code-level visibility to build faster software, create better products, and delight your customers. New Relic gets you immediate code-level visibility to build faster software, create better products, and delight your customers.
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Splunk
We make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone—no matter where it comes from. You see servers and devices, apps and logs, traffic and clouds. We see data—everywhere. Splunk offers the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. It enables the curious to look closely at what others ignore—machine data—and find what others never see: insights that can help make your company more productive, profitable, competitive and secure.
New Relic and Splunk are both powerful analytics platforms, but they have distinct differences in their focus areas, use cases, and capabilities. New Relic is primarily an application performance monitoring (APM) platform that offers real-time insights into the performance of web and mobile applications. It provides detailed metrics, transaction tracing, and error monitoring to identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and ensure the smooth operation of applications. New Relic is widely used by development and operations teams to monitor and troubleshoot application performance in DevOps and IT environments. On the other hand, Splunk is a versatile machine data analytics platform that ingests and analyzes large volumes of machine-generated data from various sources, including logs, events, and metrics. Splunk enables organizations to gain valuable insights and detect patterns, anomalies, and security threats from their data. It offers powerful search capabilities, data visualization, and reporting tools for IT operations, security, and business intelligence use cases.

See also: Top 10 Mobile App Analytics platforms
New Relic vs Splunk in our news:

2023. Cisco to acquire IT Monitoring giant Splunk for $28B



Cisco has announced that it is acquiring Splunk for $28 billion. This acquisition is strategically aligned with Cisco's security-focused business, as it gains access to Splunk's observability platform. This addition will enable Cisco to enhance its ability to assist customers in comprehending security threats while also providing valuable capabilities for analyzing extensive log data to address various challenges such as understanding system failures and troubleshooting a wide range of issues across enterprise systems. It's important to note that both company boards have already given their approval for the acquisition. However, it must undergo regulatory approval, which is not guaranteed due to the heightened scrutiny that such deals are encountering worldwide.


2023. New Relic launches Grok, its AI observability assistant



Enterprises and related companies are currently in the midst of integrating large language models into their services. New Relic has announced its own offering Grok, which it claims is the first generative AI assistant for observability. The aim is to leverage a large language model to assist engineers in performing routine tasks within New Relic, such as setting up instrumentation, creating reports, and managing accounts using natural language. The use of these models provides a significant advantage in helping engineers analyze the large amounts of data collected by the service, which is crucial not only for ensuring the performance of a given service but also for managing its associated costs - an increasingly important concern for most enterprises.


2022. New Relic enters the security market with its new vulnerability management service



New Relic, renowned for its observability platform, has ventured into the security market by unveiling a new vulnerability management service. Aptly named New Relic Vulnerability Management, this service consolidates data from both New Relic's native vulnerability detection system and third-party tools. It offers a unified solution for security, DevOps, SecOps, and SRE teams to monitor their software stack for vulnerabilities. The company emphasizes that one of its key advantages is the seamless integration with third-party security tools. This capability enables teams to prioritize security risks effectively, considering the overwhelming number of potential risks, and the service assists in identifying the necessary actions to address and mitigate these risks.


2022. New Relic launches its new infrastructure monitoring experience



In the year 2020, New Relic introduced its New Relic One platform, aiming to consolidate the various individual solutions developed by the company over the years into a unified framework. Building upon this foundation and leveraging its NRDB data storage system, New Relic enhanced its offerings by incorporating advanced features such as enhanced network monitoring, a tool for monitoring and tracking ML model performance, and error tracking capabilities. Today, the company is finalizing one of the remaining components of this initiative by making its new infrastructure monitoring experience widely available. This solution is specifically designed to assist DevOps, SRE, and ITOps teams in monitoring their infrastructure and promptly resolving issues across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. New Relic users can now access this new solution.


2020. New Relic acquires Kubernetes observability platform Pixie Labs



New Relic, a publicly traded company specializing in monitoring and observability platforms, has completed the acquisition of Pixie Labs, a Kubernetes observability platform. Despite the acquisition, Pixie Labs will retain its brand and product, enabling New Relic to expand its platform capabilities to the edge. Pixie Labs initially focused on offering observability for cloud-native workloads operating on Kubernetes clusters. While most similar tools cater to operators and IT teams, Pixie Labs aimed to develop a tool specifically tailored for developers' preferences. By utilizing eBPF, a relatively recent method of extending the Linux kernel, the Pixie platform can gather data directly from the source without requiring an agent.


2020. Splunk acquires network observability service Flowmill



Data platform Splunk continues its acquisition streak as it expands its newly launched observability platform. Following the recent acquisitions of Plumbr and Rigor, the company has now announced the acquisition of Flowmill, a network observability startup based in Palo Alto. Flowmill specializes in helping users identify real-time network performance issues within their cloud infrastructure and offers traffic measurement by service to enable cost control. Similar to other players in this field, Flowmill leverages eBPF, a Linux kernel feature that allows the execution of sandboxed code without the need for kernel modification or loading kernel modules. This capability makes it particularly well-suited for application monitoring.


2020. Splunk acquires Plumbr and Rigor to build out its observability platform



Data platform Splunk has recently made two acquisitions, namely Plumbr and Rigor, in order to enhance its newly launched Observability Suite. Plumbr specializes in application performance monitoring, while Rigor focuses on digital experience monitoring. Through synthetic monitoring and optimization tools, Rigor assists businesses in optimizing their end-user experiences. These acquisitions serve as valuable additions to the technology and expertise gained by Splunk through its acquisition of SignalFx for over $1 billion last year.


2020. New Relic is changing its pricing model to encourage broader monitoring



In the field of monitoring, it's common practice to incur fees for monitoring each new instance. This approach can result in significant costs if you have a high level of activity within a month. As a result, many organizations choose to limit their monitoring scope to manage expenses. However, New Relic aims to revolutionize this paradigm by introducing a user-based payment model that includes a smaller, more affordable data component. In addition, the company is streamlining its product offerings to encourage customers to monitor everything instead of selectively choosing what to monitor based on cost considerations. By adopting this approach, organizations can gain comprehensive insights without worrying about exorbitant monitoring bills.


2017. Splunk expands machine learning capabilities across platform



Cloud monitoring provider Splunk is bolstering its machine learning capabilities to facilitate the identification of critical data. The Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit introduces several new features specifically designed for those who prefer a do-it-yourself approach. Firstly, a new data cleaning tool has been implemented to prepare the data for modeling. Additionally, machine learning APIs have been introduced, enabling the importation of both open-source and proprietary algorithms for application within Splunk. Lastly, a machine learning management component allows for seamless integration of user permissions from Splunk into customized machine learning applications. For users seeking a more automated experience, Splunk offers new features such as Splunk ITSI 3.0. Leveraging machine learning, this tool assists in issue identification and prioritization based on the criticality of each operation to the business. These advancements empower users to derive meaningful insights from their data while tailoring the level of involvement according to their preferences.


2016. Splunk unveiled 300 machine learning algorithms for Operational Intelligence



Splunk, a leading provider of Operational Intelligence platforms, has made significant advancements in incorporating machine learning capabilities into its platform, thereby expanding its range of services and capabilities. The company has integrated machine learning at the core of its platform through the introduction of a machine learning toolkit, which can be installed as a complimentary app on top of the Splunk Enterprise platform. This toolkit offers users access to a comprehensive set of 300 machine learning algorithms, with 27 of them conveniently pre-packaged and ready to use. These algorithms cover various categories such as clustering, recommendations, regression, classification, and text analytics. Furthermore, Splunk has enhanced its machine learning functionality within the IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) platform, which was initially introduced a year ago.

Author: Michael Stromann
Michael is an expert in IT Service Management, IT Security and software development. With his extensive experience as a software developer and active involvement in multiple ERP implementation projects, Michael brings a wealth of practical knowledge to his writings. Having previously worked at SAP, he has honed his expertise and gained a deep understanding of software development and implementation processes. Currently, as a freelance developer, Michael continues to contribute to the IT community by sharing his insights through guest articles published on several IT portals. You can contact Michael by email stromann@liventerprise.com