ServiceNow IT Operations Management vs. Splunk Enterprise

[...] is changing the way our internal support staff (not only in the IT field) work and enhancing the experience for employees seeking IT assistance through ServiceNow IT Operation Management. We have moved the usual and personalized IT tools and functions from [...] service-desk to ServiceNow IT Operations Management. These advancements have sparked innovation in various aspects of our IT support management, such as enhancing accessibility, managing incidents, optimizing IT workflows and procedures, enforcing service level agreements (SLAs), incorporating AI/ML technology, utilizing virtual agents, streamlining automation, and sharing knowledge throughout the support team via data visualization, monitoring, and reporting. In brief, our collaboration with ServiceNow IT Operations Management is enhancing the effectiveness of our internal system and benefiting our shared clients.

Incentivized

Pros: Splunk is very well suited if you have multiple log sources of related data. All of them can be correlated and tasks can be automated based on the requirement. Other than alerts, Splunk can also run a specific script of your choice, based on some defined conditions. Cons: If you have a few logs but a large number of log sources, Splunk can be very expensive.

Incentivized

• The centralized dashboard allows us to keep track of production incidents as they come in, and allow us to view and sort them based on severity, making sure it's tracked
• The read/edit access and role granting process is straightforward, meaning that only the right people can change /update the statuses of incidents without unintended consequences
• With AI driven classification, it's easy to track outage impacts

Incentivized

• Real-time + Scheduled alerts - i-e you can set up alerts which are actively monitoring your logs
• Pretty good response time for search results. With our key/value logging, Splunk makes it blazing fast to query the data.
• Dashboards provide insights into historical data
• Love how Splunk indexes all of the data and provides keys to search on

Incentivized

• Scan network is limited to their discovery tool, which is costly
• Integration to jamf and ubunto tools
• Agents TCO
• integration to password management tools which are critical for successful scans

Incentivized

• Even though there is a search tool as a help function, you still have to read through many documentation to find the answers you're looking for and sometimes you don't find it. The help function in Splunk could be improved to be more intuitive or have a built-in help per report, panel or dashboard.
• Creating a Splunk dashboard is rather straightforward however, customization is not. Splunk could be improved to provide more tools or features for customization such as adding colors and font options for text and graphs or graphics.
• My dashboard has a lot of useful information and I want the important panels and reports at the top but there is no easy way to do this. Perhaps Splunk could be improved to allow features such as adding URL links to other dashboards or some other clever way to emphasize the important data in my dashboard without compromising space.

Incentivized

We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.

ServiceNow's IT Operations Management (ITOM) includes
features such as discovery, service mapping, event management, automation, and
a user interface designed to be navigable. Users can bookmark important areas
for quick access. Provides very good visibility of assets. The UI is little
difficult but once got used to is very good to use.

Incentivized

Splunk Enterprise has plenty of storage space for security logs and can search and correlate suspicious activities up to 30+ days back. Splunk Enterprise can integrate with a ticketing system to track threats and correlate with IoC between security events. Splunk Enterprise can provide reports of account lockouts. Splunk Enterprise can consolidate multiple security alerts into one entry with a number showing how many events occurred.

Incentivized

When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.

Incentivized

Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.

Incentivized

The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.

Smooth without too many major issues.

Incentivized

BMC was our legacy system before deploying ServiceNow. It's time had passed for us as it couldn't really keep up with our move to cloud and the number of services we were using. The cost kept getting higher, especially with all of the customization we had to do. Over the years, just got unwieldy. We still use Splunk for raw data and log analysis, but we upgraded to ServiceNow event management and the Loom system log analytics. We had Loom before ServiceNow bought them, but it's nice it's all on one platform for us. Splunk at times had so much info, we didn't know where to start, but ServiceNow gives us a great starting point.

A lot of products have natively inside their own dashboards and or their own logging repositories. And each one is difficult to learn or they're too complex or they're not verbose in the sense that they're not easy to mine the data that you're looking for. So that could be anything from the native logging that you find in other Cisco products. It's easier to use Splunk to draw the data that you're looking for as opposed to going to the individual's products themselves to get the logs that you're looking for.

Incentivized

Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome

• Saved 20% time than last year for customer issues management
• Estimated time of resolving issue increased
• Nearly 1000+ article got created on 1 year

Incentivized

• Splunk has allowed developers to diagnose production issues when access of control was taken away from them to be allowed to view items in production environments and I believe that is invaluable.
• At times some developers weren't super happy about using it, but it was more of the fact that they were used to having production access and not creating their splunk queries to get information.
• Going one place to view logs was very beneficial to have.

Incentivized