DevOps 2021: The best Log Analytics Tools, ELK vs Splunk ! Which one should you choose ?

Splunk vs. ELK, which one to choose !

Today, managing and handling logs always play an essential role in any company’s security framework. Suppose you do not have a well-strategized solution to handle logs. In that case, you may face security issues or data breaches as you do not have the visibility of events going on within your organization and create critical endpoints for vulnerability. If you are an IT person, then you must have heard of and worked with Splunk and Elastic search daily.

There are several tools available in the market that help process and store machine data efficiently, but what tool will you choose? Well, Splunk and ElasticSearch both tools share the same goal that is to handle log management problems and solve them seamlessly. These two tools are commonly used for operational data analytics. But how can you choose the right tool that suits your business requirement?

As the data grows with time, irrespective of the size of the business, you should be able to handle the expanded log data. Splunk and ELK offer a scalable approach that allows you to collect and index the log files and a search interface to interact with the data. Both the tools will enable you to secure the collected data to create visualization reports for end-users to track the logs being created and managed.

However, both Splunk and ELK are designed for the same purpose, but their differences cannot be ignored if you have to choose one of them. There is always a debate about which one to choose and why. So we will discuss Splunk, ELK and what are their differences to get to a conclusion.

What is Splunk?

Splunk was introduced in 2003 and is a paid tool. It helps in analyzing structures as well as semi-structured data. Splunk is also known as the “Google for log files.” Splunk is a tool that processes every type of log being generated within an organization. It is a software platform that search, visualize, monitor, and analyze the data generated by the machine in real-time. Splunk refines the data to create powerful insights into your log data with charts, alerts, graphs, etc.

It is one of the popular DevOps tools used in the market. Its benefits are not only limited to the log management and analysis solution but also ensures security and management events. Splunk performs security analysis and assessment of the gathered logs to get metrics about the organization’s performance. Splunk uses SPL (search processing language) to serve and execute queries on large and complex data sets.

Splunk comes with three major components- Forwarder, Indexer, and Search head. Forwarder helps in pushing the data to the remote indexer. Then indexer responds to the search queries. Search head is a front-end web user interface where all the three components are combined for better visibility.

Splunk has the below features.

• It helps in accelerating the development and testing of applications.
• It helps you to create real-time data applications.
• It helps you to generate ROI faster.
• It comes with search, optimization, and visualization capability for every type of user.

What is ELK (Elastic Stack)?

ELK is an acronym for ElasticSearch, Logstash, and Kibana, all developed, managed, and maintained by Elastic company. ELK is an open-source database tool that is easy to deploy and handle. You can use this tool for analytics and searching your logs. You can consider it as a NoSQL database that stores the unstructured data in a document format. ELK consists of various software tools that allow you to search logs, route data, process data, and visualize data. The three components are-

• ElasticSearch- it is a NoSQL database that uses the Lucene search engine.
• Logstash- it works as a transportation pipeline that transports data to the ElasticSerach engine.
• Kibana- it is a dashboard that provides data visualizations working on the top of ElaticSearch.

ELK stack allows the users to take data from various sources in any format available and perform actions on the data in real-time. It offers you centralized logging that helps you to analyze the problems within your application.

Below are some features of the ELK stack.

• It is an open-source search server that is written in Java.
• You can index any heterogeneous data.
• It allows a full-text and real-time search.
• It comes with a REST API web-interface with JSON output.
• It comes with multi-language and geolocation support.
• It helps in performing filtering and querying your data for better insights into your infrastructure.
• It allows you to scale horizontally and vertically.

Difference between Splunk and ELK

Below are the differences that allow you to choose one of them as per your business requirement.

Splunk	ELK
It is a commercial tool.	It is an open-source tool.
It comes with Solaris portability.	It does not support Solaris portability due to Kibana.
It allows you to perform an accurate and faster process.	It comes with limited processing speed.
It is a proprietary tool with both on-premise and cloud solutions.	It is a complete technology stack with ElasticSearch, Logstash, and Kibana.
It is a complete data management package.	You can only perform actions on ELK after it’s set up.
It can be easily integrated with other tools.	It cannot be integrated with other tools.
It uses Apache Lucene as a search engine.	It uses custom MapReduce as a search engine.
It has a moderate learning curve.	It has a flat learning curve.
Splunk’s dashboard comes with more features as compared to ELK.	ELK’s user management feature is more challenging.

Conclusion

From above discussion it is clear that both Splunk’s and ELK’s primary goal is to monitor, analyze, aggregate, and visualize machine log files. Also the processing power and functionality between Splunk and ELK are more or less similar. 

So how do we decide which one to choose over other?

So that typically depends on how much control you want and effort you’re willing to put in, you’ll lean more towards one type or another. Other factors being the cost, extensibility, and extra features of the different tools. So finally, the short answer to whether to implement ELK or Splunk is based on which product best fits the company’s organizational goals and aligns with your existing Devops toolchain.