No, Splunk is not an APM tool. It is a log analysis tool. Assume you have 200 servers in your production environment, Splunk can help you analyze the log on each of those 200 servers from a single web based interface. You can get various statistics and generate graphs for a specific error code or error message. You can generate graphs about Get and Post requests. You can get statistics about most accessed url from web access logs. Splunk’s strength is not application performance monitoring but analysis and reporting.
Several of our clients brought in Splunk, they were under the assumption that Splunk is another powerful APM tool. Tools like Appdynamics and Dynatrace have plugins to integerate with Splunk. With help of these plugins data from Appdynamics or Dynatrace can be fed to Splunk. Splunk has good capabilities of handling Big Data.
Splunk provides Synthetic Monitoring and client side Real User Monitoring capabilities using add ons, those are not the core features of Splunk. Further Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring capabilities of Splunk are very basic and not as good as that of HP or Dynatrace or Appdynamics. For infrastructure monitoring it requires more add ons, unlike Sitescope which can monitor health of your entire infrastructure without installing any agent on devices. Splunk provides no application deep dive capabilties or Real User Monitoring through port mirroring.
Thank You very Much on the above explaination. It was very much useful.
Could you please provide us some more knowledge on SPLUNK with any example.