vSphere vs Splunk Enterprise: Which is a better fit?

Evan: Hi, my name is Evan. I'm a cloud engineer. I'm reviewing VMware vSphere, I would rate it a five out of five. And for more reviews like this click below. So before VMware vSphere, we used a lot of Redhat OpenStack, and OpenStack was a lot more difficult to manage because professional support isn't widely available. Whereas, VMware support is just a phone call away. So we chose VMware vSphere for its wide community support. The licensing cost was good when we purchased multiple products from VMware. There's a great monitoring capability. There's just the ability to see your entire environment from a single pane of glass. And it was cost-effective for us. It was very easy to get started with VMware vSphere. There's a number of labs available directly from VMware, so if you don't really understand the product there's a lot of hands-on labs that will teach you the product. So I found it very easy. If I were to recommend VMware vSphere to someone looking to purchase the product, I would say that they should consider all of the available products from VMware, other than just vSphere. There's a number of monitoring, logging and visibility applications that you can purchase. It could be expensive to purchase VMware vSphere on its own but if you look at the total package, you might see that there's a tremendous amount of value.

Joe: Hi, this is Joe. I'm a software engineer. I give Splunk Enterprise five out of five. And for more reviews, click below. Before Splunk Enterprise, we had manual tools. We were using command line tools, like Grab, Sed, and ARK, and whatever kind of homegrown scripting we could come up with. And it was not really working for us very well. We had gigabytes of log files and it was difficult to find what we needed to. There was no way to do an index search. It was slow, cumbersome, and it really was limited for the type of data that we had. We chose Splunk Enterprise because a related project was having great success with it, and they had a similar dataset that we were going to be using so they strongly recommended that we use it. And they were correct. We were able to develop our own searches, our own dashboards, and for the type of data we had, Splunk worked beautifully and it came up with everything that we needed. So it was my responsibility to come up with Splunk Enterprise and get everything up and running, and I didn't have any background in data analysis or writing searches or queries or dealing with data ingestion. So what we did was I went to training from the Splunk University in California, and I also was able to use online videos that Splunk had available for free. And after doing all of that, I went back to the office and I was able to install Splunk. I was able to get the data ingested and then write some dashboards and searches and queries. And from that, quite a few visualizations were available to us. And so I took that to the team. I showed off what we could learn from the data we had. They had a lot of comments, and I made quite a few iterations through the system. All of that was quite easy to do and it really did not take very long at all, especially from someone that didn't have a background in doing this before. So we were quite pleased with it. Well, if you're new to the world of big data and data ingestion and visualizations, I would definitely recommend watching the videos that Splunk has available that can teach you how to use the software. I would also recommend their training courses were very helpful and they're great for beginners, and they also have advanced courses if you want to continue onward. And I would recommend using the internet. There's a lot of blogs out there. There's a lot of news articles you can read. There's a lot of tutorials, a lot of help in video form and in written form. So the great thing about Splunk is it's so popular and there is just a lot of information out there available to you. You don't have to struggle through things on your own.