Splunk is fantastically expensive: What are the alternatives?
- by samsmith
This has been discussed, but it has been several months, so it may be time to revisit it:
Earlier discussion RE Splunk alternatives
For the record, Splunk rocks. But the pricing is simply beyond what we can consider (When I spoke with Splunk today, the cost for a system to index 5gb/day of data is over $30,000.)
That is more than we spend on SQL Server (by a large multiple), more than we spend on a rack of servers (by a multiple), etc. etc.
The splunk sales team is correct (that for $30K we get more value and functionality than if we spend the same building our own system), but it doesn't matter. The splunk cost is simply too high (by a multiple).
Soooooo, we are looking around!
Is anyone out there building a splunk like system?
Our basic need:
Able to listen for syslog messages on multiple udp ports
Able to index the incoming data in an async way
Some kind of search engine
Some kind of UI
An API to the search engine (to embed in our console)
We currently need to index 3-5gb/day, but need to be able to scale to 10gb/day or more. We do not need a lot of history (30 days is fine).
We use Windows 2008 and 2003 servers.
Thanks for your thoughts!
