Splunk vs Grafana Cloud

Predictable costs. 
Portable telemetry. Faster fixes.

Choose Grafana Cloud to take control of your logging costs and use your metrics, logs, traces, and profiles together for faster AI-powered incident resolution.

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スタートアップからフォーチュン500まで、誰からも信頼されています。

Looking for the Splunk plugin to visualize and alert on Splunk data within Grafana?

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Why teams choose Grafana Cloud over Splunk

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform and a cost-effective alternative to Splunk for log management and AI-powered full-stack observability. Unlike Splunk's ingest-based pricing and proprietary SPL query language, Grafana Cloud uses consumption-based pricing with Adaptive Telemetry — which can cut costs by 50% or more — built on open standards including OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

Optimize costs by keeping only the telemetry worth your attention

Rather than paying security prices for observability logs, save 50% or more on telemetry cost by intelligently aggregating and sampling metrics, logs, traces, and profiles.

“We make heavy use of Adaptive Metrics and Adaptive Logs across the board. We've seen that drive our costs significantly down, which is a big thing when it comes to our customers.”
Owen Bower Adams
Head of Platform Engineering
Learn more about Adaptive Telemetry

Avoid lock-in with native OTel telemetry from collection to query

Rather than converting OTel into a proprietary format, future-proof your observability strategy with a platform natively built on open source software and open standards like Open Telemetry and Prometheus, from collection to query.

“The reason we chose Grafana Labs is because they align with our strategy — they natively support OpenTelemetry, and we want to work with somebody who built a product born in the cloud, for the cloud.”
Murugesan Ramaiah
Solutions Architect
Read success story

Use metrics, logs, traces, and profiles together seamlessly

Rather than switching between split Logs and Observability offerings, use all of your telemetry together to save your team time during incidents.

“We can go all the way down and see the exact SQL calls that we call into the database… It’s more data than we ever had… and it makes it extremely simple to find exactly how and when something breaks.”
Zachary Sistrunk
Software Developer III
Read success story

See and act on all your data without migrating it

Rather than choosing between a costly migration and gaps in your visibility, act on all your signals in one place by connecting directly to hundreds of data sources without migrating. 

Connect to your Splunk data directly from Grafana first, test and compare dashboards, and then migrate agents for a safe cutover.

“It's not only about taking the integration path because with Grafana, you can use integrations for different products in that Big Tent, but you are also able to use more than 100 data sources inside Grafana Cloud. Open your minds and think about what could we do with all the information stored in those data sources?”
Jan Ove Steppat
Infrastructure Architect Container/Observability
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Comparing Grafana Cloud vs. Splunk

Capabilities
 Grafana Cloud Splunk
Ideal use case
Grafana Cloud
Improving the performance and reliability of apps and infrastructure in a complex, distributed system.
Splunk
Complex log analytics dealing with large amounts of data over long time ranges (days, months), like security investigation or analyzing business transaction data.
Optimize your observability costs
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud Adaptive telemetry automatically identifies unused metrics, labels, and specific patterns for sampling logs, traces, and profiles, to keep only telemetry worth your attention. This can save 50%+ on telemetry cost.
Learn more
Splunk
Billing is primarily based on data ingest volume, which can lead to high and unpredictable costs as telemetry grows. Lacks automatic features to proactively optimize data volume.
Avoid lock-in with OpenTelemetry
Grafana Cloud
Natively supports OpenTelemetry (OTLP) and open source collectors, formats, and query languages, ensuring pipelines and tooling remain portable and vendor-agnostic.
Learn more
Splunk
While Splunk can accept OTel data, querying and retention within the core platform still rely on a proprietary agent, format, and the Search Processing Language (SPL).
Resolve incidents across telemetry signals
Grafana Cloud
Get a cohesive, unified view of the three pillars (metrics, logs, and traces) in a single platform, eliminating context-switching.
Splunk
Offers comprehensive observability, but often requires stitching together components from a suite of products, which can lead to tool sprawl.
Explore, visualize, and alert on your data
Grafana Cloud
Powerful and flexible operational dashboards, with a large library of visualization options.
Learn more
Splunk
Requires data migration and proficiency in the proprietary Search Processing Language (SPL) for all querying, dashboard creation, and alerting.
See and act on data from across your organization
Grafana Cloud
Connect to 150+ data sources (databases, monitoring tools, workflow and SaaS tools) and correlate signals without migrating data
Learn more
Splunk
Large app ecosystem, but optimized for data ingested into the Splunk platform, increasing costs and lock-in.
Use AI to onboard and to predict, detect, and resolve issues faster
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Assistant and Investigations helps users onboard quickly, explore data without writing queries, generate entire dashboards, investigate incidents and even submit code fixes from within Grafana.
Learn more
Splunk
Use the Splunk Assistant to learn SPL and use AIOps features for anomaly detection and field value prediction.

Grafana Labs: オブザーバビリティプラットフォームのための2025年Gartner® Magic Quadrant™でのリーダー

ガートナーは、実行能力とビジョンの完全性に基づいて20社のベンダーを評価し、Grafana Labsはビジョンの完全性で最も遠くに位置付けられました。

続きを読む
Graph showing Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms.

Gartner®、オブザーバビリティプラットフォーム向けのマジック・クアドラント™、著：Gregg Siegfried、Matt Crossley、Padraig Byrne、Andre Bridges、Martin Caren、2025年7月7日

ガートナーおよびマジック・クアドラントは、Gartner, Inc.および/またはその関連会社の商標です。

ガートナーは、その出版物に描かれている企業、ベンダー、製品、サービスを支持せず、また、最高評価またはその他の指定を受けたベンダーのみを選択するよう技術ユーザーに助言することはありません。ガートナーの出版物は、ガートナーのビジネスとテクノロジーのインサイト組織の意見で構成されており、事実の陳述として解釈すべきではありません。ガートナーは、この出版物に関していかなる保証も否認します。商品性または特定の目的への適合性に関するいかなる保証も含め、明示または暗示のいかなる保証も否認します。

このグラフィックは、ガートナー社によってより大きな調査文書の一部として発表されたものであり、文書全体の文脈で評価されるべきです。ガートナーの文書は、Grafana Labsにリクエストすると入手できます。

The 4-phase migration plan

Whether you’re trying to cut costs, simplify your stack, or just get more out of your telemetry, Grafana Cloud can help.

Scope & identify

  • Align on a migration timeline

  • Set and agree on key outcomes

  • Identify potential blockers early 

  • Build open communication channels

Define & design

  • Define observability requirements

  • Catalogue existing observability assets 

  • Develop a migration blueprint

  • Design Grafana best practices for your organization

Connect & migrate

  • Migrate telemetry sources, dashboards, alerts, and workflows

  • Leverage Grafana built-in features

  • Document observability workflows

  • Host Grafana training and workshops

Launch

  • Cutover production workloads

  • Iterate on production rollout

  • Align organization with Grafana Center of Excellence

  • Continue to train and run workshops for your teams

Talk to a migration specialist

Ready to try Grafana?

Whether you’re trying to cut costs, simplify your stack, or just get more out of your telemetry, Grafana Cloud can help.

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