monoscope vs Splunk
A Splunk alternative that keeps the request and prices it per event
Splunk Observability Cloud bills APM per host, and logs live in Splunk Cloud Platform at a price you get from sales. monoscope keeps every request and response next to your logs, traces and metrics, at $1 per million events after the first 20M.
Side by side
What you get, and what it costs
 | SplunkObservability Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Request and response bodies, in and out | Every call, unsampled on paid plans | — |
| Breaking changes in third-party APIs | Caught in the stored responses | Not in public docs |
| AI sees the full request | Yes | AI Assistant and troubleshooting agent work from spans, logs and metrics |
| AI investigates the root cause | Built in, answers in Slack | AI SRE investigates; fix PRs are in alpha |
| Pricing |
|
|
| Open source and self-hosting | AGPL-3.0, free to self-host | Proprietary; Observability Cloud is SaaS |
| Data in your own bucket | Session replays in your S3 today, +$199/month | Expired logs archived to your bucket, no longer searchable by Splunk |
| Coverage | Logs, traces, metrics, errors and session replay | Infrastructure, APM, profiling, RUM, synthetics, database and network; logs through Splunk Cloud Platform |
Sources and assumptions
Checked against Splunk’s public pricing pages and docs in October 2026. List prices, annual billing where offered. — means we couldn’t confirm it from public docs. Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we’ll fix it.
- Observability Cloud per-host prices, billed annually (checked 2026-10-29): splunk.com/en_us/products/pricing/observability.html
- Splunk Cloud Platform ingest pricing, no public dollar price (checked 2026-10-29): splunk.com/en_us/products/pricing/ingest-pricing.html
- Session Replay is a licensed add-on: docs.splunk.com/observability/en/rum/rum-session-replay.html
- Traces are kept 8 days; extended retention covers traces you view: docs.splunk.com/observability/en/apm/apm-spans-traces/extended-trace-retention.html
- Splunk’s collector is a distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector: help.splunk.com/en/splunk-observability-cloud/manage-data/splunk-distribution-of-the-opentelemetry-collector/get-started-with-the-splunk-distribution-of-the-opentelemetry-collector
- AI Assistant in Observability Cloud: help.splunk.com/en/splunk-observability-cloud/splunk-ai-assistant/ai-assistant-in-observability-cloud
- AI SRE remediation with pull requests, alpha (2026-09-17): splunk.com/en_us/blog/observability/ai-sre-in-splunk-observability-cloud-can-remediate-incidents-with-claude-managed-agents.html
- Expired data to your own bucket (Dynamic Data Self-Storage): help.splunk.com/en/splunk-cloud-platform/administer/admin-manual/10.3.2512/manage-your-indexes-and-data-in-splunk-cloud-platform/store-expired-splunk-cloud-platform-data-in-your-private-archive
Which one fits your team
Choose monoscope if
- You want one price per event instead of per-host APM plus a separate log contract
- You need the request and response body behind a slow or failed call, including calls to third-party APIs
- You want open-source (AGPL) code you can self-host, with an EU region on our cloud
Choose Splunk if
- Your security team already runs Splunk for logs and SIEM, and observability rides on the same contract
- You depend on SPL searches, dashboards and apps your team has built over years
- You need Splunk's network and database monitoring alongside APM
Already on Splunk?
Run monoscope next to it for a week or two, compare which errors and API changes each one catches, then move your services over. An engineer from our team can help.
What it costs
What you’d pay at three volumes
Same workload on both: logs and spans only, about 2 kB each, kept 30 days. Splunk doesn’t publish a log ingest price, so we don’t guess one.
| Events a month | monoscope | Splunk |
|---|---|---|
| 20M | $29 | Log ingest: contact sales. APM: $60 per host |
| 100M | $109 | Log ingest: contact sales. APM: $60 per host |
| 1B | $1,009 | Log ingest: contact sales. APM: $60 per host |
List prices checked 29 October 2026, annual billing. Each Splunk APM host includes a trace volume allowance; you pay by host count, not by spans. monoscope: $29 a month includes 20M events, then $1 per million. Request and response bodies don’t add to the count.
What you keep
What Splunk doesn’t keep, and monoscope does
-
The request and response body
Splunk APM records spans with attributes. We couldn’t find body capture in its docs. monoscope’s SDKs keep headers, request body and response body on the span, and bodies don’t add to the price.
-
Calls to your suppliers
Outgoing calls to payment, shipping or auth APIs are kept with their bodies and linked to the incoming request that made them.
-
An AI that reads both
The AI SRE investigates with the failing request and response in front of it, answers in Slack and reviews pull requests before merge.
Move over
Move from Splunk in three steps
-
1
Add a monoscope exporter to your collector
Splunk’s collector is an OpenTelemetry Collector. Add an OTLP exporter for monoscope next to the Splunk one, so both receive the same traces and logs.
-
2
Add the SDK where you want bodies
OpenTelemetry records the URL and status, not the body. The monoscope SDK for your framework keeps request and response bodies once you switch body capture on, plus outgoing calls.
-
3
Compare, then switch off the old exporter
Run both for a week or two. When monoscope catches what you need, remove the Splunk exporter. An engineer from our team can help.
otel-collector.yaml
exporters:
otlp_grpc/monoscope:
endpoint: "otelcol.monoscope.tech:4317"
tls:
insecure: true
headers:
x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY
service:
pipelines:
traces:
# keep your current exporter in the list
exporters: [otlp_grpc/monoscope]
logs:
exporters: [otlp_grpc/monoscope]
