Get the most from your time series database – InfluxDB performs up to 25x better than Splunk

In this technical paper, we’ll compare the performance and features of InfluxDB, v1.7.7 and Splunk, v7.3.0 for common time series workloads, specifically looking at the rates of data ingestion, on-disk data compression, and query performance. This data should prove valuable to developers and architects evaluating the suitability of these technologies for their use case; specifically, the time series data management use cases involving building DevOps monitoring (infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring, cloud monitoring), IoT monitoring, and real-time analytics applications.

Splunk is a log management solution used for application management, security, and compliance, as well as business and web analytics. Its core offering collects and analyzes high volumes of machine-generated data (also known as logs). It uses a standard API to connect directly to applications and devices and can be used for searching, analyzing and visualizing machine-generated data including events, metrics and logs gathered from websites, applications, sensors and devices, etc.

InfluxDB is an open source time series database written in Go. At its core is a custom-built storage engine called the Time-Structured Merge Tree (TSM), which is optimized for time series data. Controlled by a custom SQL-like query language named InfluxQL, InfluxDB provides out-of-the-box support for mathematical and statistical functions across time ranges and is perfect for custom monitoring and metrics collection, real-time analytics, plus IoT and sensor data workloads.

Our goal with this benchmarking test was to create a consistent, up-to-date comparison that reflects the latest developments in both InfluxDB and Splunk. Periodically, we’ll re-run these benchmarks and update this document with our findings. All of the code for these benchmarks is available on GitHub. Feel free to open up issues or pull requests on that repository or if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.