Dynatrace vs Splunk pricing, Observability Cloud cost and which is cheaper for uptime monitoring
Short answer: Splunk bills a flat rate per host, Dynatrace bills per gigabyte of host memory, so the answer is decided by how much RAM your servers carry. Splunk Observability Cloud APM comes in the App & Infra bundle at $60 per host a month billed annually. Dynatrace Full-Stack is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, which is $7.30 per GiB a month. They cross at 8.22 GiB of RAM per host. Below that Dynatrace is cheaper, above it Splunk is, and the gap widens fast: a 64 GiB database server is $467.20 on Dynatrace against $60 on Splunk. On plain uptime checks the two are built differently. Splunk includes synthetic uptime monitoring in every host bundle and publishes no per-check rate, while Dynatrace meters HTTP checks at $1.00 per 1,000 requests. Neither one checks faster than once a minute.
alertping ▸ check preview
simulated
▸ type a domain to watch a check and an alert play out
▸ simulation of 2 regions · US East · EU Central
▸ waiting…▌
queued
probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 2/2 regions (US East, EU Central). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 2/2 regions . First fail: EU Central.
Simulation, not a measurement of your site: this preview runs entirely in your browser and the latencies are generated from the domain you typed. Real checks on your monitors run from our US East and EU Central regions.
the short version
One charges by the machine, the other by the memory inside it
Most Dynatrace versus Splunk write-ups compare log analytics heritage against APM heritage, or argue about whose AI names root cause faster. Those differences are real. They are not what makes one renewal quote four times the other. The billing unit does that, and here the two vendors have picked units that behave in completely different ways as your fleet grows.
Splunk Observability Cloud prices per host, flat, in three bundles billed annually: Infrastructure from $15 per host a month, App & Infra from $60 and End-to-End from $75. APM is not sold on its own on the published card; it starts with App & Infra. A host is a host: a 2 GiB container node and a 512 GiB database server cost the same. Synthetic uptime monitoring is included in every bundle, API synthetics need App & Infra, and real user monitoring and browser synthetics need End-to-End. The only per-location synthetic price on the page is the AppDynamics browser add-on at $12 per test location a month.
Dynatrace prices per gigabyte of host memory. Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, summarized on its own rate card as $58 a month for an 8 GiB host. Infrastructure Monitoring is $0.04 per host-hour, a flat $29.20 a month whatever the machine. Synthetics are consumption units: $1.00 per 1,000 HTTP requests and $4.50 per 1,000 browser actions. Real user monitoring is $2.25 per 1,000 sessions, application security $13 a month per 8 GiB host. There are no seat fees anywhere in the Dynatrace rate card.
So the comparison collapses into one question about your hardware. Splunk's per-host price is a ceiling that never moves. Dynatrace's per-GiB price is a slope with no ceiling at all. Small machines favor Dynatrace, big machines favor Splunk, and everything below is the arithmetic behind that sentence, plus the thing neither vendor will sell you at any price.
All monthly figures on this page use a 730-hour month for hourly meters and 43,833 runs a month for a one-minute check, which is an average 30.44-day month. Prices are US list, billed annually, taken from each vendor's own published rate card.
read this first
Splunk sells you two different APM products, and they overlap
This is the part that catches buyers out, and you will not find it stated plainly on either vendor's site. Splunk now owns AppDynamics. Cisco acquired AppDynamics, then acquired Splunk, and the product is marketed as Splunk AppDynamics. The old appdynamics.com pricing URL 301-redirects to Splunk's observability pricing page. So when you ask Splunk for an APM quote, there are two answers on the same rate card, and they are billed on different axes. Our AppDynamics pricing breakdown per CPU core covers the APM side in full.
Splunk Observability Cloud APM comes in the App & Infra bundle at $60 per host a month. Splunk AppDynamics is priced per virtual CPU, from $6 a month on Infrastructure Edition to $33 on Premium and $50 on Enterprise. Both are Splunk. Both do application performance monitoring. On an 8 vCPU host, AppDynamics Premium is $264 a month and Observability Cloud App & Infra is $60 for the same machine. That is not a discount you negotiate, it is a different SKU, and which one an account team leads with depends on which part of the portfolio the conversation started in.
The overlap matters for one line item in particular. The only per-location browser synthetic price Splunk publishes, $12 per test location a month, is labeled on Splunk's own pricing page as an AppDynamics add-on. On the Observability Cloud side, browser synthetics come only with the End-to-End bundle at $75 per host. So the browser synthetics answer in this comparison is the same answer you get in AppDynamics vs Dynatrace, because it is literally the same meter. Ask for both SKUs in writing before you sign anything, because the two prices for the job you actually want can differ by more than four times.
rate cards side by side
Dynatrace vs Splunk pricing, meter by meter
Both vendors publish list prices, which is more than most of this category does. The rows are matched by job, not by product name, because the two catalogs are organized differently. AlertPing is in the third column for the one row where a flat plan is genuinely the cheaper answer, and left blank everywhere we do not compete.
| What you are buying | Dynatrace | Splunk Observability Cloud | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing axis | Host memory and consumption | Flat per host, in three bundles | Flat per plan |
| Full application monitoring | $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, $58/mo per 8 GiB host | APM in App & Infra, $60 per host/mo | Not offered |
| Infrastructure only | $0.04 per host-hour, $29.20/mo | $15 per host/mo | Not offered |
| Bundled editions | No bundles, per-meter only | Infrastructure $15, App & Infra $60, End-to-End $75 per host/mo | Flat plans, $49, $59 and $189/mo |
| Second APM product | None | Splunk AppDynamics, $6 to $50 per vCPU/mo | None |
| HTTP uptime checks | $1.00 per 1,000 synthetic requests | Included in every bundle, no per-check rate published | Included, unmetered |
| Browser synthetic checks | $4.50 per 1,000 synthetic actions | End-to-End bundle, or AppDynamics add-on at $12 per test location/mo | Not offered |
| Real user monitoring | $2.25 per 1,000 sessions | End-to-End bundle, $75 per host/mo | Not offered |
| Session replay | $4.50 per 1,000 sessions | Not separately listed | Not offered |
| Application security | $13/mo per 8 GiB host | Secure Application add-on, contact sales | Not offered |
| Log ingest | $0.20 per GiB, query $0.0035 per GiB scanned | Log Observer Connect, included in every bundle | Not offered |
| Fastest check interval | 1 minute | 1 minute | 60s on Starter, 30s from Team ($59/mo) |
| Seat fees | None | None published | None |
| SMS alerts | Via integration | Via integration | Included on every plan |
| Public status page | Not offered | Not offered | Included |
| Entry price | Consumption, no floor published | $15 per host/mo annually | $49/mo flat |
the break-even
The two meters cross at 8.22 GiB of RAM per host
This is the number that decides the invoice, and neither vendor will compute it for you. Dynatrace Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour. Over a 730-hour month that is $7.30 per gigabyte. Splunk Observability Cloud App & Infra, the cheapest bundle with APM, is $60 per host a month regardless of what is in the host. Divide $60 by $7.30 and you get 8.22 GiB.
Under 8.22 GiB of RAM per machine, Dynatrace Full-Stack costs less than Splunk APM. Over it, Splunk costs less, and because one side is flat and the other is a straight line through the origin, the gap does not level off. It compounds with every gigabyte you add.
| Host memory | Dynatrace Full-Stack | Splunk App & Infra | Dynatrace as a multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 GiB container node | $14.60/mo | $60.00/mo | 0.24x, Dynatrace wins |
| 4 GiB app server | $29.20/mo | $60.00/mo | 0.49x, Dynatrace wins |
| 8 GiB standard instance | $58.40/mo | $60.00/mo | 0.97x, Dynatrace wins narrowly |
| 8.22 GiB | $60.00/mo | $60.00/mo | 1.00x, they meet |
| 16 GiB | $116.80/mo | $60.00/mo | 1.95x |
| 32 GiB | $233.60/mo | $60.00/mo | 3.89x |
| 64 GiB database server | $467.20/mo | $60.00/mo | 7.79x |
| 128 GiB memory-optimized | $934.40/mo | $60.00/mo | 15.57x |
Read the bottom two rows before you shortlist. If your estate is memory-optimized database servers, Dynatrace Full-Stack is not marginally more expensive, it is roughly eight to sixteen times more expensive per machine, and the difference is arithmetic rather than negotiation. Twenty 32 GiB hosts is $4,672 a month on Dynatrace Full-Stack against $1,200 on Splunk App & Infra, a swing of $41,664 a year on identical hardware.
The comparison flips if you run compute-dense, low-memory workloads. Container fleets and stateless API nodes often carry 2 GiB or less per instance, and there Dynatrace Full-Stack is a quarter of the Splunk price while giving you deeper tracing than infrastructure monitoring alone. That is a real advantage and it is worth saying clearly, because most write-ups treat Dynatrace as simply the expensive option.
One caveat on the infrastructure tier, since it changes the shortlist for anyone who only wants host metrics. Dynatrace Infrastructure Monitoring is $0.04 per host-hour, a flat $29.20 a month, and the Splunk Infrastructure bundle starts at $15. Both are flat, so the ratio never moves: Splunk is 1.95 times cheaper on every host, forever. If host metrics are all you need, that row is the whole decision.
uptime and synthetics
On plain uptime checks Splunk bundles what Dynatrace meters
This is the part we know best. Splunk's pricing page no longer publishes a per-request rate for synthetic uptime checks. Synthetic Uptime Monitoring is listed as included in all three Observability Cloud bundles, with no per-check allowance and no overage rate published, so the price of a check is the host bundle it rides on, from $15 per host a month billed annually. Dynatrace sells HTTP synthetic requests at $1.00 per 1,000, which is $0.001 a request, with the same one-minute floor. The Dynatrace documentation is precise about the counting: one request is consumed each time a monitor runs, for each HTTP request executed, at each location, so a three-location check burns three units per minute.
| Check interval | Runs a month | Splunk uptime checks | Dynatrace HTTP monitor | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every 30 seconds | Not offered by either | Not available | Not available | Team plan, $59/mo |
| Every minute, 1 location | 43,833 | In host bundle | $43.83 | Included |
| Every minute, 3 locations | 131,499 | In host bundle | $131.50 | Included |
| Every 5 minutes, 1 location | 8,767 | In host bundle | $8.77 | Included |
| Every 15 minutes, 1 location | 2,922 | In host bundle | $2.92 | Included |
| 10 monitors, 1 minute, 3 locations | 1,314,990 | In host bundle | $1,314.99 | Included |
We should be straight about what that column means, because it can argue against us. If you already pay Splunk for hosts, extra uptime checks may add nothing visible to your invoice, and for raw check volume alone that is hard to beat. Because no allowance is published, get the number of checks and locations your bundle covers in writing before you count on it.
The caveat is what the bundle costs and what it does not include. Synthetic uptime monitoring is part of an Observability Cloud bundle, not a standalone product, so the real floor is the platform underneath it: $15 per host a month at minimum, billed annually, before the first check runs. The checks also buy you a check and a graph. Escalation policies, SMS to the person on call, a public status page your support team can point customers at, and confirmation from a second and third region before anyone gets woken up are all somewhere else in the stack. And the interval floor is one minute at any price.
Browser synthetics run the other way, and here Splunk is the flat one. The Splunk AppDynamics browser synthetics add-on is $12 per test location a month, unchanged whether the script runs hourly or every minute. (On Observability Cloud, browser checks come with the End-to-End bundle at $75 per host.) Dynatrace charges $4.50 per 1,000 synthetic actions, where every click, navigation and assertion counts as one action. A single-action script at one-minute frequency is 43,833 actions, which is $197.25 a month from one location, and a realistic five-step checkout journey is $986.24. Divide $12 by $0.0045 and the crossover is 2,667 actions a month: with a one-action script Dynatrace is cheaper only below one run every 16.4 minutes, and with a five-action script only below one run every 82 minutes. Almost nobody monitors a checkout that rarely.
| Browser check interval | Dynatrace, 1-action script | Dynatrace, 5-action script | Splunk AppDynamics, 1 test location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every minute | $197.25 | $986.24 | $12.00 |
| Every 5 minutes | $39.45 | $197.26 | $12.00 |
| Every 15 minutes | $13.15 | $65.74 | $12.00 |
| Every hour | $3.29 | $16.45 | $12.00 |
Real user monitoring is billed on different axes too. Splunk no longer publishes a per-session rate: RUM comes with the End-to-End bundle at $75 per host a month, $15 a host more than App & Infra. Dynatrace meters it at $2.25 per 1,000 sessions, so 250,000 sessions a month is $562.50 there. High traffic on few hosts favors the Splunk bundle, low traffic on many hosts favors the Dynatrace meter, and since Splunk publishes no session allowance, confirm it before you rely on that. Dynatrace also lists session replay as a separate $4.50 per 1,000 line, which Splunk does not list publicly, so if replay is a requirement the comparison is no longer like for like.
honest scorecard
Where each one actually wins
Dynatrace wins on
- Small, memory-light hosts. Under 8.22 GiB per machine, Full-Stack costs less than Splunk APM and gives deeper tracing than an infrastructure tier.
- Container and stateless fleets, where per-GiB billing is genuinely cheap and a 2 GiB node is $14.60 a month.
- A single coherent rate card. Every meter is published, there is one APM product rather than two overlapping ones, and no seat fees exist at all.
- OneAgent automatic topology discovery and Davis root cause, which name the failing component instead of handing you dashboards to correlate.
- Session replay as a published line item at $4.50 per 1,000 sessions.
Splunk wins on
- Large hosts, decisively. Flat $60 per host for App & Infra with APM against $467.20 for a 64 GiB server on Dynatrace Full-Stack.
- Infrastructure monitoring at any size: $15 a host against $29.20, a fixed 1.95 times gap.
- Uptime checks included in every host bundle rather than metered per request, which is hard to beat if you already pay for the hosts.
- Browser synthetics at real frequencies, via the AppDynamics add-on at a flat $12 per location against $197.25 for the same one-minute check.
- Real user monitoring on high-traffic sites, bundled per host in End-to-End rather than metered per session.
- Log analytics heritage, if you already run Splunk Enterprise and want Log Observer Connect against existing indexes.
Where we fit
- We replace neither platform. AlertPing has no APM, no tracing, no RUM, no log analytics and no server agent.
- We check every 30 seconds on the Team plan and up. Both of these floor at one minute at any price, and no contract changes that.
- Flat pricing with no hosts, no gigabytes and no metering: $49 a month for 20 monitors at 60-second checks, $59 for 30-second checks.
- SMS on every plan and a public status page included, neither of which is an observability platform feature.
- Alerting from outside your cloud account, which matters on the day the account itself is the outage.
buyer scenarios
Pick by your hardware, not by the demo
- Memory-heavy database estate. Splunk, and it is not close. Every 64 GiB server is $60 against $467.20. Ask specifically for the Observability Cloud App & Infra bundle rather than an AppDynamics per-vCPU quote.
- Kubernetes and container fleets. Dynatrace. Nodes carrying 2 to 4 GiB bill at $14.60 to $29.20 against a flat $60, and OneAgent discovery handles churn well.
- Host metrics only, no tracing. The Splunk Infrastructure bundle at $15 a host. The 1.95 times gap against Dynatrace never narrows at any scale.
- Heavy browser journey testing. Splunk, on the flat $12 per location rate, which is the AppDynamics meter. At one-minute frequency Dynatrace is sixteen times more for a single-action script.
- A handful of low-frequency browser scripts. Dynatrace, if you genuinely run them less than every 16 minutes. Below 2,667 actions a month the metered rate is cheaper.
- You only need to know whether the site is up. Neither. Both are platforms priced for tracing, and the entry cost is a host fee before the first check. A flat uptime plan does that job from $49 a month, at 30-second resolution from $59.
- You already run one of them and downtime still surprised you. Keep the platform and add an external check. The gap is usually detection speed and who gets woken up, not visibility.
plainly
What AlertPing does not do
We are the third option on this page, not the replacement for either. If any of the following is on your requirements list, buy Dynatrace or Splunk and treat us as the external check that sits alongside them.
- No distributed tracing, no code-level profiling, no service maps.
- No real user monitoring and no session replay.
- No log ingestion, indexing or querying.
- No server agent, so no CPU, memory or disk metrics from inside the host.
- No scripted multi-step browser journeys. We check endpoints, status codes, keywords and JSON paths, not checkout flows.
- No application security or vulnerability analytics.
- No free plan, and no 30-second checks on our entry tier either. Starter is $49 a month at 60-second checks; 30-second checks start at $59.
What we do is narrow on purpose: check as often as every 30 seconds from two regions, confirm the failure from a second region before alerting, and reach a human by SMS, email, Slack or webhook. If you want that alongside your platform, the case for pairing an uptime tool with APM lays out when a second tool is worth it and when it plainly is not.
questions
Dynatrace vs Splunk, answered
Is Dynatrace or Splunk better?
It depends on host memory, not on quality. Splunk charges a flat $60 per host for its App & Infra bundle with APM and Dynatrace $7.30 per GiB of RAM, so they cross at 8.22 GiB. Memory-heavy fleets are far cheaper on Splunk, container and low-memory fleets cheaper on Dynatrace. Dynatrace has the cleaner single rate card; Splunk bundles uptime checks into every host fee and has cheaper infrastructure monitoring.
Which is cheaper in Dynatrace vs Splunk cost?
Splunk, for most real fleets. Dynatrace Full-Stack is $58 a month for an 8 GiB host and rises with memory, reaching $467.20 on a 64 GiB server. Splunk Observability Cloud App & Infra, which includes APM, is a flat $60 per host at any size. Dynatrace is only cheaper below 8.22 GiB of RAM per machine, which in practice means containers and small instances.
How much does Splunk Observability Cloud cost?
Splunk sells three per-host bundles billed annually: Infrastructure from $15 a month, App & Infra from $60 (the cheapest with APM) and End-to-End from $75. Synthetic uptime monitoring is included in all three, API synthetics need App & Infra, and RUM and browser synthetics need End-to-End. The AppDynamics browser synthetics add-on is $12 per test location a month.
Is Splunk the same company as AppDynamics?
Yes. Cisco acquired AppDynamics and then Splunk, and the product is now sold as Splunk AppDynamics. The old appdynamics.com pricing URL 301-redirects to Splunk observability pricing. That means Splunk offers two APM products on one rate card: Observability Cloud APM per host, and AppDynamics per virtual CPU.
Which is cheaper for uptime monitoring, Dynatrace or Splunk?
It depends on whether you already pay for hosts. Splunk includes synthetic uptime monitoring in every host bundle, from $15 per host a month billed annually, and publishes no per-check rate or allowance. Dynatrace meters HTTP checks at $1.00 per 1,000 requests, so a one-minute check is $43.83 a month from one location and $131.50 from three. Both floor at a one-minute interval.
Does Dynatrace or Splunk do 30-second checks?
Neither does. Dynatrace publishes 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minute synthetic frequencies, and Splunk AppDynamics documentation gives one minute as the minimum for API monitoring. Datadog and New Relic share the same floor. One minute is the category limit and no contract changes it.
Which is cheaper for browser synthetic monitoring?
Splunk, at any realistic frequency, through the AppDynamics browser synthetics add-on at a flat $12 per test location a month. Dynatrace charges $0.0045 per synthetic action, so a single-action script running every minute is $197.25 and a five-step checkout journey is $986.24. Dynatrace only becomes cheaper below roughly one run every 16 minutes.
How do Dynatrace, Splunk and Datadog compare?
All three are full observability platforms flooring at one-minute checks. They differ on billing axis: Dynatrace on host memory, Splunk on flat per-host bundles, Datadog on a per-product mix with per-run synthetics. Splunk is the cheapest of the three for large hosts, and it includes uptime checks in every host bundle.
Can I use Dynatrace just for uptime monitoring?
Technically yes with HTTP monitors, but the economics are poor. One one-minute check from a single location is $43.83 a month and three locations is $131.50, for a slower interval than a $49 flat plan. Dynatrace earns its price on tracing and root cause, not on pinging a URL.
Does Splunk Observability Cloud charge per user?
No seat price is published. Splunk Observability Cloud is priced per host, and Dynatrace has no seat licensing at all. Neither vendor charges you to put more engineers in the console, which is a meaningful difference from New Relic, where full platform users are billed individually.
keep reading
Related comparisons
- How much Splunk Observability Cloud costs, the full rate card with three worked bills.
- Splunk vs New Relic pricing, per host against per seat, and the 5.82 hosts per engineer break-even.
- AppDynamics vs Dynatrace pricing, the other half of the Splunk portfolio and the 4.52 GiB per vCPU break-even.
- Datadog vs Dynatrace pricing, including the per-action versus per-run browser billing flip.
- New Relic vs Dynatrace pricing, seat billing against host billing.
- Datadog vs New Relic synthetics pricing.
- Datadog vs Splunk pricing, APM, logs and autoscaling costed per host.
- How much Dynatrace costs, the whole consumption rate card.
- Best uptime monitoring tools, the full roundup with pricing.
- Uptime monitoring pricing compared across fifteen vendors.
- API monitoring with assertions, our own status code, keyword and JSON path checks.
how we page you
Two regions have to agree
A single failed probe never wakes anybody. A second region, US East or EU Central, re-checks first, so a hiccup on one route is not a 3am phone call.
what a plan covers
SMS is in the price, not in credits
Email, Slack and webhook alerts are unlimited on every plan, SMS comes with a monthly allowance, and each plan hosts status pages. No credit packs, no per-message fee, no per-monitor math.
how setup works
One URL, no agent to install
Paste the address, choose where alerts go, and the first check runs from both regions. No agent, no config file, nothing to deploy on your side.
Detection speed neither platform sells
Checks confirmed from a second region, SMS and a status page on every plan, flat from $49 a month with no hosts, no gigabytes and no metering. 30-second checks from $59.