But, and this is not meant as criticism or insult as I have no idea how Splunk works, it is just based on other comments; do you know what license your company has with them? It appears that if you are paying them millions, it scales fine, otherwise, it does not?

> I have no idea how Splunk works Cool

> It appears that if you are paying them millions, it scales fine

yes, if you pay someone for product and services, you get them. If you don't, you don't

It's difficult to control data ingress so you end up in debt and on repayment plans. Which are expensive.

That makes sense, so looking at what people ingress, they pay afterwards or just really huge plans upfront? Or a mix?

Well usually you have to overpurchase up front and they sell you a 3 year lock in to make it affordable capital cost. Then when you eek over it temporarily, the sales guy calls you up within 10 nanoseconds to bill you for more.

I was getting 2-4 calls a week.

It was so fucking annoying and expensive ($1.2M spend each cycle) we shitcanned the entire platform.

First thing they hear of this is when our ingress rate drops to zero and they phone us up to ask what is happening. Then we don't go to the numerous catch up and renewal meetings and calls. Then we stop answering the phone.

Had a similar experience with them, they are truly the worst. We wasted a bunch of time trying to figure out how the ingestion volume could be so high and then realized that 99% of it was from the ridiculous default settings of their universal collector agent which was dumping detailed system stats every few seconds-- all to drive up usage so they can harass you about spending more money on their awful product. I did the renewal call with them just to basically tell them how outrageous their company is.

Yeah, because that is what I meant. A lot of services are useable without paying through the nose, this one apparently not, but thanks for the excellent input.

I'm certainly not a Splunk expert and I'm CERTAINLY have no insight into the nature of our financial arrangement with them, but yeah it's expensive.

I think there's not much of a useful "flat rate" tier; you pay based on usage. People can accidentally spin up a ton of EC2 instances and get a huge surprise AWS bill, too. And yeah our logging needs are high and monotonically increasing but they're also relatively predictable at our scale.

It ALSO turns out though that Splunk is really really good at their job and matching their expertise would require tons of engineering effort and it's not like the disk space alone is THAT cheap if you want it to be searchable.