While many SPM Performance Monitoring users quickly see the benefits of SPM and adopt it in their organizations for monitoring — not just for Elasticsearch, but for their complete application stack — some Elasticsearch users evaluate SPM and compare it to Marvel from Elasticsearch. We’ve been asked about SPM vs. Marvel enough times that we decided to put together this focused comparison to show some of the key differences and help individuals and organizations pick the right tool for their needs.
Marvel is a relatively young product that provides a detailed visualization of Elasticsearch metrics in a Kibana-based UI. It installs as an Elasticsearch plug-in and includes ‘Sense’ (a developer console), plus a replay functionality for shard allocation history.