We use it for security monitoring and application monitoring.
Sr Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Reduces troubleshooting time and improves customer experience
Pros and Cons
- "It has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment, which is pretty important for us. About 80% of our infrastructure is on AWS."
- "They can offer more self-service capability to their customers. Currently, most of the things happen behind the Splunk Cloud Platform. As a customer, I do not have an opportunity to see my platform. If they can offer more self-service to see the health of my endpoints and stack, it would be appreciated."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
We monitor multiple cloud environments. We monitor AWS and Oracle Cloud. It is easy to get all the data into Splunk from our AWS and Oracle Cloud. The integration is comparatively easy when it comes to on-prem versus Splunk Cloud.
It has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment, which is pretty important for us. About 80% of our infrastructure is on AWS. It is pretty important for our digital resiliency to monitor our AWS and Oracle Cloud platforms end to end.
It definitely reduces our mean time to resolve, but I am not sure exactly how much time it has reduced because as a Splunk Cloud customer, we provide our platform to our application teams.
What is most valuable?
We have Splunk Enterprise Security and our regular Splunk Enterprise. We use Splunk Enterprise Security for monitoring all our security use cases and our regular Splunk Enterprise for application monitoring. We have our own custom digital apps that we monitor on the enterprise cloud, and all our enterprise security monitoring happens on the Splunk Enterprise Security app. There are so many custom applications that we currently support.
We do digital transaction monitoring, so when a customer sends some money to a different customer, we monitor the end-to-end transaction of that customer when it happens on the digital platform. It is pretty important for our L1 and L2 teams to monitor that end-to-end transaction.
With Splunk in place, we can identify the bottlenecks where transactions are getting held and immediately take necessary actions to release the transaction and reach the customer. That improves the transaction time frame. There is improvement in terms of how many analysts are monitoring how many transactions and how fast transactions are happening from end to end. It improves our performance and customer experience. It is also easy to monitor end to end transactions.
What needs improvement?
They can offer more self-service capability to their customers. Currently, most of the things happen behind the Splunk Cloud Platform. As a customer, I do not have an opportunity to see my platform. If they can offer more self-service to see the health of my endpoints and stack, it would be appreciated.
Their support also needs improvement. I have had issues with the support team. When I run into issues, it is always hard to get hold of them and get things done with the support team. Other than that, product-wise, it is very good.
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Cloud Platform
October 2024
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For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for more than four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Its stability is 99.5%, but I have had pretty bad incidents in the last couple of years. Last month, we had an outage for the whole day. Support-wise, I am not happy.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In typical cloud infrastructure, you can add your EC2 on demand based on the load of your customers, but with the Splunk Cloud, that is not the case. They assign a fixed number of searches and indexes. They have named it as a cloud, but it is still an on-prem instance sitting in their cloud, so in terms of scalability, I do not see much advantage with Splunk Cloud because, at the end of the day, you get approval from your Splunk account team or a management team to add a new instance into your cluster.
How are customer service and support?
The support that we get from Splunk is not always great. Whenever we have issues, we have to chase them to get the answers. When we have an incident, identifying the root cause of that incident with the Splunk Cloud support team is always a pain. The Splunk team should improve their customer support experience. I love the product, but the only issue is getting support. I would rate them a three out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Negative
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had IBM QRadar, and we moved from IBM QRadar to Splunk Cloud. Cost-wise, Splunk is a premium solution. We pay more, but we get a better experience with Splunk Cloud Platform. It is easy to manage. There is a better user experience. When it comes to identifying issues, it is pretty easy with Splunk. Cost-wise, we have not saved much, but in terms of resiliency and digital experience, we get a lot from Splunk.
We get a lot of capabilities with Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise Security. We also do application monitoring, and we wanted to embed both solutions into one. That is the whole reason we got Splunk.
We have a bunch of tools, not just Splunk, in our ecosystem. Splunk is one of our tools for monitoring purposes. We have other tools for alert management, global alert repository, etc. In our ecosystem, Splunk serves the main purpose of detecting and bringing the issues to our analysts to resolve them. Splunk plays a vital role.
How was the initial setup?
I was initially involved in the whole migration process. We used to have the Splunk on-prem instance, and only application teams were utilizing it. We bought the Splunk Cloud Platform, and we merged both the application and security into the Splunk Cloud Platform.
Cloud deployment is pretty easy because you do not have to manage any of your infrastructure. They take care of that.
What was our ROI?
We could see its time to value in roughly one year to sixteen months. We started the migration and moved to the cloud, and in a year to sixteen months, we could see a return on investment.
The ROI is in terms of the mean time to resolve the issues. We could do all of our security monitoring and enterprise security. We integrated security monitoring with our SOAR platform. We have so many L1 and L2 teams using Splunk day in and day out to monitor the transactions. They definitely have more visibility and reduced mean time to resolve the issues. They can identify an issue pretty fast.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Currently, we have the ingest-based license. They are offering SVC-based licenses as well, but I am not a fan of SVC-based licensing. At the end of the day, I want to predict my budget and how much I am going to pay to the vendor so that I can plan my yearly budget.
I would always suggest going with the ingest-based license because you can control how much you want to ingest. It feels like you will be paying less when you switch to SVC-based licensing, but this is not true because you cannot control your users and what kind of searches they want to run. If you go for that, you will need a whole lot of manual effort to control your users.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated Elasticsearch. We evaluated Exabeam. We evaluated one more solution. Among all the solutions in the market, Splunk is the best.
The good thing with Splunk is that you can search your data across all the indexes pretty fast. The way the processing language works with Splunk is awesome. Most of my analysts can search the data as quickly as possible, whereas, with the other solution, there was always a lag while searching for data. With Elasticsearch, you have very limited capability to search across the whole platform. It is very easy with Splunk. The secret sauce of Splunk is the way they index the data. That is the main difference between Splunk and its competitors.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate the Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten. The product is good. The only issue is the support.
The primary benefit that I get from attending the Splunk Conference is to be able to see all the new features that Splunk is releasing and how to use them and implement them in my infrastructure, platform, or ecosystem. I also get to know how other organizations are using Splunk to solve their use cases. Another thing is that we have so many vendors utilizing Splunk as their base and building so many new products. I visited one of the booths, and I was very impressed with their booth. They are doing all the content validation, security validation, and simulation of attacks. They are using their tool, and they have integrated it with Splunk. They are bringing all the data into Splunk to showcase how to maintain the hygiene of the content. That impressed me a lot. When I attend Splunk conferences, I get to see how others are utilizing Splunk as their base and building new tools out of that. It gives me some ideas of how to implement it in our organization. Of course, we cannot implement everything, but at least we can see the best fit for our platform.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Manager ICT & at Bangalore International Airport Limited
Boosts performance and helps simplify monitoring across platforms and data management
Pros and Cons
- "The data management and instant search features are the most valuable ones for us, as they allow us to instantly retrieve information needed for reports and security compliance."
- "Splunk should increase the frequency of new feature releases, particularly those related to real-time operational flow monitoring and analytics reporting."
What is our primary use case?
We leverage the Splunk Cloud Platform to effectively manage the vast amounts of machine-generated data, thereby ensuring application management security compliance.
We implemented the Splunk Cloud Platform to enhance our customer experience and optimize the data storage costs. We can convert the log data into numerical data points when requested.
How has it helped my organization?
The Federated search helps retrieve data in a better way.
Splunk Cloud Platform simplifies monitoring across multiple cloud environments, providing real-time insights into operational flow. It also streamlines data conversion, reducing the data-driven process for the company.
Splunk Cloud Platform's machine learning and AI capabilities simplify data management and provide clear visibility into multiple environments.
The AI makes it easy to integrate with other systems and applications in our environment.
The Splunk Cloud Platform reporting provides good insight.
Splunk Cloud Platform significantly boosted our performance and cost-effectively optimized data sets, delivering immediate benefits.
Thanks to the Splunk Cloud Platform we can make decisions within the organization much faster.
Splunk Cloud Platform empowers our organization to access data efficiently, ensuring compliance with privacy and regulations through actionable insights.
Splunk Cloud Platform strengthens our security, particularly in handling complex processes.
What is most valuable?
The data management and instant search features are the most valuable ones for us, as they allow us to instantly retrieve information needed for reports and security compliance.
What needs improvement?
Splunk should increase the frequency of new feature releases, particularly those related to real-time operational flow monitoring and analytics reporting. It has been over a year since any significant updates were added to the Splunk Cloud Platform.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Splunk Cloud Platform is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Splunk Cloud Platform is scalable.
Splunk Cloud Platform's resilience is good.
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment was straightforward. The deployment took around four hours and required two people.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated Victoria Experience but it was not suitable for our environment.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten.
We have around 150 users.
No maintenance is required from our end.
I recommend Splunk Cloud Platform. It helps monitor all the respective functions.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Cloud Platform
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about Splunk Cloud Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
816,192 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Support Engineer at American Express
Integrates well, provides good visibility, and reduces maintenance work
Pros and Cons
- "Everything is maintained by the Splunk support team. Users do not have to maintain any physical servers. They do not have to maintain indexes and searches. It reduces a lot of work on the user side."
- "In the case of knowledge objects, even a Splunk admin does not have access to delete them. If we want to remove a knowledge object, we need to contact Splunk support and raise a case. After that, they delete it. They should give us access to delete knowledge objects."
How has it helped my organization?
Splunk Cloud Platform was very useful for us. With the on-prem setup, we had to maintain all the servers and take care of the upgrades, whereas with Splunk Cloud Platform, we did not have to bother about that. Everything was handled by the Splunk support team.
It was sufficient for us to monitor multiple cloud environments. The visibility that it provided into multiple environments was good.
We used Splunk Cloud Platform for business processes and security. It helped us a lot. On the business side, as a banking organization, it was helpful for reports and alerts. On the security side as well, Splunk was helpful. We could see any security breach. It was also helpful for smooth operations. If any issue happened or any server was down, it automatically alerted us.
What is most valuable?
Everything is maintained by the Splunk support team. Users do not have to maintain any physical servers. They do not have to maintain indexes and searches. It reduces a lot of work on the user side.
We integrated it with other applications in our environment. It integrates well. We did not face any issues on the integration side.
The reporting offered by Splunk Cloud Platform is also good.
What needs improvement?
I faced a few minor issues with Splunk Cloud Platform. In the case of knowledge objects, even a Splunk admin does not have access to delete them. If we want to remove a knowledge object, we need to contact Splunk support and raise a case. After that, they delete it. They should give us access to delete knowledge objects.
Everything else was good. It already had all the features. We did not require any new features.
For how long have I used the solution?
I used this solution for almost ten months in my previous organization. Currently, I am not using it. I last used it about five months ago.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It was stable. We did not see many issues. Any issues were on the physical servers, not on the Splunk Cloud side.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. We had more than 2,000 users in our organization. It was being used by more than 150 departments.
Onboarding end-users was easy. I was a Splunk admin, and I was also an end-user. I could provide access to other end-users directly.
How are customer service and support?
Their technical support was good. I would rate them a five out of ten because we worked in the Australian time zone, and the tech support team that we usually got did not have much knowledge. They took time to resolve issues.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In our organization, we used multiple products. We had Dynatrace and other products, but we mostly preferred Splunk. It was more user-friendly than others, and we could search everything easily. We could create dashboards. Other products were more difficult.
How was the initial setup?
It took us a long time to switch from on-prem to the cloud. It took almost four to five months.
What about the implementation team?
We took the help of the Splunk team for migration, but after that, we did not take their help. We took care of onboarding and other things. It was easy. If any issue came up, we contacted the Splunk support team.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I do not have much idea about the price. We previously used 1 GB at the cost of $600. Both on-prem and cloud licenses have the same price. There is no difference.
It did not impact the cost because the costs of the on-prem license and the cloud license are the same. We did not have any issues with that. Overall, its price is reasonable.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend moving to the cloud because you do not have to maintain physical servers and infrastructure. Everything is handled by the cloud provider.
Overall, I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Sr. director of Enterprise Architecture at a recreational facilities/services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Provides single-pane access to data from different places but needs better stability and performance
Pros and Cons
- "I can trace an event back to its root cause. I can find the root cause instead of just looking at the symptoms across different things."
- "Its stability and performance can be better. Very rarely does a day go by when we do not see an error in the console, such as a health check error. Because it is cloud-hosted, we do not have access to the backend to figure it out ourselves. We are reliant on their support to figure it out, and a couple of days later, the error comes back or it is a different error. It is a never-ending cycle of support tickets. Their support is also not great."
What is our primary use case?
We use it for IT security and observability.
How has it helped my organization?
We did not have anything prior to this that could perform the same function. Previously, if we needed to trace a security event, we had to search across logs on multiple systems to figure it out. Since Splunk, we have got it all in one place, and we can dashboard that out and save searches.
It has reduced the time for root cause analysis. It gets us to the logs quicker, so it has reduced our mean time to resolve (MTTR). The time saved is entirely dependent on what the problem is, but it shaves a good hour or two off the initial investigation per incident.
It would improve our company's resilience if it was used effectively. It has helped the technology teams that do use it improve their business resiliency. It needs either evangelizing or being made more accessible to the front-end teams or departments that do not use it today. That is largely on us. We can do that in Splunk, but there is a never-ending list of things to do, and a part of that is building Splunk outs so that we can provide that centralized logging, and then give users access to it while maintaining the privacy of their data within our organization.
We have probably not seen any cost efficiencies. The benefit of any cloud platform such as Splunk, AWS, or Azure is that you do not have to look after it, but you pay a premium for that. For example, for VMware, you pay a premium for vCenter, vSphere, etc. You can do the exact same thing with OpenStack, but you need to hire five people to look after it versus two people for VMware. You pay for Splunk Cloud, but you run into other challenges. You do not own your data anymore because it is now stuck there, and you have to export to AWS, and then rehydrate into a different Splunk instance if you want to get access to it, or you pay through the nose for the data or retention history. It is horses for courses.
Do you want to host it yourself and save money on the OpEx but spend more on headcount and CapEx, or give it Splunk Cloud and spend more CapEx, but save money on CapEx and headcount? I prefer to have it on-prem. I prefer to go down the CapEx and headcount route because it gives me more control over my data, and it gives me more flexibility of my data. It gives me easier access to troubleshooting when something is wrong. It gives me easier access to scaling when we are seeing performance issues. I can bulk my hardware. It does not lock me into Splunk Cloud Platform. I know that Victoria promises some improvements around that with being able to manage my own applications and being able to have auto-scaling on search heads, but I will believe that when I see it, and I have not seen that yet, so I would personally prefer to put money in somebody pocket and food on their table than to give money out to a cloud provider.
What is most valuable?
I do not really like it, but being able to correlate events across platforms in a single place is valuable. I can trace an event back to its root cause. I can find the root cause instead of just looking at the symptoms across different things.
What needs improvement?
Its stability and performance can be better. Very rarely does a day go by when we do not see an error in the console, such as a health check error. Because it is cloud-hosted, we do not have access to the backend to figure it out ourselves. We are reliant on their support to figure it out, and a couple of days later, the error comes back or it is a different error. It is a never-ending cycle of support tickets. Their support is also not great.
In terms of performance, we are on the classic version of Splunk. We are not yet on Victoria or the new version, so we do not get auto-scaling. Therefore, we are limited. 90% of the time, Splunk is not doing anything. It is just reading logs, and 10% of the time is when we need to use it, but when we actually need to use it, there are five or six different teams trying to use it at the same time, and there are speed issues with search.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for about eight years.
How are customer service and support?
I could not interact with them very much, but I have people who do. It is not often a pretty experience. From what I understand or from the complaints that I hear, you are often told that this is not a problem or you have done something wrong, and then magically, it manages to fix itself an hour later.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before Splunk, we used distributed instances of Elasticsearch, Logstash, Grafana, and Graphite. This was ten years ago. Splunk was in its early days. Everybody had heard of it, but it had not become apparent why people need something like Splunk, so people had been building their own little instances. A lot of that still exists today in the organization because of the Splunk pricing model, the performance issues that we have on Splunk Cloud, and the stability. People want access to their data, but they also want to own their data. They do not want it to go into the black hole that is Splunk Cloud, so they keep it on-premises. They keep it in their own systems, such as Elasticsearch or Logstash, mostly because they can maintain sovereignty over data.
What was our ROI?
When compared to not having anything, we have seen an ROI. If we were going into it today, and that today was ten years ago, I do not think I would be at this Splunk conference. I would probably be at an Elastic conference and an Open Compute conference.
The value is definitely there, but it needs more performance around it. It needs to be more responsive. The value is definitely there in terms of a centralized point of visibility, but this value is provided by Splunk, as well as all of its competitors. Splunk potentially suffers from the same problems as ServiceNow, which is, if you want to do something clever with your data, you need a Ph.D. in data sciences to figure out how it works. It is hard to put in front of end-users who do not necessarily want to do something clever with their data. They want to be able to link it to the tools that they are familiar with.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is a touchy subject because we are locked into it. That goes back to the rehydrating data. We cannot have the retention that we want to store for legal and compliance purposes because that is seven years' worth of data for some of the indexes, so we ship them off into S3 buckets and install them there, at which point they are invisible to Splunk, so we have to rehydrate them, but we cannot rehydrate those pockets into Splunk Cloud. We have to rehydrate them into a self-hosted version of Splunk, which can take days to set up and get going. I would not call Splunk's licensing and pricing predatory, but they have made it very difficult to maintain the independence of your own data.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There are a few solutions out there that are similar to Splunk. You can get something similar with CloudWatch, BigQuery, Azure Monitor, and Azure Sentinel. In the cloud, Azure Monitor for the analytics platform and Azure Sentinel for the SIEM platform are the biggest competitors of Splunk. When you put dollars next to them, they all cost about the same at the end of the day. I probably would not trade Splunk for another cloud provider or another cloud-hosted solution.
We are heavily AWS compared to every other cloud. If that was not true and we were heavily Azure, I would probably move everything to Azure Monitor and Azure Sentinel to get that single ecosystem, but we are not going to live in that world. I also do not like AWS CloudWatch, so we are not doing that. On the cloud-hosted side of things, Splunk does not really have a competitor out there. Despite being very mature, Grafana is not as convenient as Splunk, but Splunk definitely has on-prem competition. Ten years ago, everybody was itching to get to the cloud. Everybody was pushing everything to AWS. It was like, "We have got to go to the cloud. We have got to be the first. We have got to be hybrid." Now, everyone is like, "I can do this cheaper in my own data center and have more control over it and not go offline every Friday when AWS East goes down." The competition for Splunk Cloud is with Splunk on-prem and probably Elastic on-prem, which is significantly cheaper and offers 99% of the same functionality.
What other advice do I have?
In terms of Splunk's ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real time, if this capability exists, I have not seen it.
We monitor multiple cloud environments with it. We also have the on-prem environment and a lot of SaaS providers. We are largely dependent on the people who are deploying to the cloud. They are configuring their services and their platforms to talk to Splunk. We provide Splunk as a centralized service, but it is largely up to them whether they consume it or not. Some departments are eager to get in there so they can get visibility. Some want to build their own little greenfield internally, and some have not reached the maturity of realizing why they want it.
I would rate it a six out of ten. We have frequently run into many performance problems with it. The search is slow. We cannot scale it. We cannot troubleshoot it. We cannot get access to some of the functionality that we wanted, which is changing because we are moving to the new version. We also want to be able to manage our own applications. We are just locked into this parted sandbox, and we send our data off to it, and all of a sudden, it is no longer our data because it is trapped in the Splunk cloud. If we wanna get it out, it is going to cost us money. Their support is also not great, but it does provide single-pane access to data from a whole bunch of different places.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Network Infrastructure Manager at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has good analysis and visualization features and saves costs and time
Pros and Cons
- "We use Splunk Cloud primarily as a troubleshooting tool, so the most valuable features are the analysis and visualization."
- "I want to have the ability to process the ingestion before it is sent to the back end and Splunk just announced that the feature is coming, so now it just needs to be released."
What is our primary use case?
We use the Splunk Cloud Platform to log all the network devices, whether it's switches, routers, firewalls, wireless controllers, wireless access points, and applications such as MuleSoft or Adobe AEM.
How has it helped my organization?
The team I manage is small and we don't have much time to maintain the on-prem infrastructure with patches and updates. With Splunk Cloud, we don't have to worry about patches or upgrades. It's always up to date with the latest and greatest features. That's the biggest benefit for us so far. It saves us time and headaches that come along with all the upgrades, patching, and administration of the Platform in general.
Splunk Cloud Platform has more features than the on-premise Splunk Enterprise version that we previously used. My team seems to like the GUI better.
Splunk Cloud Platform's ability to provide end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment is extremely important because we don't have any tool that has that feature.
It has sped up our mean time to resolve by 40 to 50 percent compared to the on-premise version of Splunk.
Our on-premises setup used an outdated Splunk version on aging Red Hat seven hardware. Upgrading would have required new Red Hat eight systems and consultant deployment expertise. By going to the cloud, we don't have to worry about hiring consultants or upgrades. That saved us time and money. The pricing that we were given was the same as renewing our maintenance and support for our on-prem version. So it was a no-brainer decision.
As soon as we migrated, my team liked the GUI because it made them more efficient. There are more functions and features that are not available with the on-premise version of Splunk.
What is most valuable?
We use Splunk Cloud primarily as a troubleshooting tool, so the most valuable features are the analysis and visualization.
What needs improvement?
Areas of improvement for Splunk Cloud Platform are difficult to say because we're still learning about the platform. I want to have the ability to process the ingestion before it is sent to the back end and Splunk just announced that the feature is coming, so now it just needs to be released.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for three months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Splunk Cloud Platform is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Splunk Cloud Platform is easily scaled on the cloud.
How are customer service and support?
The few times we reached out to technical support, they were helpful and able to address the issues.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used Splunk Enterprise and wanted to stick with Splunk because we feel it is the best product. So switching to the Splunk Cloud Platform was an easy decision for us.
How was the initial setup?
The deployment was not difficult. We had consultants helping us. We thought it was going to take three weeks to migrate from on-premises to the Cloud, and it took half that time. It was a lot easier than we anticipated. And we were able to do most of the work ourselves without using the consultants.
What about the implementation team?
We used Bitzios Consulting to help us with the implementation.
What was our ROI?
By moving to the Splunk Cloud Platform we saved on having to hire consultants to build a new environment and install it on-premises.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price for Splunk Cloud Platform is the same as our maintenance costs for Splunk Enterprise on-premises.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform nine out of ten. Splunk Cloud offers several advantages in terms of ease of use. Since it's cloud-based, there's no need to worry about infrastructure maintenance, availability, or scalability. New features are automatically available, eliminating the need for manual upgrades and potential downtime that can occur with on-premise installations.
We have AWS and GCP but are using the Splunk Cloud Platform to monitor only the AWS for now.
While we currently use Splunk Cloud, we don't have Splunk security. We plan on implementing Splunk security and that's also going to integrate with all of our Cisco equipment. For now, I can't say that Splunk's unified platform has helped consolidate networking, security, and IT observability, but soon, it will because we'll be able to have one source, one point of reference for all of our logging and security information instead of managing separate tools for different tasks. Once we implement Splunk Security, it will be one single pane of glass where we will have everything.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jul 7, 2024
Flag as inappropriateSr. Engineer Observability at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Make staff's jobs better for resiliency purposes, reporting, and whatever they need to do
Pros and Cons
- "It has definitely improved our organization by virtue of reducing the amount of overhead we would have had for those environments. Having to implement, maintain, or even update the existing stuff would have been extremely time-consuming. Splunk Cloud handles all of that for us. So it's definitely been helpful from that perspective. It's allowed them to maintain upgrades for far further than they are. Some of the hosts of that environment were still on version 7 so they could get upgraded feature parity."
- "Some of the implementation is challenging. They're not very proxy-aware."
What is our primary use case?
We're looking to migrate an acquisition into the Splunk environment. We acquired a company and their Splunk environment was small and separate. We didn't want to have to maintain old Windows environments in unique use cases so we wanted to migrate it to the cloud as a proof of concept.
In their case, they had global data domicile requirements. We didn't have the same global deployment for our other larger environment that they did. So it made sense for us to migrate them to a bunch of small cloud stacks that were globally positioned rather than deploy a bunch of tiny enterprise environments to do the same thing.
The solutions are segregated at the moment. We're currently migrating the ACS environment. We have our own Splunk Enterprise implementation that we still use for Azure currently. It's fine, it doesn't drop.
How has it helped my organization?
It has definitely improved our organization by virtue of reducing the amount of overhead we would have had for those environments. Having to implement, maintain, or even update the existing stuff would have been extremely time-consuming. Splunk Cloud handles all of that for us. So it's definitely been helpful from that perspective. It's allowed them to maintain upgrades for far further than they are. Some of the hosts of that environment were still on version 7 so they could get upgraded feature parity.
They do well at empowering staff by providing business resilience. Users have the capability to utilize Splunk in ways to make their jobs better for resiliency purposes, reporting, and whatever it is that they need to do. Splunk is a very powerful platform in that way.
What is most valuable?
In their case, they had global data domicile requirements. We didn't have the same global deployment for our other larger environment that they did. So it made sense for us to migrate them to a bunch of small cloud stacks that were globally positioned rather than deploy a bunch of tiny enterprise environments to do the same thing.
It's pretty important to us that Splunk has end-to-end visibility to our native cloud environment. We need to be able to figure out where the points of failure are. Knowing whether it's a forward, on our end, an index, the cloud environment, a firewall, or something else entirely is important to troubleshooting that kind of process.
Splunk has helped to reduce our mean time to resolve. For the specific use case, the ability to bring in more Splunk data and market makes work consistently accessible.
I think that Splunk's ability to predict, identify and solve problems in real time is better than what we use it for. Our observability journey is still pretty early so we haven't done a lot of predictive detection that is possible to do with Splunk. It looks like it can do the things that we needed to do in a pretty effective way. We just haven't done that yet.
What needs improvement?
Some of the implementation is challenging. They're not very proxy-aware. Their recommendation is to set up an intermediate forward in a DMZ environment or something like that. That's not always the most convenient way to do things. It would be better if we could use an HTTP proxy, send data out via HEC, HTTP, or in a way that is proxy-aware.
For how long have I used the solution?
We did the POC six months to a year ago. We've been in the process of migrating some smaller use cases over the last three or four months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't used it a lot but it's been pretty stable.
How are customer service and support?
Splunk support is pretty good. There's some work to be done. When I provide them with a bunch of data, they don't need to ask me some of the initial questions. But otherwise, they're pretty good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What was our ROI?
I have seen ROI. The adoption of the company has increased dramatically. We have hundreds of alerts, hundreds of reports, and hundreds of dashboards that people use for their business cases, whether it's deliverables, resiliency, or troubleshooting.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Splunk is expensive. We have had some challenges in ensuring that all data is available in Splunk due to its cost. It has definitely proven its value in the data that we have brought in. From a resiliency and reporting perspective, those things are all very valuable. But it's certainly not the most cost-effective product in the world.
It is a valuable product, but it is certainly challenging at times to be able to bring in as much data as I would want due to the cost of the product.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Sr. Manager, SOC, NOC, and Corporate Security at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Can integrate easily with other tools and allow businesses to expand their use cases
Pros and Cons
- "The product's deployment phase was easy."
- "I think the tool has some scalability issues, especially when used in larger organizations."
What is our primary use case?
I use the solution in my company, and its primary use cases have been related to the log correlation engine. Splunk Cloud Platform can be considered a central ingest point for gathering logs from all over our company's network, after which it is used to take and create reports. Security, detection, dashboards, and similar features are some of the use cases that can be associated with the tool.
How has it helped my organization?
The benefits my company has seen from using the tool would be that it gives you more of a single place to look at rather than having to jump from a bunch of different screens to look at current logs, as well as the ability to correlate data amongst different log sources.
What is most valuable?
Regarding the solution's most valuable features, I think that since many of our company's applications are Splunk-based, they can integrate with other tools within our tech stack, which allows us to expand our use cases.
In our organization, Splunk Cloud Platform provides end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment, and it is a very important area where we need visibility within our environment. It is one of the main tools I use for end-to-end visibility.
Splunk Cloud Platform has helped reduce the mean time to resolve. It helps find issues, which can lead to a better mean time to resolve overall. Depending on the detection type, it reduces the mean time to resolve by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent.
My company saw time to value using Splunk Cloud Platform pretty quickly, and we continue to see the value, specifically when we add in new sources and tune-up. In general, it has been pretty quick.
Splunk's unified platform helps consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools since it gives our company a single platform where we can collect logs from all different sources.
What needs improvement?
I think the tool has some scalability issues, especially when used in larger organizations. I feel the searching part gets really slow, which is based on one's resources.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for about six years. In general, I have been a Splunk customer for eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I think the stability is pretty good. I haven't noticed any outages.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I think the scalability could be a little bit better because our company runs into some resource constraints that slow down our searches.
How are customer service and support?
When it comes to the solution's technical support, I would say it all depends on what the request is or who is actually responding to our company's queries. We have had some people who have been great, but we have also had times where we had to escalate some issues to get our tickets looked at by someone from the support team. I rate the technical support a five or six out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I think the tool has some scalability issues, especially when used in larger organizations. I feel the searching part gets really slow, which is based on one's resources.
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase was fairly expensive since my company had to get some professional services to help us with the set up of everything. Overall, the tool freed up some manpower, resources, and hours from our personnel and management, so having the tool in our company made sense. Yeah.
The product's deployment phase was easy.
The solution is deployed using the cloud services offered by AWS.
What about the implementation team?
My company had to get some professional services from a reseller named Resultant to help us with the setup of the tool.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I don't remember whether my company had evaluated other products against Splunk Cloud Platform. In the environment where our company made the switch over, I can say that we are happy with our Splunk usage in general. We just wanted a tool that was more resilient and didn't have to worry about the management on the back end.
What other advice do I have?
My organization monitors one cloud environment with the help of Splunk Cloud Platform. The ease or difficulty of monitoring multiple cloud environments is not something that is applicable to my company.
In terms of Splunk Cloud Platform's ability to help improve our organization's business resilience and predict, identify, and solve problems in real time, I would say it is not possible in real-time. The solution gives our company the ability to do more of a retrospective analysis, which helps us with the current backup.
There are not any cost efficiencies I can think of that I have experienced after switching to Splunk Cloud Platform.
I think Splunk Cloud Platform is still probably one of the best tools out there in the market for enterprise organizations.
I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jul 8, 2024
Flag as inappropriateCloud DevOps Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Good monitoring and automation capabilities but needs a more efficient UI
Pros and Cons
- "Its monitoring is completely automated."
- "It needs to mature; it's just getting established in the industry on a wider scale."
What is our primary use case?
I use Splunk on my phone, on-premises, and for the automation tasks that we carry out.
We use it to work on dedicated forms and infrastructure and have a lot of virtual machines and instances that are being run for every single application. Our infrastructure is purely based on Azure by Microsoft.
Keeping CMDBs of all the virtual machines is a heavy task. When you use it for your portal use, it might be two or three virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created, we use post-provisioning inside the virtual machine. While post-provisioning, we install Splunk agents so that any activity that is happening inside the VM is virtually monitored by Splunk.
We create a dashboard. We are able to monitor everything from that dashboard.
Splunk also offers enhancements and automation. Splunk plays a major role when it comes to automation. We extract the data from Splunk, and then we use it to automate using a jump server so that we can put in actions on any number of virtual machines.
How has it helped my organization?
The automation is the main advantage. When we need to search for data, as engineers, it's very easy.
What is most valuable?
I like that it's an independent cloud platform. It can work with AWS or Azure.
Its monitoring is completely automated. We do not have to put in other engineers just to maintain Splunk. It maintains itself, and it's very user-friendly. For the dashboards to be created or any sort of code that we want to do with Splunk, we can do it by ourselves. We do not need to have separate resources so it is very cost efficient. We do not require many people; it's resource-efficient as well.
We do use the federated search feature and find it helpful. Earlier, it was hard to withdraw data. We'd have to maintain it. Now, Splunk does it for us. It's a very time-efficient service. It's made a huge impact on automation. We can grab data in real-time any time we need to.
The solution integrates well with other applications and systems in our environment.
What needs improvement?
It could have a more efficient UI. If they could integrate more AI and make search more efficient so that other people can access and use it, not just engineers, that would be ideal.
It needs to mature; it's just getting established in the industry on a wider scale.
The API still needs some enhancements from a post-performance point of view.
From a monitoring point of view, Splunk is doing very well. However, if they could provide a post-provisioning aspect. Right now, we have to install a monitoring tool while we are post-provisioning every virtual machine. If they could be a provider that precluded having a virtual machine being created or provisioned, that would be ideal.
Alerting could be faster. Sometimes the actions that happen take some time to reflect on the Splunk dashboard. There is still latency. Especially when you work in a multi-cloud environment, you deal with a lot of regions. They still need to focus on availability across regions.
They need to have some security enhancements. Most users are using it with other single sign-on features like Okta. If they had their own SSOs that would be ideal. we'd be able to work independently. Right now, we have to log onto the virtual machines then move to Okta, then go to Splunk.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for somewhere around a year or one year and a half.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is okay. Sometimes it goes down. I have not witnessed that as I do not use it continuously after the deployment. The resiliency is good. I'd recommend it four out of five.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Everyone in the company uses Splunk.
The scalability is very good. It's extendible.
How are customer service and support?
I don't directly deal with technical support. We have a dedicated team that would work with Splunk.
Generally, my understanding is that if we have a query, we raise a ticket. There may be a separate portal or mailbox we can access as well to get assistance.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used Qualys. We switched mainly due to the costs involved. We also didn't want to migrate our resources to it. We simply wanted a monitoring tool, which is why we chose Splunk. Splunk in comparison is really cost-efficient.
How was the initial setup?
I was involved in the deployment of the solution.
Whenever a new resource or a new agent comes into the picture, in an organization, it's always complex. I don't blame Splunk for it, or my firm. It's like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and it's the developers who need to cut the pieces. It works really well as of now.
The deployment took somewhere between six to eight months.
We did need a lot of resources or staff members for the deployment. We have a vast infrastructure. We have a dedicated team inside as well who manage incidents and tickets using platforms like ServiceNow, and we still have a lot of resources dedicated to maintaining Splunk. The number of resources that are required to maintain it is more than the number of resources we use for development, actually.
How many people you need depends on the region. I work for Asia and North America. So for us, it was not much personnel. We needed four to five people in the development. There were somewhere around ten to fifteen people working on different parts.
What about the implementation team?
About 90% of the deployment was handled in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm only aware of general pricing terms, however, they have enterprise agreements as well. I can't speak to the exact cost. It's reasonable, from my understanding. I'd rate the affordability seven or eight out of ten.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Evaluating other options would be a task reserved for the highest management personnel at our firm. I was not involved with that process.
What other advice do I have?
We aren't using the solution across all cloud platforms. We use Azure. However, we would have the flexibility to gather insights from others. We just don't use that particular capability.
Right now, the solution does not affect our decision-making. It's still a very new platform. We're not relying on it completely. It's a work in progress. We need some time with it, to build up trust with it. Splunk is great so far, however, we still need more time and it needs more of a presence in the market.
Right now, in terms of compliance and privacy policy regulations, we limit the features that are not compliant with us. However, they are very flexible. We just use the features we can and block the ones that are unnecessary.
It hasn't had an impact on our security posture. We have very detailed security layers and several processes and teams. We haven't had any real use cases for Splunk. It hasn't actively blocked anything. We already have what we need in place.
I'd advise new users to check if this solution is reliable from a security point of view. Talk to Splunk about the cost as well. Splunk is really convenient for that. And whenever you deploy it in your infrastructure, make sure that the cloud providers or the on-prem solution that you are using are compatible with Splunk. We had issues in that some features that we were using in the cloud were not compatible with Splunk. So we had to make a lot of changes. That is something anyone who is trying to deploy Splunk needs to check - compatibility.
I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Updated: October 2024
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