Splunk Cloud Platform Reviews

We pull in information from cloud resources like AWS and Azure, and we just recently got into GCP. Just pulling data directly from there was a little bit easier than trying to do it from on-prem. We can now do that a little easily.

We have a lot of cases where business units that were not even in Splunk got compromised for whatever reason. We could get security logs from those and import them directly, more quickly, and easily with Splunk Cloud. We have had several use cases directly with that. In our company, we do not monitor logs from laptops. We have had issues with users getting compromised on our laptops. We could get the data logs from there.

I also use it to monitor my universal forwarders so that I can see what versions they are on. We had CVEs coming out on the universal forwarders. We had to replace them. I have dashboards to keep track of our progress as we are migrating and upgrading all those agents.

The biggest, heaviest use of Splunk Cloud Platform for us right now is people going and looking at our firewall logs to find the denies and to find out which firewall is being blocked. We are a medium-sized company. We are so segmented with all the PCI and SOC 2 compliance audits that we have. We have segmented everything. We have so many firewalls that there is always another firewall down the line that is blocking. The firewall team is in there every day and all day long, and then we have other teams that go in there to see if the issue that they are having with their app is a firewall issue or not.

I have done health checks several times now, and those have been very valuable in getting more information about what is going on in my platform. There are also recommendations on what is going on in my environment. Sometimes when it says something, I already know that, and when I explain why, it knows that I am aware of it. It knows that it has to be that way for compliance reasons or there are certain break glass accounts that we have to have in case our Okta is offline. It points out things like that. 

One of the things we had to do was find out how much Splunk on-prem was costing us because we had so many different groups. We had the storage group, and then we had the hardware team. The indexers and the search heads were physicals. That was being handled by the data center teams, which bought all the hardware, and then we had the virtual servers. Everything else was virtual. That was still owned by us, which is fine, but then we had storage, so we did not know the full cost. As I am trying to migrate from one data center to another, the teams do not want to buy. They do not want to migrate hardware. They want to buy new hardware, which, of course, is a cost to their department. They are a group but not our group, so we wanted to go to Splunk Cloud. We had to first find out how much the total cost of Splunk was for our company so that we could show that moving to Splunk Cloud was going to save the company money, which it did. It saved at least a million dollars a year. We are oversized in some areas, and we are running pretty close in the other areas. It is saving us money in the long term.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. We have data in multiple clouds. We have AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as our own on-premise that is technically a cloud or our own personal private cloud. We are a cloud customer for our clients. We are in four different environments. It has been fairly simple to monitor multiple cloud environments using Splunk Cloud Platform. The documentation and the TAs have been updated and tell you which piece is what. You see no difference between a client ID, tenant ID, a secret, a key, and the tokens. That has been very handy. We had an incident where there was an S3 bucket somewhere, and one of our teams was unable to communicate with the Cloud Infrastructure team. It was set up as a file share only instead of another type, which was not available in the TA. That was not an option, so that became a challenge. We had to work with them, and they basically had to rebuild that bucket because you cannot just add it as a function to that bucket. They made a whole new bucket and put the logs in there. That was a challenge, but other than that, it has been very smooth and easy. We have had teams that had incidents. They took all the data and put it into an S3 bucket, and it took that right in.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped reduce our mean time to resolve because they can get the data in faster. I have even automated things. We have a Python script. I can take CSV files and send them to the endpoint and just pop them with all the data they need to do their evaluations, such as if they went to bad sites. They can see all that information. I can get that in quickly. With on-prem, I could do that, but it had to run through so many hoops because of the PCI requirements that our company has. It is still PCI-compliant, but it is just so much easier to work with. I know we have had mean times of 60 days. We are reducing it to one or two weeks now, so it is getting a lot better.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped improve our organization’s business resilience. That was something with which I have had issues with the on-prem. I have had issues with an index. It could be a hardware issue, a software issue, or an OS issue. By having Splunk Cloud Platform, everything has been a lot more stable. I do not have as many worries or problems there. I have fewer things. I can even troubleshoot on my side if it is a heavy forwarder. That is on me, but there are a whole lot fewer things to look at and worry about. It took away a lot of headaches.

In terms of Splunk’s ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time, real-time is a touchy word because being real-time means you are indexing directly. There are a few people in my company who have or are allowed real-time access, but it is pretty close. It is pretty much within seconds. You have access to all that data, so it has been handy. I had to explain to the teams how searches work in the background. If you are running a search every 5 minutes, it sounds great, but if there is any kind of delay in the data, you can miss something, so 15 minutes is a little better, but still, you are seeing things within minutes and getting alert about them. We connect to Microsoft Teams and Slack. We are sending things to ServiceNow for the monitoring team. It is 24/7, so if they need something to watch 24/7, there is a group. They are now tied into ServiceNow, so they can get all that data right there in one place for that team, pulling it from different monitoring tools besides Splunk. It is handy to be able to just pop it all in there quickly.

The firewall stuff is huge. Everybody is in there. All day long, people are hitting that dashboard searching for firewall blocks or denies. Sometimes, they access it just to see if it is connecting because we do drop a lot of data. A great thing about Splunk is that we can drop some of the data if we need to when it is ingesting. We do not keep all the connects, but we can see whenever a connection is closed. We can see that the connection had been made successfully and then closed. We are able to see that one way or the other. We can see whether things are being blocked or it is able to connect. That information is handy now. We have a complex network, and there are times when we have routing issues. We can see that there is no route in the logs and say that it is a routing issue. They then bring the network team. The firewall is the front point for all that, but the network team has to work closely.

Just the fact that it is cloud-based is valuable. We are still on the classic one. I am waiting for the VE to come to the GCP. That is where our stack is. It is in GCP. They say it is coming somewhat soon. We will see when that is.

There is the flexibility of not having to manage all the indexes and searches myself. I was doing that with on-prem before. That was quite a bit of work. When you have an issue with an upgrade, you have to upgrade all of that. They are handling that on the backend now. I still have to do my heavy forwarders and my deployment servers, but it is a much lighter load for me on my end as an admin.

For one of the areas I am working on right now, they did an update this week which gave me back something. It was a feature that I have been using, but they took it away last conference. They just gave it back to me now, and I had to go through the setup again to make it work with our Okta. We have had issues with the maintenance windows. Sometimes I get informed about those at the last minute. They are getting better about informing us when they are going to do maintenance, but there were times when they did maintenance, and then I came in the next day and something was broken. They have gotten a lot better about that. I am still working on a couple of issues. They have cases open for them, so they know about them. They are working on them. The communication is getting better. That was an area that had a lot of feedback. I can see that they are accepting the feedback and taking it to heart, which is great.

Some of the Victoria Experience that was rolled out is not yet fully everywhere.

The AI assistant is going to be good, but we are on GCP, so I am worried about how fast it is going to get rolled out and if it is going to be nine months late for the GCP customers or not. That would be a bad thing because that would put a black eye on the whole marketing part of that. The same thing is with the Victoria Experience. They already have a black eye on that one. It has been two years since it came out and they still do not have it on GCP, so they need to get that fixed up. I would like to see the AI assistant feature as it rolls out. That helps with me wanting to roll out ITSI and the O11y suite with them bringing that AI assistant over there. I have teams right now that hit me up. They have been using some kind of AI assistant. We have Microsoft CoPilot. It is allowed in our company now. They tell us not to use ChatGPT right now because it is not approved for whatever reason. I have had some of our people hit me up who are not Splunk users but they have access to some dashboards and want to do a little bit of searching. If they use generic AI to find out how to do a generic Splunk search, it is not going to work in my environment at all. They will wonder why this is not working. That is because the AI does not know our environment. It will be handy to have an AI assistant that knows our environment.

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for a year and a half.

It has been quite stable. The fact that we are on GCP has been causing some pain. That is the only thing.

That has been very nice. When we renewed our last contract, we had seen that our long-term storage or archive storage was not enough, so we had increased it. It is nice to have enough visibility. It tells you that you are getting close to over or you are over, so you can see where you are. The new improved monitoring console that just came out has more information in there for that. That to me is even more valuable, so I am happy to see the new console they have released.

For the most part, their technical support has been pretty handy. Sometimes you get someone a little bit newer, and they may ask some basic questions because they do not know our knowledge level. If we are putting a case in, we have already tested steps a, b, and c. We have already tested all those, and we already know. We would not put the case in otherwise. However, in some of the cases, you get in there, and they immediately bump it up to the next level. They can recognize and see quickly that it is a problem, and they are able to bump it up. I like the fact that they are able to do that somewhat quickly and escalate things a little faster than in the past when we were on-prem. With us being on Splunk Cloud, they are able to see the issues faster and verify them faster. I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten. They are doing pretty well.

When it comes to customer service, the only issue we have seen is that they changed the sales team three times in the last two years. That has been frustrating. I meet them all at Splunk conferences, and I feel like half the Splunk people there know who I am because they have been our support team for some reason or another. Their teams are great, but it takes time. There is a transition time for them to get everything moved from one person to another because they have to finish up the team that they were with while adding in the new team that they are moving to. I understand that it takes time, but it is getting frustrating on our side. They can give us at least a year before they switch the team again.

Positive

We had used Enterprise Security before, but one team was using Splunk core with their own built-up dashboards and other things. They were not using the Enterprise Security pieces and parts specific to that, so we decided to not use that temporarily, but it might return because whatever they have switched to is not particularly helpful. It is not as helpful as we were hoping.

We worked with a third-party provider. We were in a bit of a hurry to get it done. We were able to do it quickly. 

Because we were getting GCP, we were getting help from Google, and they ended up paying for the service provider who was helping us migrate. We paid for it upfront, but then Google paid it back to us as a part of the contract we had with them. The good news was that we were able to get it done quickly, but it was quite a rush to do that. It went fairly smoothly. There were a few blocks, but we were able to migrate.

It took us a full six months to move from on-prem to cloud. Moving the data took me a couple of days, but getting everything fully migrated and tested and making sure that all the teams were fully in there took a full six months, which for our company was pretty much lightning speed. It normally takes two to three years or something like that.

We had a Splunk partner called TekStream.

We are seeing cost efficiencies with the move from on-prem to the cloud. We found out how much on-prem was costing us. It is not just the cost of the storage or the hardware. There is also the cost of the time of those people who do the setups of all that. We definitely saved quite a bit of money.

We have greatly seen an ROI. We have been able to add more and more data that we were dropping before because we did not have the license. We started opening that up. We have some more events from Windows event logs and some more things related to the firewall. We do not have to drop all that. We can bring some of that in now.

We were on ingest. We were on-prem, and when we switched to the cloud, we went to an SVC model, and that has been a huge help. We are now able to ingest more data than before. I was known as Doctor No because I had to say no so many times because we were on an ingest model and we were maxed out. I am not that way anymore. A lot of times, our use cases are one-shot because security needs the data. With our SVC model, we do not worry about it as much. I know that it is saving us huge amounts of money because of the SVC model.

Unfortunately, we did not evaluate any other tools, and that was the issue. We were handed down a tool to use, and that is something that our team did not like, and we have made that very clear. That is why we say that Enterprise Security might come back. We will see.

End-to-end visibility is something that we are working on. I have talked with the Gigamon vendor. We have Gigamon to do packet captures, but we want the metadata from that to come into Splunk so that we have longer retention times at least on some of that metadata. We do not necessarily have the package, and that is okay, but we can at least see the trending of some of the things a little bit longer than we are currently. It gives more visibility to more teams. I have 350 users in my Splunk Cloud Platform. On the network side, we have the network teams with 20 to 30 people looking at things over there, so it gives visibility into more of the organization. That is one of the big benefits. We can see the network layer and then all the way up to the App layer. When we want to get the O11y suite, we already have AppDynamics. We will be integrating that pretty soon. It will probably be the next month when we get that integrated in. The other piece is going to be getting the network cleared up. We are also seeing issues with GCP with some applications that we have migrated there. We will be able to see whether it is a slowdown in the cloud provider or not. Having this visibility and the end-to-end data and being able to correlate it is pretty helpful.

Splunk's unified platform can help consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools. That is what we are working towards, and that is exactly what we are hoping for. I am hoping to bring in ITSI and the O11y suite. We already have AppDynamics. We are going to be able to pull that in which will start helping with that full visibility, but to fully integrate that, I am going to bring the O11y suite as well because eventually, I see AppDynamics moving in that direction. 

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten because it is very good. It is pretty stable. 

We use it for security monitoring and application monitoring.

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. 

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.

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.

I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for more than four years.

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.

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. 

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.

Negative

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. It has been over a year since any significant updates were added to the Splunk Cloud Platform.

I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for one year.

Splunk Cloud Platform is stable.

Splunk Cloud Platform is scalable.

Splunk Cloud Platform's resilience is good.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The deployment took around four hours and required two people.

We evaluated Victoria Experience but it was not suitable for our environment.

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.

We use it for IT security and observability.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using this solution for about eight years.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The primary use cases of Splunk Cloud Platform are security log monitoring and compliance.

The most valuable feature of Splunk Cloud Platform is its flexibility and readiness because it's already prebuilt, and everything is click-to-go. Splunk has multiple features, but the cloud feature comes with that. It is built for a smaller organization, but that's how organizations grow. The solution is good for a new budding organizational group.

Splunk Cloud Platform should improve its integrations and consider multiple integrations or direct integration with other platforms like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS.

I would like to see more integrations because integration is related to bringing in more data. More integrations would increase the visibility and customer's point of scope. Customers are initially tied to one platform and stick to it because of its feasibility. Integration becomes a major challenge when they want to bring in different solutions.

Once they have different integrations from Splunk, they need not worry about security, things to monitor, or what compliance they must meet. Everything will be physical, and integration will bring in a lot of things.

I have been working with Splunk Cloud Platform for one and a half years.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a stable solution.

Splunk Cloud Platform's technical support is good. The support's technical capabilities are always great because everyone who is capable joins in and contributes. However, at a high level, we understand there is always a gap in automation. We have process automation that can be resolved or detected by customers.

The flaws in our cloud can be fixed. We can send an integration update to the customer and tell them that you must fix this so everything works fine. For a download-compatible system, you can update an older heavy forwarder version to a newer version to grasp the maximum out of it.

Positive

I have worked with a lot of other products, but not as a cloud solution. I have designed cloud solutions for other products like what Splunk currently has. I have worked with IBM, which has its own cloud platform, cloud monitoring solutions, and security solutions. Similarly, we have other market solutions that will act as a security solution, but they are in different behaviors. We have designed one for other customers, which monitors other cloud and hybrid solutions.

Splunk is currently at the top rating because I haven't explored other ones. I started exploring Microsoft Sentinel, which is a good competition for the Splunk Cloud Platform, and it's a healthy competition. I would like to see a very light-flavored source solution integrated with the Splunk Cloud. Once people start tasting source solutions, they will surely explore them more because that's how hunger is created. Other solutions already have the source solution in them. For example, Sentinel has its own source solution, which they give as an integrated part.

Splunk Cloud Platform’s initial setup was quite easy.

The Splunk team was involved in the solution's deployment.

Splunk Cloud Platform's pricing is a little on the higher end. When smaller organizations start their journey of onboarding log sources or security solutions, they think Splunk is quite worth it. But when they start growing, they feel it's quite eating up their budget on security. So, it is fine for smaller organizations. It all depends on how the discounts are provided.

Splunk Cloud Platform is used in our customer's company. The solution is deployed on the Spunk Cloud in our organization.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a very good product in the market, and you can use it wisely. Compared to other products for the cloud solution, you can use Splunk Cloud Platform for a wide range of tools. Splunk Cloud Platform is the best product to onboard for a new startup or a working good industry with a very small number of people. You don't have to sit in an office and work. You can work it from anywhere and integrate the log sources. That's how easy it is.

The cloud is not for a bigger organization. The one which is sitting in the environment can be used. For example, if you have one terabyte of ingestion per day, that is not what we expect a bigger organization to ingest on a cloud. It would become quite expensive to store, manage, and process.

It is good for smaller organizations because they have around 25, 30, or 100 GB of ingestion per day. If you want to grow bigger and bigger, you can use a hybrid model. If that model is available, that would be great for bigger organizations. For example, the cloud is integrated into the cloud, and on-premise is integrated into data centers. That should work fine.

Splunk does the solution's maintenance. From our side, the local integration material has to be maintained as per the cloud instance. It all depends on the customer. If the customer is fully on the cloud, it should not be a problem. We still have to upgrade heavy forwarders, universal forwarders, and deployment servers. However, the rest is taken care of by Splunk itself.

Our customers monitor multiple cloud environments, which are distinguished in their environment. It is integrated in a different format and not directly integrated. Monitoring multiple cloud environments using the Splunk Cloud Platform’s dashboards is quite easy and reliable.

It's a standard thing. I don't know about other comparative tools, but the first time I used Splunk Cloud Platform, it was quite good enough and can be used for the current organization.

I rate Splunk Cloud Platform's integration with other systems and applications in our environment a seven to eight. This is an average rating where you can see that the growth still has to be achieved. Splunk Cloud Platform should work on its integration with third-party products.

Splunk Cloud Platform has different types of formats, and those are enough. The rest of the reporting, like the presentation, should be done by itself. No one gives those. The reporting that Splunk Cloud Platform currently provides is enough.

It depends on the industry, but for financial or banking industries, Splunk Cloud Platform plays a major role in decision-making. If I want to rate it, you have to consider ten out of ten as Splunk or any other tool before they make any decision. If they have Splunk already, they should consider Splunk as a major partner to integrate and bring in more services apart from bringing any other solutions. That will create a multiple-glass observation, which will not be an easy decision. If one of our customers has Splunk, they must consider it a priority before bringing in any other solution.

Splunk Cloud Platform helps our organization access data for compliance and privacy regulations. Right now, Splunk is so feasible that it can integrate with any tool, anytime, and in any data format. So, it should not be a problem. Anyone brings in data in any format, Splunk Cloud Platform will surely meet it. The only thing is they need a good engineer to design it properly so that it brings in data properly.

An organization that does not have a security posture review is considered a zero, not a negative. We don't know when it becomes negative. The day they bring Splunk into the environment, it will obviously increase their visibility. Every time the security posture increases, they get to know the flaws.

Their observation of 24/7 monitoring, compliance, log monitoring, and forensics will come into the picture. They can enable everything in a single solution or product.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a resilient model. SIEM tools can perform post-detection. SIEM is not an EDR tool because it doesn't automatically detect something. A SIEM tool is used for compliance and audit. It is helpful for future investigation because it can record logs and keep them aside.

However, a SIEM tool does not have an automatic detection module. Although it has a prediction model, it does not have an auto-detection or blocking model. It cannot be a resilient tool, but it can be a vigilant tool.

Overall, I rate Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten.

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. 

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.

We use Splunk Cloud primarily as a troubleshooting tool, so the most valuable features are the analysis and visualization.

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.

I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for three months.

Splunk Cloud Platform is stable.

Splunk Cloud Platform is easily scaled on the cloud.

The few times we reached out to technical support, they were helpful and able to address the issues.

Positive

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.

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.

We used Bitzios Consulting to help us with the implementation.

By moving to the Splunk Cloud Platform we saved on having to hire consultants to build a new environment and install it on-premises.

The price for Splunk Cloud Platform is the same as our maintenance costs for Splunk Enterprise on-premises.

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.

I use the solution to create alerts for different servers. I also create dashboards in Splunk.

We have a lot of servers. It was hard to track which were down as we didn't have a monitoring platform. Splunk changes that. It receives data and if it doesn't get any data, it creates an alert so we are notified if something is down.

We also use it for making reports to help make management easier. 

The monitoring of servers for high CPU utilization helps us out. If there are offline servers or high utilizations, we can see the incidents and optimize our processes. 

The cloud is very fast. We have a lot of data in our Splunk instance and it isn't slow in any way. 

The maintenance is good. We have good support if we have queries or issues. With on-premises Splunk, if we ran into issues, we'd have to figure things out ourselves. With the cloud version, it's easier to get support. 

We can monitor multiple cloud environments, including Azure and AWS. 

It can be difficult to monitor cloud platforms. We are integrating more cloud servers and patching data sources from those servers. It's very easy to use Splunk and have everything go to the dashboards.

We get good visibility into multiple environments. We can easily search from Splunk Cloud to our on-prem or AWS directly. We also do not ingest the data in order to see it.

We can easily integrate with other systems. It's very helpful. We can leverage Splunk to gather any specific reports we want with this integration capability. 

The reporting is very good. Every month we have a call with Splunk personnel and they'll show us reports to show high usage for search, for example. From our side, we can change or update in order to optimize our systems. 

The cloud has helped us with decision-making. It helps make maintenance decisions very easy.

It's very resilient. 

Testing can handle a lot of logs, however, we are unsure if the speed will be affected.

When we are using OneDrive or SharePoint, as a developer, we'd like to have better integration between the two.

There are some issues with Splunk blocking some shared mailboxes. 

Support could be improved. 

I have been using the solution for five years.

The Splunk cloud is very stable. I've never experienced crashing. If there are issues, they will notify us. It doesn't take long to resolve issues at all. Things tend to be resolved in an hour or so. 

The solution is very scalable. 

I haven't experienced the extensibility, or the ability to extend the system, however, my understanding is that it is very good. We have yet to upgrade it.

When we have high-priority tickets, it's hard getting help efficiently. We'd prefer to call. It takes time to get someone to help. We've had to submit tickets via the portal, and they asked us to call instead. It's hard to get above P1.

It would be ideal to get a specific phone number or email so that we do not have to wait hours to get help.

We do have different Splunk support services where we talk to them bi-weekly, and at that point, we can talk about any high-priority issues. They do try to help us with queries. 

Positive

We previously used Splunk on-premises. 

I do not have any experience with the initial setup. Since it is a cloud deployment, Splunk handles the maintenance mainly.

I'm not aware of the exact pricing. That said, my understanding is that it is very reasonable. However, every application has a price. We need separate licenses for everything. They don't have any bundles. 

For the first few years, I used the solution on-premises, and then I moved over to the cloud. 

I use the classic dashboard; I don't yet use the studio. 

It has not yet affected our security posture. 

We have not yet explored federated search. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

If a user is planning to use the Cloud Platform is to consider the pricing. It's fast to access and there is no downtime. It's very good from a user perspective. I'm happy with it. It's helpful.

Users should work to maximize the power of Splunk to get the most out of it. Leverage the applications, including security. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

We haven't used it a lot but it's been pretty stable.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten.