Splunk Cloud Platform Reviews

On Splunk Cloud, I mainly look for errors in applications or issues that come up with our internal applications. I have also used it to create dashboards and display customer data to customers in an effective way so that they have insights into their data.

There is less overhead now for infrastructure management. There are fewer issues that we have to worry about on the infrastructure side. This has freed up more of our resources' time to work toward initiatives on the Splunk platform itself. It is hard to measure the time savings. If one resource was working on it, that resource could save anywhere between 15 to 20 hours a week.

It must have reduced our MTTR, but I have been with Splunk for as long as I have been in my current environment, so I do not have anything to compare it with.

It helped improve our organization’s business resilience. The solution helps us find where errors are and potentially where threats are a lot faster. We can more effectively push out alerts not only to our team but also to the teams across the enterprise. It is nice to have on hand.

It is quite effective at helping us identify problems very quickly. We do not participate in real-time searches within our Splunk environment, but close to real-time is possible, and it is quite effective.

Not having to manage Splunk Cloud's infrastructure is valuable. Being able to deploy within the cloud and not having to manually manage our configs on the infrastructure side and set up our own architectures has been the biggest help.

Other than that, the new Dashboard Studio has been a pretty big win, but I do not know whether that is more cloud-specific or not. Dashboard Studio has a cleaner look for customers that want to see their data but not necessarily search. For the customers that want to see their data, having an easy and effective way to drag and drop to see where things are going to be if they want to change them has been pretty beneficial.

They can streamline the process of creating custom apps. I do not have a lot of experience with it. It was not very difficult for me to do so, but there is probably a better way to present the ability for people to push their own custom apps to the platform and go through Splunk's manual and automatic reviewing process.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

I have not seen any downsides when it comes to uptime and availability. Being in the cloud reduces downtime, especially compared to being on-prem where if something goes wrong, you will have to go in and fix that infrastructure yourself.  I have not necessarily seen significant downtime with Splunk Cloud or on-prem at this time.

I quite enjoy the fact that if we need more indexes or search heads, it is very easy to plug and play with Splunk Cloud. With the infrastructure model that we had before, we would have to go in, set up a new search head out to the cluster, and add a new indexer to the cluster if we needed it. It will have more benefits going forward as we move more and more into the cloud.

I have worked with Splunk support, and I would rate them an eight out of ten. It depends on where you are and what project you are working on at the time. It would be quite beneficial to work with them if you have a specific project that you are working on, and they have some insight into it. I do not work with support too often myself. Usually, one of our Splunk Infrastructure managers works with them, but there is always room for improvement. Availability in terms of making the time to gain insight into specific projects and problems that we are having is an area that can be improved.

Positive

My company has been with Splunk for quite some time now. We are well integrated at this point, and we are in the process of migrating over to Splunk Cloud specifically. We used Splunk on-prem for a while. We are currently in a hybrid situation, and we are making our way toward being completely on the cloud.

I help from time to time with the migration process, but I am not necessarily in charge of the total migration functions that we currently have today. The most I have done in terms of deploying to the cloud was creating a custom alert action for the cloud environment, which is one of my biggest contributions so far. I am not completely in charge of it, but from time to time, I will assist in the migration process. It is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get more and more familiarized with the cloud and how to benefit from it by using features like federated search, it becomes easier. It is somewhere in between in terms of complexity.

We would have seen an ROI. I do not have a specific number, but assuming that we did not have Splunk Cloud, we would have to manage our own infrastructure. Not having to manage nearly as much infrastructure and not having to have the personnel to manage that infrastructure on a regular basis, frees up that time for them to do what they are really designed to do. This has definitely added value.

I am a little bit familiar with the pricing and licensing model. I am not sure about the particular pieces of the actual price that we have, but I do like the idea of going towards a more CPU-based approach rather than the ingesting approach. This CPU-based approach gives us the ability to ingest more data if we need it.

The biggest value that I get from attending Splunk conferences is the insights from everybody here. You have people from many different companies doing very different things and deploying very different models within their different Splunk instances. You get an idea of where everybody lands and maybe grab some ideas that you would not necessarily have thought of by looking at it from the inside of someone who is in a completely different field than you are.

There is definitely a big difference between Splunk Cloud and on-prem. For me, one of Splunk on-prem's biggest features is being able to deploy my own custom applications internally, which is something that is a bit of a process with Splunk Cloud. So, given the information that I have, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

My role is in observability. 

Some of our internal systems send data into Splunk Cloud. We had dashboards for our team's KPIs. We can check to see how fast the team reacts to events. Those reaction times a recordreed and sent to Splunk. From there, we can draw some dashboards. We can check to see who is doing well and who needs to improve. The power Splunk admins started moving into the Cloud.

The primary use cases are for team KPIs, log analytics, and error search. We would look for the relation of different events and draw dashboards to see how bad things were veering off from the timeline that we wanted to see. 

Splunk helped us shape the picture of our team and enabled management to see who should be rewarded and who should be coached. It helped outline where KPIs were not being met. We could sit down and discuss what happened, and why it did not go as planned, and then we could make improvements in the processes. It helped us draw a broader picture of the entire team's capabilities.

With Splunk, everything is centralized, everything is in one place. We don't have to scramble and approach Splunk admins where to look. 

In terms of networking, we managed to build good dashboards. We have a lot of firewalls and rules. If a new service comes up, if they don't have a firewall and nothing works, we can look at the Splunk dashboard and see the particular network flow and see if firewalls are blocking traffic. This is a Splunk function that people are happy and excited about. It shows us valuable information in an easy-to-understand way.

It's very important for us that Cloud Platform offers end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment. More and more functions are moving to the cloud, so it's not only for observability to see the system, but it's also for management and senior management to see that all of their applications are running as intended. If we try to spread out applications through multiple vendors, multiple regions, access groups, and whatnot, it becomes pretty important. It may become a challenge because of that spread. It brings resilience, but it also makes it more difficult to look after everything.

We want to achieve having everything in a single view. Senior management wants to make sure that everything is running well. The application team's developers want to have a granular review. 

Splunk reduced our mean time to resolve by 30%. If an application starts misbehaving, we send logs to Splunk and check to see what's going on and see what's happening.

The dashboards are the most valuable feature. It's all of the information in one place. We can build it ourselves, so we can make it the way we like. 

Since I work on data collection from external sources and send them into Splunk, I miss its ability to collect that data through REST API applications. I would like the ability to configure an endpoint, set it on Splunk, and set a schedule for it to pull information every ten minutes, and pull this endpoint information. I could search through it, look for keywords, restructure the data that's brought back to me, and then store it in the Splunk index. This is not available and if it is available, it is bare bones. I would like Splunk to have this function by default.

We started using Splunk seven years ago. We started with Splunk on-prem and then moved to Splunk Cloud. 

I never had any stability issues. 

I use support rarely but so far, it's been fine. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. My cases weren't that critical so it took a little longer to solve. 

Positive

We have not achieved cost efficiencies by switching to Splunk. There will be some cost discussions in cost optimization. 

We log a lot of data which may have impacted our licensing cost.

We also looked at Datadog but it wasn't cost-efficient to log with two tools.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. I heard that it's more straightforward to monitor multiple cloud environments with AWS. Azure doesn't work as intended, there were some issues collecting data from it.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform seven out of ten. I really miss REST API abilities. 

Our Splunk Cloud Platform centralizes logs from all OT assets, allowing OT business units to request various insights. These insights can include how often assets cycle down, memory storage usage, or data consumption over time. They can then configure dashboards to receive alerts based on these specific metrics.

The biggest benefit I have seen using the platform is the alerts because most of our sites are remote in the middle-of-nowhere deserts. If something goes down, they don't have direct eyes on them. Thanks to Splunk's automated alert that notifies us if something is down, we can quickly respond to it before it affects any other systems.

We do have several cloud environments that we're using because we got the Splunk Cloud Platform last month. We are integrating them all into one location, so we are still determining the ease of monitoring all the cloud environments using the Splunk Cloud Platform. Before having Splunk, it was a huge issue because we had to go to different locations. Having it all in one location under Splunk will make it much better for us.

It is important, especially for our cloud team to have end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environments through Splunk Cloud Platform. The more visibility we have the better it is.

Splunk Cloud Platform has significantly reduced our mean time to resolve because instead of us having to go out to the site or having somebody on the site tell us a few hours later there is an issue, it could be within minutes now that we can resolve the issue. After all, as soon as it goes down, we get the logs, we get notified, and then we can immediately go in and check it out. So it is a significant amount of time that Splunk is helping us reduce for resolution.

Splunk Cloud Platform's ability to predict, identify, and resolve problems in real time has been huge, especially because our business units are operational technologies. They generate revenue for us. That's how our business stays afloat because we're in the energy sector. So If something goes down or if they want a quick dashboard, the biggest thing we're to be using as well besides the alerts is the dashboards showing how quickly we're remediating vulnerabilities and showing where they are vulnerable. That's going to be huge for the business side and will help us a lot.

Splunk Cloud Platform helps consolidate network security and IT observability tools. The cyber group gets all the alerts, but we can direct it to which person we want to send the alert to. That's good because they can go to IT, which is where we're at, Cyber, which can potentially help fix the problem, and then networking too in case something goes down. That is one of the requests is if an on-site asset goes down, the network team can see why it's off the network. So it's good that it spreads out everywhere, and whoever can help fix it can be on top of it.

Alerts are a huge benefit because we can customize them to each business unit's needs. Splunk automates the process and sends email notifications directly, which saves me time.

The AI features will be a huge improvement for Splunk. Using basic natural language in English instead of writing a regex expression will be helpful. For example, I can tell Splunk AI that I need to get the logs from last week between eight AM and ten PM on a specific asset. Instead of me going in, doing the regex expression, and then having to Google what it is because it's super hard to do sometimes. That is the biggest area for improvement. Hopefully, it will be released soon because that will simplify things for me and non-technical people. 

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

Splunk Cloud Platform is stable.

Splunk Cloud Platform can handle terabytes of data.

The support has always been great for the few times I have used it.

Positive

The deployment is super easy. We deployed the Splunk Forwarder file and from there, we have a batch file, a PowerShell file, and it runs in the background. The users don't even know it's being installed.

The implementation was completed in-house.

In regards to a return on investment, the metrics are the biggest thing. Data is everything. The business units enjoy the dashboards that Splunk Cloud presents. And it is quick to present them.

Splunk Cloud Platform fell within our budget so we pulled the trigger and implemented it.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform ten out of ten. All the applications I need are readily available in a user-friendly dropdown menu. Exploring them is a breeze, and the platform's speed is impressive.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a product I use since my company has different platforms on Splunk, like Splunk ITSI and Splunk Enterprise Security. Splunk ITSI and Splunk Enterprise Security are the two packages known as paid packages under Splunk Cloud Platform, and my company also has an ad-hoc search head. Splunk ITSI is totally related to the infrastructure monitoring that my company does, and from it, we derive the service analyzers, episodes, and alerts and see if we want to integrate anything with ServiceNow, Jira, or any other monitoring tools we have. The product can be integrated with other tools, while my company can also use its alerting feature and its ability to notify the consumers with particular alerts, so the total infrastructure is covered under SIEM, making it possible to attach to security information. My company also created a couple of use cases, like in the case of continuous resetting of a password more than three or four times, then there will be a security incident that would be created so that if any end user is doing it as malpractice, like, phishing or something, my company can detect it and inform the user that you have crossed the four limits, and there is some attack happening owing to which we need to reset the password. Based on the aforementioned process, SIEM monitoring will be handled through its application. The aforementioned areas consist of the use cases related to the tool, along with a couple of more activities, like onboarding a user onto Splunk, creating apps for them, creating dashboards, creating alerts, and creating a couple of use cases for them as per their requirements.

In my organization, Splunk Cloud Platform has improved the issue revolving around transactions. If there are any issues with the transactions, then my company notifies the end users that their transactions failed, after which they can fix the issues so that there are no issues with the transaction part, especially regarding the application availability. The tool makes it possible to fix issues without any downtime.

I mainly work with Splunk SIEM and Splunk ITSI, and these are the two major products recommended for all consumers. If it is related to security, I recommend Splunk SIEM, and if it is related to infrastructure monitoring, I recommend Splunk ITSI to others. I used to take care of the observability part as well with the aforementioned tools. For observability purposes, I use Splunk-related applications. I also do the onboarding of the data into Splunk with the help of observability functionality.

If I focus on the observability part of the product, I see that it is an area that doesn't offer more integrations compared to what Splunk Cloud Platform or Splunk Enterprise offers. When it comes to the integrations with the other platforms, there is a little bit of a lag in the observability part, making it an area where improvements are required.

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for 5 years. My company has a partnership with Splunk.

It is a stable solution. Cisco has acquired Splunk recently, so I think it will be a more stable product in the coming days.

It takes a lot of time for the support team to resolve issues. In short, it takes a lot of time for Splunk's support team to troubleshoot an issue, meaning they are unable to resolve issues within a certain time frame. I rate the technical support a 6-7 out of 10.

The product's deployment phase was straightforward, especially compared to the ones I have dealt with in the past.

The solution is deployed on a hybrid cloud model.

For deployments starting from scratch, I deal with the documentation part. I prefer to look through Splunk's recommendations on the limits of how much the server configuration should be while trying to meet the configuration requirements of the consumer. In general, I deal with whatever configuration files are needed and how the consumers want to approach it, like if it should be a heavy forwarder or universal forwarder or if they don't want to directly ingest data to the indexer bypassing the heavy forwarder. Basically, I try to understand the consumer requirements before taking care of the deployment part.

For a limited deployment involving four to five servers, only a single person is required. If the deployment involves twenty to thirty servers, the number of people required to deploy the product will have to be increased depending on the requirements, and my company will also have to manage everything. The number of people required for deployment is based on the capacity at which my company plans to do the deployment.

My company has the entire Splunk Enterprise package, and we have many universal forwarders set up at fifty different locations. In around twenty locations, universal forwarders have been set up. My company also has fifteen indexes that directly send data to indexers. My company also has four heavy forwarders that collect information from applications like Azure. My company uses add-ons with the heavy forwarders in Splunk.

I was involved in the product's deployment phase.

My company has a license for Splunk Cloud Platform. My company also has a license for Splunk Enterprise. There are two packages that my company has access to when it comes to Splunk, and I am also aware of the configurations and setup phases related to the tool, from scratch to production.

Splunk Cloud Platform has improved our company's incident response time. For example, if any event is ingested into Splunk, within less than a minute, we trigger an incident to the end user based on the assignment group in ServiceNow.

There are many benefits attached to the tool in the areas of machine learning and predictive analysis. In Splunk ITSI, there is predictive analysis, which can be used for protection with the alert capabilities, especially if there is an alert storm coming up. My company can directly detect particular alerts from the trail to the attack and notify the end user about it. With the machine learning toolkit, my company does anomaly detection with the help of Splunk SIEM platform. With Splunk ITSI, my company does predictive analysis. The aforementioned area covers the two different platforms my company uses, along with two different approaches and the tool's machine learning capabilities.

My company interacts with our consumers. For example, if I am a consumer of Azure products, I would want to onboard all the data from Azure, even if it consists of user data. I recommend that more space be set on a particular index so that Azure data can be used. My company has all data related to Azure about its users and the changes if you have a license or if you have Azure Event Hubs, including any other things that it may have. I recommend more space in Azure, but if it is a network-related application like Aruba, I recommend that it has a little bit less space compared to Azure. The scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform can impact our company's data management, though I recommend the space required for a tool based on the use cases.

I am aware of the federated search features in the product. If a search is not running up, then my company needs to check whether any permission related to the search has any issue or if anything is going wrong, after which my company needs to check and fix those searches. I have not used much of the tool's federated search features.

My organization monitors multiple cloud environments with the tool's help. It is easy to monitor multiple cloud environments using the product. For example, if my company takes into account Splunk ITSI with service analyzers, then we define how one service is related to GCP. One service will be under the cloud services offered by Azure, while another service will be related to AWS. My company can divide the services based on locations and KPIs. My company monitors the total locations of the cloud so that we can get more insights from the service breakdown, which is why I recommend the use of Splunk ITSI. I used to work more with Splunk ITSI, a reason why I recommend it to others, as it is easy to understand and handle, even if you have 1,000 or 20,000 applications. With Splunk ITSI service breakdown, it is very easy to handle applications.

The visibility of the tool in multiple environments can be explained with the help of an example, where, if my company considers Splunk Cloud Platform, the visibility will be less compared to what we get from Splunk Enterprise. Splunk Cloud Platform is totally managed by Splunk's support team, so if anyone needs to do anything, my company needs to raise a request for a change in the tool, though we can modify a couple of services, like a couple of applications using ACS, which was introduced by Splunk. With ACS, if you want to update, create a token, or modify anything from the HEC token information, you can do it with the particular services offered by the solution. Considering the aforementioned area, I recommend that 30 percent of the work be done with ACS, and 70 percent of the work needs to seek assistance from Splunk's support team. Our company handles Splunk Enterprise, and we have 100 percent visibility on it compared to Splunk Cloud Platform.

The integration of the product with other services is possible. I have integrated it with ServiceNow, Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, and I can say that it has been okay till now. It is good to integrate Splunk Cloud Platform with other tools. If we take a cloud service like GCP into consideration as an example and say that it is not working properly, then there will be an incident directly assigned to the support team based on the integration with ServiceNow. If you want to notify all the consumers in a scenario where GCP is not working properly through particular notifications with Slack channel particular notifications, then one can inform all the thousand consumers in a particular company about it, and it is possible with a single integration.

My company uses the tool for alert reporting. For example, if the top management of an organization is looking for the availability of websites, especially a couple of websites that are critical to their applications, then my company monitors such applications with the data in the report from the last thirty days or seven days, to ensure that availability of a particular website is 100 percent. If anything goes wrong as per the reports from the previous seven days, then the availability is reduced to 80 or 95 percent, which is based on how much time it was down, and it will be then notified to the consumer or top management, stating that the availability got reduced, and how there is need to fix a couple of applications in the back-end so that the availability can be increased. The top management will be made aware of the things that have been going on for the last seven or forty days. In general, a report is good for notifying the top management or consumers so that they can make decisions or check if their licenses or server capacity needs to be increased. With the alerting report feature, my company can be confident that the top management or consumers know about a particular issue in the tool that we can fix as soon as possible, but there will be a cost involved in doing so every time. If the consumer or top management is aware of the issues in the tool with the help of the alerting report feature, then they can make a decision.

I am currently not aware of how the product has an impact on decision-making.

The product has helped my organization with data compliance and privacy regulations since we were able to set up the terms and conditions with Splunk. In general, it is good when it comes to the terms and conditions revolving around the security part.

Maintenance is required to upgrade the applications, so we need a downtime of no more than fifteen minutes.

The product offers value in terms of resilience. Whenever my company faces difficulties, it is the solution we use for all our monitoring purposes.

In terms of the extensibility of the product, I feel it is a good solution.

Everything is supported by Splunk support, though it may take some time to find and resolve certain issues. If Splunk's support team resolves issues within a certain time frame, I can provide a nine out of ten rating for Splunk's technical team. Splunk Enterprise is totally handled by our company, so I can give it a nine out of ten.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise to others, especially when compared to Splunk Cloud Platform. If any notifications are needed, it can be done with no downtime, and it can even be completed within a week. If we want Splunk's support team to do the same aforementioned procedure for our company, then it may take a little bit more time.

I rate the overall tool a 7-8 out of 10.

We use Splunk Cloud Platform to monitor our environment.

Monitoring multiple cloud environments is made easy with the Splunk Cloud Platform due to its fast ingestion and data recovery times.

Splunk's visibility into multiple environments is excellent. I have found that a hybrid environment works the best, as the login portion remains on-premises while the rest is in the cloud. This reduces the maintenance required on-premises.

There are two types of integration. The first involves bringing something into Splunk, while the second entails moving something out of Splunk. Bringing data into Splunk is relatively straightforward, with multiple options such as RAS, SysLog, and Splunk's built-in functions. However, exporting data from Splunk is more challenging and not as straightforward as the process of bringing data into Splunk.

Splunk Cloud Platform has influenced our decision-making processes. Splunk is primarily employed for security purposes; thus, it excels particularly in SIM. It encompasses an asset and identity framework that effectively gathers information about an organization's assets and individual identities, encompassing all users. Therefore, when considering Unified Business and SIM, Splunk proves to be highly proficient. 

The cloud performance is good.

Not having to perform any maintenance because it is handled by Splunk saves our administrators time which is valuable.

Splunk should offer various options for real-time monitoring. If we could enhance the speed of data ingestion or data retrieval, that would be an added advantage. Additionally, there is room for improvement in SaaS-to-SaaS integration. I believe that reintroducing HTML dashboards would be beneficial, as they provide dedicated web features. This, in turn, gives users the flexibility and freedom to create custom dashboards more easily.

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for five years.

I would rate the stability of the Splunk Cloud Platform as an eight out of ten. We still encounter some lagging and errors, but not as much as with the on-premises deployment.

I occasionally get in touch with Splunk technical support, usually regarding data onboarding. These include routine activities like installing or uninstalling applications, as well as making changes to existing ones. On average, we submit at least one ticket per week to them.

Positive

I have used many tools including Elastic, Grafana, Tableau, and Sumo Logic.

Splunk is indeed superior in many cases, but other tools are also making progress to catch up, with Elastic being one of them. They have begun developing their own SIM offering, complete with its own SIM features. Similar to Splunk Cloud, Elastic also has its Elastic Cloud Stack. Some of the features provided by Elastic seem to outperform Splunk. Therefore, there is room for Splunk to enhance these aspects. As for pricing, it could be more competitive, considering that other tools also provide the freedom to choose the Cloud Stack. Although Splunk offers this flexibility, the process often involves extensive discussions, making it less adaptable compared to other tools.

The initial setup is somewhat complex regarding the CI/CD pipeline, and Splunk manages the deployment. Splunk provides a feature called ACS, which enables us to manage the deployment ourselves if desired, but it's simpler to have Splunk handle the deployment on our behalf.

The deployment took around one month and required ten people from Splunk's DevOps team.

The implementation was completed by Splunk.

The pricing is high for small organizations. The cost makes more sense for organizations that have a large amount of data ranges.

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

There are numerous tools that offer real-time reporting and alerting capabilities. Splunk is indeed effective, but due to the prerequisite of registering logs beforehand, a delay is inevitably introduced. Therefore, while Splunk is suitable for real-time reporting alerts, it may not be as optimal as some alternative solutions.

Resilience has added value and contributed to the improvement of our organization. This is highly significant. In most cases, the SOC team relies on the tool for issue mitigation and ticket resolution. Therefore, it is crucial for Splunk to remain consistently up-to-date and respond as quickly as possible. This holds immense importance.

The extensibility is good, but there is room for improvement, especially in integrating certain logs. Enhancing the process of incorporating raised logs is possible. In most cases now there are limitations on log creation. Previously, a direct option existed to import logs. However, this process has been altered, requiring users to develop an add-on for log integration, leading to increased complexity. Furthermore, users are expected to have knowledge of Python. This can be problematic in cases where users lack such expertise. Therefore, this aspect could certainly be enhanced.

For those who want to evaluate Splunk, it comes down to the volume of data. If they are dealing with a substantial amount of data flowing into their SIM, Splunk would be the superior option. Splunk effectively manages extensive datasets in comparison to other technologies. It also offers numerous additional functionalities, such as an enterprise security suite, assets, and identity framework. Moreover, it has undergone industry testing and has been employed in the field for a considerable duration. In contrast to other organizations, they provide a wealth of features.

We're migrating our on-prem environment to Splunk Cloud Platform. We're consolidating two separate Spark clusters because of a merger. Our primary use case is for unifying all of that data into one place.

It's made searching for data easier. Users like it. We're still in the migration process, but overall, it's a lot easier to use.

It's important to use that Splunk has end-to-end visibility in our native environments. We have to have that visibility because we manage multiple app applications that rely on it.

Splunk helped to improve our organization's business resilience. That's very important to us. Our users rely on Splunk heavily for the health of their applications. It helps them to get ahead of issues, and if there is an outage, it enables them to resolve them faster.

Splunk gives the different application owners the ability to configure alerting specific to their needs so they can customize it however they want. If they know their applications better than you know, admins, I'll give them that flexibility.

The administration could use improvement. We have to rely on support more often than we're used to.

We have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for nine months.

Stability has so far been good. We haven't had any issues.

Their support is great, especially the agent that we have now. They're very responsive, willing to help out, and give suggestions.

Positive

We previously used Splunk Enterprise. We switched to Cloud Platform because we wanted to consolidate a couple of instances to one place and we're moving our security team to the cloud. 

I wasn't involved in the setup directly but I was aware of what they were doing. The setup is a little complex. We had some issues we had to deal with. Bringing both environments together and getting the different environments to communicate with Splunk Cloud was complex. We have a lot of data. Getting a handle on that before we were able to start sending data to the cloud was complex. 

It's expensive. We're still trying to figure out Cloud licensing. 

It's not so easy to monitor multi-cloud environments using Splunk. We have some difficulties, but we have some things in place, but it's not easy.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten. There's a lot we haven't tapped into yet, so the rating can go up.

We mostly use Splunk Cloud Platform for monitoring performance and looking for performance events.

We have seen many benefits of Splunk Cloud Platform, which is why we are still using it. With the alerting, we can find outages faster, and we can find performance impacts faster. We are then able to use them to diagnose and dig through our logs to find out what possibly caused it or look for a time when it happened to find a correlating deployment or something else that caused the problem.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. Splunk Cloud Platform is pretty good for monitoring multiple cloud environments. We have it all come into the same index irrespective of the system. Even though we have multiple data centers, everything comes into the same Splunk index, so we monitor it all in the same place.

Splunk Cloud Platform has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment, which is very important for us because otherwise, we would not be able to have the data or be able to diagnose and find issues.

We have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for a very long time. I do not even know a time without it, so it is hard to say how much it has reduced our mean time to resolve (MTTR).

Splunk Cloud Platform has improved our organization’s business resilience. We use it very heavily to look for issues that may arise. In terms of Splunk’s ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time, we mostly rely on our own searches. We do not rely on a lot of advanced observability features. We are mostly using our own alerts that we have written and our own dashboards.

Dashboards and alerting are the most valuable features. The dashboards let us see how the system looks in terms of anomalies, and the alerts trigger us to go and look at what possible problems are happening.

Its performance can be better. The searches sometimes take a long time. There could be better searches, but mainly, it needs to improve the performance with a vast amount of data. That will make it better and easier to use.

Their support can also be better.

I have been using this platform for 12 years.

Its stability has been very good. We have only had a few outages that I can remember where Splunk has been down.

Its scalability seems okay. Most of our issues come with our data storage. We are storing mass amounts of data, and it seems to handle that right now.

Their support has been lacking a little bit. We have several outstanding bugs that have not been fixed yet, and we are still waiting for Splunk to fix them. For example, we cannot use Splunk Mobile because of an issue with the authentication and what permissions are available. We have not been able to use Splunk Mobile since the new app. I have used the old apps, and I was quite disappointed when they were broken. I have never been able to use the new app.

I would rate them a seven out of ten. For emergency issues, they are good. For lower-priority issues, we are still waiting.

Neutral

I was not involved in its deployment.

I know that the company evaluated a few other solutions, but I have not been as involved in those. We are still using Splunk.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten because it does a good job at what it does. I wish I could use the mobile app, but the rest of it works very well.

The best value that I have received by attending Splunk conferences is finding out new things that I can do with my own job. Most of the time, it is disappointing because a lot of the new features have new applications that we have to buy, and I have no say in the purchase of new applications. However, there have been some new improvements in the applications that we already have, and I come for those updates. I am able to see if the new features in the existing applications are more useful to me.

We mainly use it for the purposes of analyzing application logs to get a bit of understanding of what is normal application performance and then use that to highlight errors and inconsistencies when they occur.

Resilience is incredibly important to us. We are in the medical field. It is insurance. When people are using our service, we should be able to provide that. Having that resilience is key for us because we are helping people. The resilience that Splunk offers has been valuable in that regard. There is peace of mind for us and our customers.

We have multiple cloud vendors that are being utilized in Splunk. It has been useful. Splunk is able to handle a lot of things out of the box. There is a good bit of value in being able to make sense of multiple types of logs in one environment and being able to cross-reference them. It has just taken a lot of effort out of that.

We have integrated it with other tools. At the moment, it has been with Cribl as a pipeline tool so that we can be agnostic with Splunk in some regards. Cribl handles the logs being sent to Splunk, and then from there, if there is anywhere else where we want to send them, Cribl can handle that too. That has been our main integration. The ease of integration varies. Splunk offers out-of-the-box support for some tools and applications. Integration with them has been quite simple. Other things have been a bit more difficult. Integration can be more difficult if it does not have a Splunk base, but there is a good range of things that are available out of the box.

Its reporting has been excellent. We have integrated it with tools like ServiceNow, so we are able to create an instance for teams and integrate it with our NOC. The reporting has been incredibly valuable.

I come from a monitoring background. I knew from the get-go the value that we could get from Splunk, but we actually started to see its value once we started enforcing logging standards. It made it very easy for us to validate if something was or was not following our standards.

It has been great from the compliance perspective. It began to show value to some of our customers when they were able to search multiple applications because of the standards and compliance built into it.

It has had an impact on the decision-making processes in our organization. It has been mainly around compliance. Given it is a financial and medical sector, decisions have been made around what information we are storing in the logs and how we are managing the data that comes directly from Splunk.

It has been good for helping our organization access data for compliance and privacy regulations. It has been useful for pinpointing things. We are able to ensure that we are abiding by those standards. It has been incredibly useful in that space.

Dashboarding has been very powerful. I work with a lot of different customers, so being able to tailor the data for different customers has been valuable. I am able to make visuals and have reports where they can self-serve.

It would be nice to see more comparisons between Splunk and other log management tools. There are some legacy tools that people are often coming off. It will ease the transition if you are coming off a Windows LogViewer or any other logging tool. Splunk could offer more advice on how to transition into it or onboard it.

I have been using this solution for two years.

I have not had any issues related to stability.

This is outside of my department, but it seems like it would be easy to scale up. However, there is a cost concern. That always seems to be the linchpin when people discuss Splunk. It comes at a cost.

When it comes to extensibility, they make it relatively simple, but it is an expensive tool. There are always going to be conversations that need to be had.

The quality of the answer has been good. We have had to leverage the support only a small number of times. We found the actual portal to get support difficult. Some members of the team were not able to raise certain types of requests. However, when we got through to support, we had no issues.

Neutral

Prior to Splunk, we had a mixture of things. LogViewer and Graylog were used. Some folks had their logs locally. There was not one central system. 

I was not directly involved in decision-making, but some of the things that I called out as useful were the analytical tools that Splunk offers. We can very quickly get to the root cause by using its query language. It provides a lot of power with little effort. That is what initially drew me to it.

Moving to Splunk allowed standardization. That is the key. It does not matter which part of the company you are from. Splunk has given us a mechanism to say that we expect the logs to look like this, and we all are going to abide by that. It has made standardization a lot easier. Previously, you would not know what you were getting while dealing with a logging problem.

I was involved in its deployment only in a small cluster. I was mainly involved in setting up standards around logging. It was challenging. It was dense, but it was manageable. The feature set of Splunk allowed us to know what we could or could not do.

The main part of maintenance is the ingestion of new logs. New teams and applications get stood up every day, or a new cloud vendor comes in, so there is some maintenance involved there.

We had Splunk technical support. We had a mixture of people from other departments. We had some folks from security, and we had some folks from operations. There were 15 regular faces and 2 Splunk contractors. We involved other teams on an ad hoc basis, but the core team had 15 people.

Overall, we had 20 to 30 people who directly worked with Splunk in some way or for some period of time. We also had to involve all of the teams to get their feedback and educate them on how to use Splunk.

I do not personally deal with that side, but from discussions, I know that it is one of the more expensive tools. I do not have anything to compare it with.

New users should focus on the Splunk free courses. They are an excellent resource. If you are a customer, you should take up the search and reporting classes. That is probably going to be what 99% of people are using it for day to day. If you are a sysadmin user or someone setting up the instance, there are free classes for managing licenses and ingesting data. I would highly recommend them. The free classes are a great start, and if you think it would be valuable, take some of the paid classes as well. They are incredibly detailed.

When it comes to security, we definitely have a stricter attitude when things are going to the cloud because they are not fully in our control. Going to the cloud is always a little bit scary, but we have put in a refined approach for the data going into Splunk.

I have not made much use of federated search. I have come across it, but it is not something I have leveraged.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. What it does, it does well, but I do have qualms with it here and there. There are obvious features that are missing from time to time, but I am happy with what is there.