Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

We implement Splunk Enterprise Security for our clients. It's a security tool that centralizes data in one location, so we can gain some insights from it. We can also use it to create alerts. For example, let's say we want to find an incident in real-time, but we can't sit in a single place and stare at the screen. We can create alerts that send us an email notification or automate a response. 

Splunk helped us reduce our alert volume because we could optimize our risk-based user analytics. I estimate that we decreased alerts by around 20 percent. Splunk Enterprise Security speeds up security investigations.  

Splunk's strongest suit is its user interface. We can integrate multiple solutions and adjust settings in the Splunk interface. It's easy to manage multi-cloud environments because we can use rules to segregate the data and restrict our clients from seeing each other's data. Splunk has a lot of plugins and add-ons that provide a lot of information about our cloud and on-prem environments.

Splunk's MITRE ATT&CK framework is excellent, but I haven't used it for investigation. I'm primarily involved in implementation and development. Splunk Enterprise Security is solid detection-wise and faster than many other SIEM solutions. 

We already have an antivirus solution in our environment, so Splunk detects viruses based on that. Once the antivirus detects something, it generates an incident in Splunk that we can investigate. The detection time depends on a few factors, but we can detect a threat in two to five minutes under ideal conditions. 

Splunk could improve its default machine-learning models. Also, Splunk Enterprise's native threat intelligence isn't that good. I prefer a custom threat intelligence model. 

We have used Splunk Enterprise Security for more than three years.

Splunk Enterprise Security has gone through multiple versions, so the product is mature and stable. It's currently on version 9. 

We can scale Splunk Enterprise Security horizontally or vertically. It isn't a problem. 

I rate Splunk support 10 out of 10. Splunk has better support than other vendors I've worked with. It's better than IBM support. 

Positive

We previously partnered with IBM and used QRadar as our SIEM. Splunk is faster, and I like the look and feel better. If you are looking for the cheapest solution, some free open-source SIEM solutions exist. They can do many of the same things that Splunk can do but maybe not at the same scale. 

One person can deploy Splunk Enterprise Security in 15 to 20 days, depending on the architecture. It takes less time to deploy on the cloud. The solution requires some maintenance. We need someone there to monitor it in case there are issues. Three people are responsible for maintaining Splunk. 

Splunk costs a little more than other SIEM solutions. It would be nice if they could bring the price down a little. 

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of 10.

The main use cases are with the firewall, DNS, and Windows events. These are the three basic ones to start with. Once they're done with all the compatibility and introductions, custom use cases will follow.

It's currently in the implementation phase. But, it will surely improve response time and make it easier to collect and check everything in one place. Instead of going to multiple dashboards and running multiple queries, all can be integrated into one dashboard. You can just click and then go drill down into deeper levels and get more information.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. It's very important because: 

1. This tool is used as SIEM implementation. End-to-end visibility is really important in such a case; if something is missed, it's an error. 
2. Also, we belong to the retail sector with over 700,000 employees. We have a lot of endpoints and everything is open, so end-to-end visibility is essential.

It helped our organization to ingest normalized data. With Windows, DNS, firewalls, and the open use cases we've checked, we've gotten more data in. The compatibility with the add-ons helps us add more data in the same compatible format and use data models to elaborate and make it faster.

The investigation dashboard provides a lot of value. In the same dashboard, we get all the drill downs, raw events, and information about what the particular user is doing or where the vulnerability started, all in the same dashboard.

It helps us reduce our mean time to resolve. Now, we can see all the incidents on a single dashboard and it could be assigned to the analysts at the same time on the incident review. People can start working on it right away, so it does reduce the mean time to respond.

Splunk's unified platform helps consolidate networking, security, IT, and IT observability tools. But our major focus or use case is more on the security side. We don't use observability, so we just use logs, matrices, and other security-related features.

Incident review is pretty valuable. You can have everything in one place, review it, and assign things to analysts, and they can work on it. 

We also have different teams segmented; it is not one team. So, we brought that using the teams method in Enterprise Security, which I think most people are not using. This way, different users have different dashboards or lists of incidents.

One thing is multi-tenancy, which is not currently not there. The concept of Enterprise Security assumes only one team using Splunk, but in many companies, including ours, that's not the case. We have multiple security teams operating under one umbrella, with different people using it for different smaller companies. If multi-tenancy could be incorporated, it would surely help us. 

We started with it last year. We integrated it last year, and the SOC team is now handling it. They're making it SIM compatible, introducing the first few use cases, and working with the data. 

So, we bought the license nearly a year ago, and started implementing it about six months ago.

Stability is there, but every release has some bugs. For example, in this release, indexes were down, searches were down, and the monitoring console wasn't working. So, it's a bit tough.

It's still being implemented, and a lot of work needs to be done. But, considering the pricing and everything, I would give it a seven out of ten. It does have a lot of use cases, but a lot of work has to be done beforehand. Our data wasn't totally SIEM compliant because we used prebuilt solutions and changed the data format.

We use Splunk Operator on Kubernetes, so it's not on-prem or Splunk Cloud. Customer support is not good at all.

For example, we upgraded the system on Saturday and raised an incident. With Operator, you can only raise a P3 incident, so we needed to escalate it and get the developers involved. Support cannot handle such cases. We always have to get the developers involved to get the issues fixed. This happened very recently. But it is very common; the support for Kubernetes is zero.  

The company didn't have a SIEM solution. It was more of SOAR, so we used FortiSIEM for that. We still use it. 

Setup is not that difficult. You just have to install the search head cluster and a normal app. Data normalization is the main thing required for Enterprise Security. SIEM compatibility is the most important thing. If it's not there, then it won't work.

The deployment of the solution is pretty simple, if your data is SIEM compliant. If not, then you need to make it SIEM compliant. Otherwise, you cannot use the solution.

We have a Splunk partner that helps us with integration and other stuff.

Pricing is a bit costly. It always is.

We considered a couple of other brands. We ran a couple of POCs with other enterprise tools.

Since we've been using Splunk for nearly four years, it was easier to incorporate Enterprise Security. We did try other SIEM solutions like Fortinet, but since Splunk was already there in place and had all of our normalized data, it made more sense to use Enterprise Security.

We use the solution to build correlation searches around insider threats and exultation of data. We also use it for DLP (data loss prevention) and to get more visibility on what's happening in our environment that could increase risk.

The solution's data aggregation has allowed our organization to unify a lot of inputs from various tools in one space and to be able to search from there.

The solution's most valuable feature is risk-based alerting, focusing on building out user risks for individuals throughout the enterprise.

It is important to our organization's security that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment.

Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to find any security event across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments is good. It's more about how you configure it and how well your company is equipped to provide and allocate resources to make the best use of the tool.

It has helped reduce our mean time to resolve.

The tool should include more real-world use case examples built out either through videos or in the community. These should not just be examples of how it can be implemented but of how previous solutions have been transitioned to new solutions and how they provide a different and better approach.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for one to three years.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a very stable solution.

The solution’s scalability is based on the cost.

Splunk Enterprise Security is just a tool you can use, and then it's really up to the customer how they leverage it best.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

We use it for alerting. It also helps our analysts triage.

It is our bread and butter and our day-to-day tool for the SOC. Besides alerting, just being able to do research and look through various logs to gather context around the alerts has been super valuable.

It is critical to us that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility. The place that you cannot see is from where you are going to get attacked.

We have a hybrid cloud environment with AWS and Azure. I am pretty confident in its ability to help us find any security event across our environment. We have put in time to feed Splunk Enterprise Security the data that we want to look at.

I am pretty happy with its ability to ingest data. When it comes to normalizing, my company could improve on that a little because we need to do more tuning of some of the data that we are ingesting. That is not much of an issue with Splunk Enterprise Security. That is more of an issue with how we are using it. We need to possibly do a little bit better in terms of how we utilize this tool.

I am pretty confident in its ability to identify and solve problems in real-time. If it has the data and you implement it properly, it will tell you what is wrong.

With risk-based alerting, we are now getting the right context for investigations. It definitely helps and speeds up the investigation. With risk-based alerting, I can see the chain of events. I can see what caused this to occur. I do not have a percentage, but I know my analysts are not getting the alerts that they have not completed by the end of the shift. Previously, that was not the case, so I am pretty pleased.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s business resilience.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps to identify and solve problems in real-time, but I do not know if it can also predict the problems in real-time.

I am enjoying our implementation of risk-based alerting. That has helped very much with cutting out a lot of the noise that we have. It has reduced our alert volume significantly. There is about an 80% reduction.

I do not like the pricing model. It is expensive.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for about five years.

I have not had issues with its stability.

It is pretty scalable. It also depends on what you are ingesting, but it does a good job with our data.

I do not use the support that often. Normally, when I am looking for help, I just search on the web. If I am trying to build something and I do not remember the command, it is pretty easy to find.

I have used logging solutions. I find Splunk easier to use than other solutions such as LogStack.

With any such tool, the alert quality that you will get is based on the data that you are feeding it. If you are parsing logs and doing a good job with that, the outcome is good.

I did not deploy this instance, but I deployed it in my last company. It was not as bad as I thought. It was comparable to some of the other product rollouts in the environment.

It is expensive, but it is a good tool.

It is worth the cost. I have worked with organizations that did not want to invest in a security tool. I am glad that we are taking security a little more seriously in this organization.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a ten out of ten. I enjoy it. I like it.

When we identify a threat in the environment, we try to track down whether it has moved from one system to another or there is any lateral movement. When we are trying to figure out how it got started and where it came from, we use Splunk to identify those logs. Palo Alto is our biggest index for the firewall, and we can look into those logs, see the relevant data, and correlate it into something that makes sense, so we can track down the problem.

For the most part, it makes it easier to read the index data. Instead of trying to look through an individual index, all the logs, and other aspects, it brings everything to one area. I can look at the relevant data that I need to identify the threat.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our mean time to resolve. I do not have the metrics, but I know it is faster compared to the old way of doing it. Previously, we had to go through Windows logs and security logs. We had to go through each log to figure out what happened. I can pull all of the information way faster with Splunk Enterprise Security. I can look at multiple systems.

Splunk's unified platform has helped consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools.

Splunk Enterprise Security brings all the logs into one central location to look at the relevant data and filter out the things I do not use. We are able to see the logs of multiple systems, the logs of the firewall, and the logs of the DNS and the Windows servers. It is able to bring all of that together and give a nice, solid picture of what is happening. We can read those logs faster.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into the environment. It is very important for our organization to be able to see the threats, understand the threats, and figure out how to stop those threats. That is the importance of it. We are a casino. After what happened last year with two casinos in terms of hacking, we want to be able to stop that from happening to us. We learned a lot of lessons from what happened to the other two casino properties, and we applied them to a lot of our tools. Splunk Enterprise Security gives us a heads-up a lot faster.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped improve our organization’s business resilience.

Its alerting is most valuable. We have alerts set up in our environment for certain attacks, such as an SQL injection attempt. We have a front-facing server for the website. It is out there, and anybody can access it. When those SQL injection attempts come in, we can detect that with the alert. We get the alert in our mailbox, so we can start looking at it right away. Generally, with a SQL injection attempt, there is way more to it than just the SQL injection. There could be another 15 or 20 different types of attacks attempted during the injection. They are just trying to see if there is any vulnerability, and then they can take a shot at it.

I do not have any pain points for Splunk Enterprise Security. I am still trying to learn it, but there can be more information on the education side for Splunk Enterprise Security. It would be nice if the certification path was more specific to what I use instead of being so broad.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for about six months.

Besides the forwarder, it is nice. The forwarder ran out of space, so it occasionally has to be rebooted to clear out the space that is being utilized.

We have 50 gigs of data.

I never really had to use professional services. For the most part, everybody is knowledgeable and patient, and there is a decent amount of communication back and forth.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten. My biggest issue right now has not been solved yet. Our heavy forwarder ran out of space. It is a VM. By using vCenter, we presented more space to the drive, but we could not get the VM or the Linux OS to allocate the new space. So far, nobody has been able to help us fix that. The current solution is to just upgrade it. We are not in a position to upgrade it right now because of the workload.

Positive

I changed my career last year to InfoSec. I was in IT before that. With IT, if there is a problem with the system, we just look at the logs. With Splunk, it is nice to be able to have it all centralized in my location where I can look at the data relatively fast as opposed to a line-by-line.

I was not involved in its setup. We have a bit of a hybrid setup. We have an on-prem data center and then we also have a cloud. We have Azure Cloud.

I would say that we have seen an ROI, but I do not know the numbers.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a ten out of ten.

I use the solution for data analysis and log collection. 

Splunk Enterprise Security helps with advanced reports and keeps the system scalable and flexible. It provides a clear picture of the current status of any incidents. As a CISO, I see a lot of potential for future innovation, which is interesting. I've noticed better performance, especially with the reports.

Splunk Enterprise Security can provide more details and help CISOs resolve vulnerability situations better. The reason is that the tools we choose for data analysis and log collection cannot collect all the data and logs. Splunk Enterprise Security should help me with this, but it cannot.

I have been working with the product for four years. 

Splunk Enterprise Security's stability is very good. The system consistently performs well, and we don't encounter many issues. Ticketing problems are minimal, which is significant because it handles a lot of logs and data persistently without causing frustration.

The tool's customer support is good. 

Positive

We chose Splunk Enterprise Security because it was simple and had better data analysis capabilities. 

A reseller helped us with the deployment. 

The tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it. 

I haven't used it for multi-cloud environments. As for on-premise, it's meeting my current needs quite well. When it comes to identifying and solving problems in real time, sometimes it's challenging to understand the situation, and generating reports can be difficult. But overall, it's good for monitoring activities like endpoint and authentication incidents and normalizing.

The solution has helped us reduce alerts by five to ten percent. It processes data and allows us to look back at incidents to see what happened and where they occurred.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for continuous monitoring, ensuring compliance, and advanced threat protection.

Splunk Enterprise Security allows our customers to view their decentralized infrastructure from a single pane of glass.

Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities are good.

The actionable intelligence provided by the threat intelligence management feature is effective. The solutions are integrated into the platform, and customers receive operational insights.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework's ability to help our customers discover the overall scope of an incident is high.

Splunk Enterprise Security is good for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps our customers detect threats faster.

Splunk Enterprise Security is able to process a huge amount of data without any issues. Our customers can see the benefits two to three months after deployment.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped our customers reduce their alert volume by 40 to 50 percent.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped speed up our customer's investigation time by 60 to 70 percent.

Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by including backup network detection and response and safe management to the paid platform.

Splunk Enterprise Security's price is high and could be lowered.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The technical support response time is delayed and they can take two to three days to respond sometimes.

Neutral

The initial setup can be complex for customers who require advanced configurations and customizations, but it is straightforward for basic usage.

The deployment process is simple. We first identify the platform and determine if it is a unique system. Then, we define the virtual environment. After installing Splunk's platform, we perform the necessary configurations and other tasks. Splunk Security Essentials is a premium add-on for this tool, which is installed on the Splunk Enterprise platform.

The number of people required for the deployment depends on the customer's requirements and the use case they are developing. For example, if the customer needs to gather data from their network, we will need to add network experts to the project. However, if we already have experts who are familiar with the API and application connectivity, we may not need to add any additional people. Ultimately, the number of technical resources required will depend on the specific needs of the project. On average, we require four to five technical people for deployment.

Splunk Enterprise Security's price is high. I would rate the cost as ten out of ten, with ten being the most expensive.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

There are many cheaper solutions available on the market but Splunk Enterprise Security is worth the cost.

Two people are required for maintenance.

The value Resilience offers our customers is good.

The primary use case is security and data analytics. In general, we manage and maintain it for our customers.

Application-wise, it's good. Searching and reporting of data analytics is also fine. The dashboard presentations are also a good feature. Overall, its functionality is great and that's why we use it.

I would like additional support for custom add-ons, as well as cloud integration. Right now we have concerns because we have to customize applications for direct integration. But on-prem, it is all functional. We have to build it on our own. Previously, they developed custom connectors or add-ons for a lot of applications. But that number can be upgraded still. There are a lot of applications in the world that are not supported.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for over two years. I received Splunk certification six years ago.

The stability of the functionality is good, but there are still bugs that keep hindering things. I am waiting but they are there and that is quite common. I think they have not yet been resolved from the older versions. The stability is a seven-plus out of 10.

It's scalable for all environments. Splunk Cloud can be scaled to a small or medium company, depending on their inputs or log resources. Businesses at the high end of medium-sized, and large companies, can go with the on-prem solution.

The technical support is good. 

However, there is a lot of delay nowadays. The last time we raised a case, it took quite a long for them to come back with their first response. That's not for a P1 or P2, but if it is a P3, they don't respond at the earliest. When they respond, it is quite late and we have to ask again. The first response is never an answer. It's always a query.

Still, the people I have worked with there are all an eight-plus out of 10.

Positive

It can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud. With the latter, it is Splunk's own cloud. 

The deployment of the solution is straightforward, but there is a lot of engineering activity involved in designing the architecture. Architecture-wise, it is fine, and bringing things together is not that tough, but maintaining and managing it is a tough job because we don't work in a normal environment. We work on something that is very defined to the network. That means we have to build everything from scratch and deploy it.

The implementation strategy depends on how the customer wants things done. But in general, I go through research and then develop and design. I ask the client what sort of environment is flexible or cost-effective for them. It's done in stages. It's a matter of understanding the infrastructure and then implementing,  or designing and handing it over to them.

If there are 1,000 log sources, it takes six months to a year to deploy, depending on how the customer is supporting the process.

Every on-prem solution involves maintenance, including keeping things upgraded, whereas Splunk Cloud is managed by the vendor. The number of people involved in on-prem maintenance depends on the size of the environment and how long our update window is. For example, if we have a green zone at midnight for three hours, and we want to upgrade at least 20 to 30 servers, it will take eight to 10 people working in parallel. But for a very small environment of 10 servers, it will take four people to manage it, or if we have a large window, even three people can do it.

We do it ourselves.

The pricing depends on the bandwidth of an organization and is good compared to some SIEM tools. IBM, for example, is quite costly. But Microsoft Sentinel is notably cheaper. I have seen a lot of organizations running on Sentinel.

IBM is for quite large organizations that don't want to have their data on the cloud. Splunk has both on-prem and cloud modules and, cost-wise, Splunk is better. Internally, we cannot push everything to the cloud. That would become too expensive for us. So we have it sitting in our data center and that is good.

I have worked with a number of other solutions including RSA enVision, IBM QRadar, as well as Microsoft, McAfee, and LogRhythm. 

If we want to build an add-on feature in Splunk, we have to build an application and then integrate it. But in other applications, there is a direct integration that only requires partial development and it will start functioning.

Also, there is something called correlation in a lot of other tools. Splunk also has it but it consumes a lot of memory. If we tag all the data, it is better, but tagging consumes storage and it makes it a little tough for us to run a search. 

If we want to work towards SOAR, if there were a little bit more integration so that our customers could taste SOAR, they could then move to Splunk Phantom or other tools. Right now, people are not using automation. Everything is done manually. Hopefully, that's the next goal. Security operations will surely use SOAR and, once they start tasting it, they'll get to know how it works. They can design playbooks and start using it. That's an additional feature I would like Splunk to bring in. 

Splunk's advantage is its search capability. Its search is notably faster. With Splunk, I can search easily on keywords. That is great. It also has something called "stats" and it runs much faster. Within minutes, it gives the data from a very large set. Spunk's dashboards are also a very good thing. No other application or tool is as versatile in presenting the dashboard. It all comes down to presentation. It may take a little bit of engineering work to develop and customize, to parse the fields and fetch the data, but the presentation is good.