We have integrated different tools to get files from various types of endpoints. We also have Check Point. There are a few Windows use cases for brute force and code block attacks, and we use Splunk to detect when a user is logging in from another country where we don't do business. Splunk is integrated with our AWS environment, so we ingest logs from Amazon CloudTrail, GuardDuty, and other solutions.
Information Security Analyst at Apcfss
The threat intelligence provides insight into how business decisions can make an organization vulnerable to cyber attacks
Pros and Cons
- "Without Splunk Enterprise Security, it would be difficult for us to manage and prioritize alerts. There's a potential to lose track of important notifications, and it's essential to our security that we do not miss anything. Splunk has improved our investigations because the reporting and dashboarding make things so much easier. We can provide weekly or monthly reports. I also like Splunk's ability to integrate."
- "Integrating tools and creating use cases could be easier. It's hard for a junior security engineer with only a couple of years of experience to write use cases. They can do it, but it's much easier in a solution like IBM QRadar. Setting conditions is like a multiple-choice type of thing. It's a more user-friendly process."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
Without Splunk Enterprise Security, it would be difficult for us to manage and prioritize alerts. There's a potential to lose track of important notifications, and it's essential to our security that we do not miss anything. Splunk has improved our investigations because the reporting and dashboarding make things so much easier. We can provide weekly or monthly reports. I also like Splunk's ability to integrate.
We can fine-tune our alerts to reduce false positives or low-priority alerts. It reduces the time our admins spend on responding to alerts by one or two hours weekly. We can alter the policies, do geoblocking, and add certain applications and IPs to our allowed list.
What is most valuable?
Splunk covers our cloud and on-prem environments. We were exclusively on-prem, but we are slowly moving into the cloud. Our developers can customize investigations by adding multiple interesting fields and aggregate those details in Enterprise Security by using the appropriate SQL queries.
We use Splunk's threat intelligence management feature, which provides insight into how business decisions can make an organization vulnerable to cyber attacks. All of these things fall under tactical threat intelligence. For example, it can tell us if someone is accessing our organization's API.
We have integrated all our tools so that we can monitor any alert type, but we use Splunk primarily for investigations. We're ingesting audit, security, application, and Windows logs. Once we get an alert, we go to the tool and investigate further
Splunk uses the MITRE ATT&CK framework, giving us new tactics and techniques based on issues observed in other businesses and industries and helping us to address novel threats to our network. MITRE ATT&CK is highly useful.
What needs improvement?
It's a little difficult to archive data in Splunk for longer than six to eight months. Integration is more challenging compared to other tools we've used, such as LogRhythm.
Integrating tools and creating use cases could be easier. It's hard for a junior security engineer with only a couple of years of experience to write use cases. They can do it, but it's much easier in a solution like IBM QRadar. Setting conditions is like a multiple-choice type of thing. It's a more user-friendly process.
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Enterprise Security
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about Splunk Enterprise Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used Splunk Enterprise Security for nearly a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate Enterprise Security nine out of 10 for stability. Splunk is solidly stable. We've rarely experienced a crash requiring us to rebuild cases.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Our organization has around 1,000-1,500 groups, and Splunk works fine for us.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Splunk support nine out of 10. Their support team is excellent. We schedule calls with them when we have issues. They typically rectify any problems in eight to 12 hours. At most, it will take a week to fix an issue.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have worked with LogRhythm, and I think Splunk's interface is much better. It's more attractive and has a more interesting feel, so I think it makes things easy for our analysts.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of 10. Splunk is useful for compiling all types of logs for investigation and monitoring purposes. I can recommend Splunk for people if they are comfortable with the deployment and integration. While integration is easier with solutions like QRadar or LogRhythm, Splunk is better for everything else.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Technical Associate at Positka
Multiple components are very useful, providing us with a lot of security information for our clients
Pros and Cons
- "It gives us good visibility into multiple environments, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid; irrespective of platform."
- "One issue is that we are getting a lot of false positives. We are trying to reduce them by customizing the default rules, changing thresholds, and using white-listing and black-listing. It's getting better and better as a result. But they need to build components that would reduce the false positives."
What is our primary use case?
We use it to provide both operational and security dashboards based on our clients' equipment. We use it for infra monitoring and threat analysis.
We have multiple rules for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. We get the notable events from the logs and from there we drill down into the cause. We correlate that with the framework and get a score. Based on that, we proceed to the investigation.
How has it helped my organization?
It gives us a complete correlation between data processes and security threats. It has threat analysis and the MITRE ATT&CK framework. From a SOC perspective, it uses multiple components or frameworks and, in that way, is very useful, providing us with a lot of information for our clients. They don't want multiple teams dealing with security and malware, et cetera. Splunk Enterprise Security gives us everything in one place.
We get all the real-time logs and, based on the configuration, it's pretty easy to use to find threats. It has helped to speed up our security investigations. Before we went with Splunk Enterprise Security we had limited information but now we have threat intelligence to enhance things.
We are now handling multiple customers globally. We are able to build custom rules based on customer requirements and the applications and data they are using. It is enhancing the security of each customer's infrastructure. We are able to provide weekly and monthly reports and, based on that, our customers are honing their firewalls and other security infrastructure. Splunk Enterprise Security is very helpful in improving the security of our clients.
What is most valuable?
It gives us good visibility into multiple environments, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid; irrespective of platform.
The UI is also very friendly. You don't have to work very hard to find things.
What needs improvement?
One issue is that we are getting a lot of false positives. We are trying to reduce them by customizing the default rules, changing thresholds, and using white-listing and black-listing. It's getting better and better as a result. But they need to build components that would reduce the false positives.
Also, we have a lot of security feed providers. If there was some kind of management tool for that, it would be a great tool to have.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Splunk for about four and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I started working with Splunk Enterprise Security at version 6 and now we are up to 9 and it needs more resources. But it's okay because we have a lot of functionality now. It's better than it was earlier. I would rate the stability at nine out of 10.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Splunk on the cloud is scalable, a 10 out of 10.
How was the initial setup?
If someone is doing the deployment for the first time, it will be a little complex. The installation is straightforward, but for the configuration, you need to follow the documentation and understand it. That is a little difficult the first time if you are doing it on your own. If you have anyone with experience who can explain the configuration, the second time it will be straightforward.
The solution requires maintenance but not much, mostly when there are upgrades
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Most of the companies we work with are keen on budgeting. They can't spend much on security. Their problem is with the cost. They would like to have it but the problem is the budget. If they got a taste of Splunk Enterprise Security and its benefits, they might be able to cope better. A 15-day trial doesn't give them much hands-on or benefit from the tool. From a security perspective, they would need to have it for six months or a year to get a sense of it.
We try to explain, to someone who is concerned about the cost, the functionality and how powerful the application is. Security people know it's better to have a better solution, but management has to look at the budget.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We tried some other solutions, but they didn't work like Splunk. We found that Splunk is the best one.
What other advice do I have?
We work on multiple cloud environments including AWS, Azure, GCP, and most of the popular clouds. We have built our own combined app to monitor most of the cloud service providers. We have our own solution for cloud security monitoring.
My advice is that for big firms, because it has better detection and security, Splunk Enterprise Security is a very good tool. For big companies, good security is important, especially if they have a global market.
I don't see any other software having as much functionality and different ways to investigate security.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Enterprise Security
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about Splunk Enterprise Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Director of Security Engineering and Operations at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helps us reduce the volume of alerts we receive and speed up our security investigations
Pros and Cons
- "The varied prebuilt feature is the most valuable because it ensures that we have complete coverage over all of the key questions."
- "It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk."
What is our primary use case?
We use Splunk Enterprise Security as our primary security event manager. We collect data from various log sources into our Splunk SIEM to build context around what is happening in our environment. We then use the capabilities of Splunk Enterprise Security and other tools to enrich this data and help us manage the data, events, and detections.
How has it helped my organization?
Splunk Enterprise Security helps us focus on security. It provides us with data and a number of pre-built learnings that allow us to view the content in very useful ways. We can apply filters to the data to get more value out of it. This is the primary use case for Splunk Enterprise Security: to help us analyze and leverage the content we have.
Monitoring multiple cloud environments can be relatively easy, but it depends on the vendors. There can be challenges, such as ensuring that all of the data is ingested and aligned correctly. This is because vendors, especially in the cloud, can change their log formats at any time. Additionally, some vendors may not provide the same log feeds in the cloud as they do with on-premises solutions. As a result, it is important to be aware of these potential challenges and to take steps to mitigate them.
Splunk Enterprise Security provides reasonable visibility into multiple environments by harnessing the power of Splunk and the data it ingests to unify and provide a consistent view.
Splunk Enterprise Security's threat detection can help our organization find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior. We are early adopters of the user behavior piece, so we are still working to normalize our data. Splunk is working with developers to ensure that they can intake our data. We use Windows Log Forwarding for a lot of our host-based logs. We are leveraging this with an on-premises GPO. The gathering mechanism is a little bit different than what Splunk has seen, but it is still within the realm of acceptable. We are working through this issue.
We have a few different STIX and TAXII feeds that are being processed by the Threat Intelligence Management feature. We are members of a few different organizations that provide these feeds, and we use them as needed. The feeds also feed into some of our security products.
Actionable intelligence provided by Threat Intelligence Management is valuable, but it is important to be aware of its limitations. Threat intelligence can help organizations to correlate and build context around security events, but it is important to remember that the information provided is often brittle and can change quickly. For example, an IP address that is associated with a threat actor today may be used by a legitimate user tomorrow. Additionally, some threat intelligence feeds may be contaminated with false positives, which can lead to false alarms. It is important to carefully evaluate the quality and reliability of the threat intelligence before taking any action. Organizations should also have a process in place to verify and validate any threat intelligence before using it to make security decisions.
Splunk Enterprise Security is a valuable tool for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. I am glad we added it to our security stack. Previously, we ran for a year or so without it, and while we had some capabilities, we were truly missing out on some things by not having Enterprise Security. It definitely added value for us, and I would not go back to not having it. I think it has been a solid addition to our security posture.
Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats faster, but the lion's share of the work is still in the process of customizing it to our needs. Taking enterprise security and modifying it to apply to our needs is where we see the biggest bang for the buck. From that perspective, it is probably better for us.
A lot of the prebuilt capabilities in Splunk Enterprise Security are extremely beneficial because they cover all the use cases. I think another important aspect is the consistency of their approach and how methodical they are. This is very helpful because it sets a structure for how we view our data and what we can leverage from it. This page clearly drives us to what is happening and what we need to do, and it has a workflow associated with it. This also helps to reinforce the process. When we deal with security issues, this can always be a challenge. We are dealing with a fire drill, and we need to be able to react. We don't want to make mistakes, and it is easy to do so if we are trying to wing it. However, the structure of this approach helps to reinforce that. I think this is another area that is beneficial in terms of the workflow and how it approaches what it does.
Splunk Enterprise Security helps us reduce the volume of alerts we receive. However, we still have to take action on a number of items. Splunk Enterprise Security helped us to do this by ensuring that our input data is accurate and reliable. We are still evolving and maturing in our use of Splunk Enterprise Security, and we believe that it will continue to help us to reduce the volume of alerts we receive and improve our security posture.
Splunk Enterprise Security helps speed up our security investigations to a degree. The workflow is improved, and when we encounter an incident, we can take ownership of it, manage it, dive into individual facets of it, run queries, and expand on them. It makes some items easier to access or understand.
What is most valuable?
The varied prebuilt feature is the most valuable because it ensures that we have complete coverage over all of the key questions. By seeing how others analyzed the data, we can develop new dashboards and approaches. It is always helpful to see how someone else used a tool to spark ideas about how we can enrich our items based on our specific needs. This feature covers a lot of our core general questions and is helpful, but it also allows us to see what someone who is really focused on this area has done and how we can tune and tweak it to our needs.
What needs improvement?
It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk. This includes making sure that the log feeds are aligned correctly so that when we look at data and alarms, everything makes sense. Sometimes, I see alarms that are caused by data sources that have snuck in. For example, if my firewall says something about AV, it might get mapped into antivirus. This can happen because firewalls are multipurpose devices, and they can end up in models that aren't really applicable. Part of the problem is the infrastructure within Enterprise Security with how they group data types. For example, authentication data, firewall data, network data, and user-based data are all gathered in different ways. This can lead to confusion, especially when multifunction devices are involved. For example, if a firewall says that antivirus is not enabled, it might still detect something as if it was antivirus-related. This can blur the incidents and the information we have. It is important to identify items that creep in or issues that need to be cleaned. This will help us identify problem areas and their root causes more effectively and quickly. We can then clean up the data model, make sure the lines are correct, and get higher-quality alarms.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for over a year. We have used Splunk as a security SIEM for at least three to four years.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used free Splunk apps.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I believe that Splunk Enterprise Security is worth the price, but it is expensive. I am always trying to balance the need for security with the need to be cost-conscious.
What other advice do I have?
I give Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.
Using a SIEM is not cheap, no matter how you slice it. So, the first question I would ask is, what are we trying to do with our SIEM? In my opinion, Splunk, including ES shines when we are willing to invest in learning and modifying our SIEM, our solution, and our environment to align it with what we do and how we do it. If we are willing to make that investment to contextualize the security and visibility, then Splunk is a tool that can help us do that. If we are looking for a turnkey solution, where we can just throw logs at something and then pull the arm of the slot machine and get things out, then Splunk is not necessarily the right tool for us. We can get there, but it will be a pricey slot machine. I think we will get the most value out of Splunk if we want to get things that are more contextual to us. We may need to enhance or build off of the Splunk dashboards that ES includes, and that will help us to create dashboards that are extremely relevant to our environment. If we are comfortable with creating Splunk queries, then we will have a lot of power at our fingertips.
To those looking into the solution, I would ask: What are they looking for? What are they willing to invest in? Do they want to understand queries? Do they want to build the knowledge around how to structure them? Are they willing to put in the effort to get the real power out of it, or are they expecting something to tell them what is going on? They need to realize that it is never going to be built for them at that point. So they are going to be getting something generic. They have to consider their specific situation, such as how many people they have on their team, etc. They should also probably take a good stock of what they are trying to log and how long they have to retain it. I have been very happy with our Splunk Cloud instances. They have been very reliable. I think it has been incredibly powerful for us. I think that is also another aspect of whether they are going to have their SIEM in their environment or outside of their environment. They need to think about some of these items. Obviously, Splunk can go either way. They have to make their decisions there. We have been very happy with our Splunk Cloud instance. So that's what's been really good for us. And, also, it takes some of the administrative aspects and puts them on somebody else. That's valuable for us too.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Director, Information Technology at a government with 501-1,000 employees
Offers complete visibility into the environment, centralize management but latency issues when using cloud services
What is our primary use case?
We have an engineering team working on the back end to receive data, they do data modeling, and create dashboards. That's been pretty useful.
How has it helped my organization?
Splunk Enterprise Security helped our organization a lot. In the past, we relied on every single product that had its own kind of audit trail information. We needed to go and look for it, for example, in the Windows environment. We have to use the event viewer a lot to look for certain things, like system applications and security logs. In Linux, we have to use the log file, and under certain applications in the Linux environment, we have to look at the logs for that as well.
That's just part of the operating system. It is not the infrastructure, like network devices. When we centralize logs, we put everything in one location.
Our advanced users can do the SPL query anything they want. Executives or higher-up management users need to look for certain things, like how many systems are missing patches for this month or who logged in today from where, what they did, and how often they re-authenticated to the systems.
We have a lot of data from businesses, data from our devices, and more. When we put it all in the ES, it gives us the ability to look at certain functions. It provides more insight into our data, where it's traveling from, between endpoints, and what they're doing with it.
We also look into performance. We use other monitoring tools as well, and that data is also piped into Splunk. We have a centralized platform that we can navigate to look for everything we need rather than having to go to each individual system, like Cisco Syslog or we have to go to the Forcepoint console to look for it. It is a centralized platform that gives us more insights into our data or what's happening in general.
It is very important that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment because, at any given point in time, we want to know what's happening to the data. Data privacy is the primary concern. We want to make sure that authorized users get access to what they are authorized to so that data would not leak out or travel from a different path. Again, we get a lot of data in there. We understand more about our data to improve the business in certain aspects.
We know that during certain times of the day, a lot of people access a server or website.
Then it'll give us more insight about where we need more network bandwidth or where we need to upgrade network devices. We understand more about our data, like how many people access the data lake house. And that's just for performance.
On the security side, we would know who's accessing it from where. Are they authorized to do so, or is there any weird access pattern in locations that they're not supposed to be in?
So again, we get the data, we centralize it, and we can do data mining. We can pull out anything from there rather than looking all over the place, like, "I want to find out if he's working today if someone's using his account, or from which devices he accessed data from two different places."
From Splunk Enterprise, we can either do it manually or have our engineers create an audit dashboard. Or, if you are an advanced user, you can do SPL queries that will give you anything you need.
The alert volume depends on the users. If they do what they're supposed to, then there's nothing to talk about. If not, it's more or less on how you manage the data, educate your users, and control your system. Based on that, Splunk might play zero, fifty percent, or seventy-five percent role.
In a way, it has helped improve our organization's business resilience. It's a way for us to predict the pattern of data access and other things going on.
Knowing a way to do that, if we have enough resources to do it, is fine because we have so much data, but no one's really monitoring it. If we get alerts in the middle of the night and we don't have anyone to handle it, it's not going to help.
It's another aspect that we worry the most about, where our data is floating.
Now that we've centralized our log information into Splunk, we want it to be secured well because now users can predict a pattern of data access from where, and from whom.
What is most valuable?
We put all of our logs and data into Splunk, like network switches, firewalls, and web-based protection. In general, every component within the infrastructure sends data to Splunk.
Then, we have an engineering team transforming, manipulating, and analyzing the data to create a front-end dashboard in a meaningful way.
What needs improvement?
With the new announcement of version eight, it's going to give us a single point-and-click. On the front page there, that will give us a whole lot of information that we need to look into on the right panel without navigating down or going to more details, clicking here and there.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using it for quite a few years now.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The solution of choice depends on the engineers and teams. If they manage Linux, they're comfortable with certain tools to read the logs. In a Windows environment, it depends on the engineers. They favor any certain tool; they would do it, but it would be to cut down costs and consolidate all the software strings.
Splunk was not that big years ago. But then we started seeing that they put more investment into it and made the tool more useful.
How was the initial setup?
We're not using the cloud version yet. This is just the enterprise product on-premises.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Splunk can improve the pricing. People like certain features, and sales use the features that they provide, the automated features, to hook customers into paying for the big-price license.
Everyone does it, like Microsoft and Cisco. Initially, you try out the free version, but once you get it in your shop and turn it into production, you start relying on it and don't want to get out. You start paying a lot more for it.
What other advice do I have?
Splunk is on the right path. It's good, but it does not provide everything that we need. There's a lot more to it. I look at it as ideal for detecting in real-time, but we're always behind and just look at the log information.
If you have a network device, a Splunk Enterprise instance, and you have to send data to it. You're relying on network connections.
If you're using a cloud service or anything where Splunk is not on-premises, there's high latency. If that network connection is down, that's it. You don't know what's going on. So even if you have it on-prem, you're still relying on it after the fact.
When you look at Splunk, you're looking at things that have already happened. It's nothing that's actively going out there and doing something for you.
If you had to give it a number, from one to ten, since they've gone this far, I'd give it a five or six. Because locking or monitoring is just a part of business, and how you're going to receive those alerts and act on them is another part of it, when I look at the overall infrastructure and infrastructure management.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jul 11, 2024
Flag as inappropriateSystem Engineer at Tara
Easy to maintain, with good alerts and fast threat detection
Pros and Cons
- "The alerts are very effective."
- "We'd like Splunk to reduce false positives."
What is our primary use case?
We are using the solution for security. We can use it to track what has happened in our network. We can check via dashboards and alerts. We can use it for load balancing and high-performance tasks. We use it to analyze data and logs. It normalizes logs and we can detect attacks, such as brute-force attacks. We can receive information from our firewall, our Fortigate. Since we receive a lot of traffic, we have to investigate events using the solution. It provides updates on attacks. The solution helps us report on what happens in our network.
What is most valuable?
We use Splunk for security and tracking what happens on our network and it is effective at that.
We like the big data analyzer.
The dashboard and alerts are good. We can use them for monitoring to see what’s happening on our network. It’s centralized. It gives us good visibility into multiple environments. We can use it in Windows, Linux, et cetera.
We can use platforms and integrate everything together. We can see multiple environments on-premises.
When something happens, we get alerts via SMS or email.
We use the MTTR attack feature and it is very effective to use for detecting threats.
We can also schedule reports on a monthly or weekly basis.
It’s very useful for tracking. If you can look at the steps and see what happens, you can investigate effectively, and so on.
Splunk Enterprise Security is excellent for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. We can see, step by step, what happened. We can escalate and investigate and so on.
Splunk has helped us detect threats faster. The alerts are very effective.
It helped to reduce alert volume. I’m not sure precisely how much, however, it depends on how many client devices you are tracking and analyzing.
Splunk is a suitable resource for collecting logs.
What needs improvement?
The threat intelligence management feature is something we cannot use.
We'd like Splunk to reduce false positives.
It would be helpful to be able to configure everything a bit more. If your network is very big, it's important to customize.
The dashboard could be improved so that tracking and analysis could be better visualized.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable. If you have suitable resources and buy and use the correct license, you'll get fine performance.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The ability to scale Splunk depends on your network. If it is big, you can add more resources easily. You can use a cluster and several servers.
How are customer service and support?
When you work on Splunk, it's very easy. However, when you need to reach out to support, it could be better. It would be helpful if they could respond faster.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have experience with another solution called ELK; I find Splunk better, even though it is not free to use.
How was the initial setup?
I've done one implementation. I installed it across several servers. How long it takes depends on the project. It also depends on how many resources you have. If it's just a small setup it might take two hours.
The product is easy to maintain.
What other advice do I have?
I'm a customer. We cannot use the cloud versions as we are based in Iran.
I don’t have experience with the Spunk Mission Control feature.
I've worked with Splunk so far and while it's very easy to use it's not free. There are other solutions that are open-source that you could use, however, I find Splunk to be worth the price and I'd recommend it to others.
I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I would recommend Splunk to others.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees
We can create notable events and look at the data faster, but Dashboard Studio needs to mature a bit
Pros and Cons
- "From the class that I took this week, being able to create notable events from whatever you find in the data set is pretty useful."
- "We are waiting for Dashboard Studio to mature a little bit more. There are some things that we are using with Classic Dashboards which have not yet made it to Dashboard Studio. We are waiting for that."
What is our primary use case?
We use it for a lot of compliance work and incident reviews. We are also using it for remediation and tracking assets.
How has it helped my organization?
We use Splunk not just for security, but we also collect a lot of data from our operational equipment. We are using it a lot for troubleshooting and trending and even for command and control.
It has reduced our mean time to resolve some of the things. We are able to look at the data a lot faster and see what is going on. For some of our use cases, our NOC controllers or our operators are looking at the Splunk dashboard a lot. It is a part of their main job. In one specific use case, we used to take a couple of weeks to do certain maintenance. With Splunk and having the data, we were able to reduce that to just a few hours.
It has helped improve our organization's business resilience. We are able to have the data collected in one spot, see it, and get some insights from it. That has helped a lot.
It has definitely given our technical workforce tools to help with their jobs for troubleshooting and things like that.
What is most valuable?
From the class that I took this week, being able to create notable events from whatever you find in the data set is pretty useful.
What needs improvement?
We are waiting for Dashboard Studio to mature a little bit more. There are some things that we are using with Classic Dashboards which have not yet made it to Dashboard Studio. We are waiting for that.
It seems to be limited in terms of predictive features. I took up machine learning a couple of years ago. It seems to have some capabilities there, but I do not have specific things for it right now.
For how long have I used the solution?
In our organization, we have had it for over five years, but my personal experience with it is very limited.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It has been working for us so far.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have been able to scale as needed.
How are customer service and support?
I have not contacted their support directly because we have folks who are pretty knowledgeable. I go to them, and then they go to their support if needed. As far as I could tell, their support has been okay. I have not heard of any issues.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not have a similar product. Splunk came as a security product, and we have evolved it into doing operational work.
What about the implementation team?
We have folks who do the deployment. I am more on the interface side.
What was our ROI?
We would have seen an ROI. We are using it for a lot of our operational work and other things as well that are not related to what we are doing on a daily basis. We are looking at logs and other things that our executives are looking for.
Its time to value was within a year or so. There are a lot more things that we could do with Splunk, and that is why we ended up adding some stuff to it to fit our needs.
It is hard to tell whether we had any cost efficiencies because we did not have something like this before. Of course, we have Splunk now.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
As a team, we prefer the old pricing model with a perpetual license. We are still evaluating the whole subscription-based model.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other solutions. Splunk came in with the modernization effort that we were going through, so it just came with the system.
What other advice do I have?
We are pretty happy with it. I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Analyst at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
Enables us to use rules to segregate data and restrict our clients from seeing each other's data
Pros and Cons
- "Splunk's strongest suit is its user interface. We can integrate multiple solutions and adjust settings in the Splunk interface."
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used Splunk Enterprise Security for more than three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Splunk Enterprise Security has gone through multiple versions, so the product is mature and stable. It's currently on version 9.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We can scale Splunk Enterprise Security horizontally or vertically. It isn't a problem.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Splunk costs a little more than other SIEM solutions. It would be nice if they could bring the price down a little.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of 10.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Integrator
Splunk architect at Schwarz IT KG
Investigation dashboard provides a lot of value, end-to-end visibility, but multi-tenancy is not there
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "Stability is there, but every release has some bugs."
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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:
- 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.
- 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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The company didn't have a SIEM solution. It was more of SOAR, so we used FortiSIEM for that. We still use it.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
We have a Splunk partner that helps us with integration and other stuff.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing is a bit costly. It always is.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jul 9, 2024
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