Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

I am the branch chief. I use Splunk Enterprise Security depending on how swamped the team is. I use it for anything from basic searches to DDoS attacks, which is a big thing right now. So, DDoS attacks and phishing emails are a lot of what I am using it for.

We had FireEye before and then we went to CrowdStrike. Splunk has definitely helped to have everything into the tool. It is a lot easier to complete the tickets. It saves, on average, a couple of hours a day. We just go to Splunk and then provide data and work with different people on the tickets, so it saves hours each day. We have been able to allocate these hours to other projects or things that are more of a priority. We are able to do different projects that were on the back burner. We can put those hours towards other things.

Splunk has improved our organization’s business resilience. We are able to give leadership updates through dashboards versus the actual metadata. It is easier for them to understand and provide leadership.

Splunk’s ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time is very good. It is proven. Every couple of weeks, it catches some of the things that our SOC team did not catch and provides alerts, so its real-time capabilities are very good.

Our team has overall benefited from Splunk. We had FireEye before, which was not that good. We are able to benefit from Splunk not only in terms of instant response. We also have other teams doing vulnerability management using the Prisma systems. It is important that Splunk provides end-to-end visibility into our native environment. We use it for Prisma and instant response. Without Splunk, we would not be able to do some of the things that we need to do unless we went to individual tools, and we do not have the resources for that.

Exporting is a good feature. It helps me out when I have to do reports. I do a lot of exporting and crunching of the numbers. Dashboards are okay for showing to the leadership, but for doing statistics and updating tickets, the export feature is very beneficial for me.

They offer training. That is a big part of it. If you do not understand the tool, they are able to provide everything that you need, which helps the business. When you have learned a tool, you are able to speed up the process meantime, so you are not wasting a lot of man-hours trying to figure things out. 

I do not have any areas that can be improved. It works as intended for us, and we are getting everything that we need out of it. If anything, its initial setup can be improved a bit. 

In terms of additional features, I am still learning SOAR and everything else, so I do not have any feature requirements at this time, but as we do these SOAR operations, there might be some additional features that we will need.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security since 2016.

It is very good as long as you have the scope of how many servers, processors, and other things you need. There was a learning curve of making sure our servers were beefy enough to handle the data. We had four terabytes of data coming in every day. We were maxing out our systems a little bit, so we beefed that up, and we have had no issues since. 

Its scalability is easy. On-prem was very easy, and on the cloud, you have to learn and adapt a little bit, but scalability is perfect. 

I only reached out to our Splunk contacts, but my team reached out to Splunk's support team. I have not had any issues where they told me that they did not get the support they needed. They might take time to figure out what the issue is, but overall, I would rate their support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

We used FireEye, which was our primary one, and then we had CrowdStrike. Splunk has definitely been wonderful for us. The biggest reason for switching was integration. It is very easy to get all the tools fed into Splunk. They also had a cloud version, which was another reason. We are doing a hybrid setup, so cost savings was also a big factor.

I was involved in its deployment. I am the system owner of it. I am in charge of it, so I oversaw the project deployment. There is a learning curve with the hybrid setup with the cloud and on-prem, but overall, I am pretty satisfied with it.

We have an on-prem and a cloud environment depending on the platforms we are using in the system, so we have both environments. The challenging part was getting everything set up and fed into Splunk, but once it is set up, there is no difference in using it on-prem or on the cloud. We do not notice any real difference in it. 

The initial setup could be improved a little bit. It depends on your local team, firewalls, and other things like that, so there was a learning curve for the teams to learn how to set it up. That part could be improved, but once you go through it, it is not an issue. 

We had the Splunk team, and they did wherever they needed to get everything deployed. Our experience with them was good. We have worked with Splunk for years now. Their support has been very beneficial. If I have a question, they jump right on and let me know. They walk me through it and give me updates, so I am pretty happy with Splunk.

We have seen an ROI in terms of the mean time to resolution and man-hours. We are able to allocate those hours to other things. We have not got there yet in terms of the upfront costs, but we will get there over time.

When it comes to the time to value, we are getting there. We have not got there yet, but over time, we will get to the time to value.

Its price is fair. Like with anything else, if you go into the cloud, different providers cost more, and you are able to throttle back or throttle up. The cost is comparable with anything else.

We evaluated other options. We had to evaluate the pros and cons in terms of the cost and the capabilities of each tool. A lot of that went into the proof of concept. We did our due diligence and determined that Splunk was the best fit for us.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a ten out of ten. It gives us everything we need, and its capabilities keep on improving, so it is getting better. 

Our customers utilize Splunk Enterprise Security for either their cybersecurity program or their data warehouse program.

Splunk Enterprise Security's threat detection capabilities are effective in assisting organizations to uncover unknown threats and identify anonymous user behavior. However, this effectiveness is dependent on using the UBA modules and having the proper infrastructure in place.

MITRE ATT&CK is the framework that we use to detect and track well-known threats. When there are well-known threats, we can utilize the MITRE ATT&CK to identify any anomalies.

Splunk Enterprise Security has its own routine and process defined for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. Mainly, we baseline the client's business process and day-to-day activity and then use it to detect malicious activity through various scenarios.

Splunk Enterprise Security assists us in detecting threats more quickly. We have an abundance of unrelated and meaningless data from the raw logs, and the solution aids us in organizing and correlating this data so that we can extract meaningful events and take appropriate action. This is the primary objective for the majority of our clients. 

In most cases, we provide monitoring and intelligence to our customers based on how they use the solution. This allows other technical teams, such as PC, system support, and other tech units, to take appropriate actions. Our main role is to provide them with alerts and use case scenarios, while the detection and actions are primarily related to other aspects.

When we initially implement Splunk Enterprise Security, there are many alerts and false positives. However, with time, we are able to align our configuration with the client's requirements and do more baselining, reducing such issues.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps to expedite security investigations. Without a security solution, our security team is unable to identify threats because the log and auditing data are unrelated and uncategorized. Consequently, we cannot access them promptly. Therefore, having a solution like Splunk Enterprise Security is crucial for our cybersecurity program. For certain clients' needs, we prefer using open-source applications like ELK and ESK. However, if they opt for an enterprise and commercial product, Splunk is among the top three choices.

The most valuable feature is the DSS, also known as SPL, because it allows users to script advanced queries with limited knowledge.

The CIM model is the method Splunk uses to normalize data and categorize its important parts, but it is quite complex. Simplifying this process would assist security officers in assessing threats and using the system more efficiently.

I would appreciate it if Splunk could add the feature of importing and exporting from web servers and third-party devices during project and process development. This addition would greatly enhance the value of the solution making the maintenance for the security officer easier. 

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for six years.

I rate the stability of Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

Splunk Enterprise Security can be easily scaled once it has been installed and deployed.

Cyber threat levels are increasing every day, especially during the pandemic when most employees needed remote access to their business services. As a result, many organizations experienced a surge in attacks and required a resilient SIEM and cybersecurity solution.

I have used ELK, ESK, QRadar, Graylog, and LogRhythm in the past. One of Splunk's strengths over its competitors is its dedicated DSS called SPL.

The drawback of Splunk Enterprise Security is that upon initial installation, we need to do a lot of customization in order to have an effective cybersecurity program and deliver quality service to the client.

The initial setup is straightforward, but we need to make some configurations afterward that can be a bit complex. The deployment time depends on the size, but it usually takes several months to ensure stability and requires two SIEM engineers.

Splunk Enterprise Security is hardly affordable for most of our clients, causing many of them to resort to using open source solutions instead.

In addition to the licensing fee, there is also a support and maintenance charge.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten due to its high total cost of ownership, difficulties in maintenance, and the complexity of configuration immediately after deployment. 

Splunk Enterprise Security may not be cost-effective for small and even some medium-sized companies. While each organization has different requirements, we do recommend Splunk for medium and large organizations.

Organizations should take into account the complexity of their environment. For instance, if they have a purely vendor-based environment for their network security appliance, it may be easier for them to handle security, fabric, and architecture requirements. However, if they operate in a multi-vendor and mixed environment, they need to conduct more research on how to integrate various components. Often, they rush into negotiating their cybersecurity program without sufficient research, leading to potential problems for clients.

The primary use case is for failed login attempts. I typically stick to the security use cases.

The risk-based alerting helped to decrease false positives. We would just get a bunch of email alerts every time a threshold was reached previously and we'd have to investigate them. We'd have to deal with alert fatigue, the standard scenario where no one believes in the alerts anymore. So risk-based alerting has helped us tune out some of the noisier issues and then tune into the alerts, endpoints, and users that are problematic.

The risk-based alerting is excellent. It was most helpful in decreasing the amount of false positives that help bubble up the most problematic users and assets for the analysts, and it's fairly easy to implement.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. It's a ten out of ten for that capability. Everyone wants to know what's happening across their environment. The more difficult part is defining the visibility, as we can't we can't ingest the entire company into Splunk. So, the harder part is not necessarily gaining visibility. It's rather determining what visibility looks like. Oftentimes, it comes down to determining and prioritizing using the highest value.

Splunk Enterprise Security, when set up properly,  helps us find any security events across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments. It helps with investigations and helps us find that needle in a haystack. 

While it doesn't necessarily help with data normalization, some pieces determine whether the data is usable and create that usability outside of enterprise security. It does assist in the process. 

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with relevant context to help guide our investigations. The context helps with risk-based learning, which is one of the things I rely on fairly heavily. It also helps reduce false positives and increases visibility to the most problematic endpoints and end users.

The Splunk Enterprise Security Hub has reduced our mean time to resolve; however, how much is hard to quantify. The dashboard is color-coded, and it's easy to read for the analysts. I don't often have to explain anything to them. Red is bad, green is good. The dashboards are relatively self-explanatory and it helps reveal the most difficult, problematic parts.

The solution does help with resilience - a bit. What it does is help us discover problems and reactively fix them.

I've definitely seen improvement. However, assets and identity are probably some of the most important integrations for risk-based learning. So if there was a way to make it easier - and, again, I know there's been significant improvement - that is one of the more annoying friction points when setting up risk based alerting.

The Splunk platform is not unified. We have all of these different tools and they feel a bit disjointed.

I've used the solution for maybe six years.

It's a complex tool. Everything needs to be done proactively. That said, it's relatively stable. There's a lot of stability built in, and I don't have any problems with it.

I've worked in on-premises environments as large as 300 terabytes, and they return data very quickly. When it's done right, it can scale tremendously.

The customer service and technical support can be hit or miss. Sometimes you get someone that is really good and knows their stuff and is really helpful. Sometimes you are trying to be patient and help them through. That's hard when you have someone breathing down your neck to get things fixed. They're nice. However, sometimes, when I have pressure on my end, I don't need someone who is nice - I need someone who knows how to fix my issue 

Positive

I'm usually the one performing the setup work. I've been working with Splunk for a long time; it's relatively easy for me.

Enterprise Security is a beast. The best practice is to put it on its own search head. When setting it up, I'm asking for not only an additional light license for Enterprise Security. I have to ask for another server on top of it, too. It is quite a difficult task to ask when Splunk is already as expensive as it is. Then, there is technically setting it up and configuring it. It does take time to configure and normalize all the very foundational parts, such as the assets on identities, which is absolutely integral to getting security working. While I enjoyed the process, it took a lot of work. 

I am a consultant and do assist with the setup.

My work typically has to do with improving the quality of alerts or content and normalizing data. I don't usually get to the point where I'd be able to measure ROI.

I'm not the person that deals with pricing. I have heard there is sticker shock.

I'd give the solution an eight out of ten. There are a lot of great features. They're constantly increasing the value of Enterprise Security. However, they're leaving behind many smaller clients that don't have the knowledge or expertise and don't have professional services, which is another large expense. A lot of smaller clients just don't have the ability to set it up properly, and when that happens, they're only leveraging 30% to 40% of its capabilities. They're upset and wonder why this very expensive tool is not working for them. That said, when it works, it works great. 

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.

We primarily use the solution for SOC purposes.

The solution has made it possible to check and detect our traffic a bit better.

The incident review is great for working inside of a SOC if we want to see everything and we want to configure notables and have all notable features, it's useful. We're moving to SOAR right now for configuration for our work center. As far as ES in our work center, just detecting our notables and monitoring all our traffic, is the most important feature as far as what our day-to-day is concerned. 

Splunk has helped us with mean time to respond, although I don't have exact numbers.

Splunk has helped improve our company's resilience level.

Splunk is very good at predicting, identifying, and solving problems in real time. I've never used anything else, however, I'm impressed with the ease of it and the ability to find anything and everything we need. 

I do a lot of the maintenance. A lot of my workers are fresh into Linux and need to monitor, manage, and do maintenance on it. They should bring back the maintenance mode button. Splunk used to have it and they took that feature away.

The upgrading process could be smoother. 

I've used the solution for about a year.

The stability and availability of Splunk are great. It does get weird when we initially update items, however. That's the only time we see issues. It may try to input data in areas it doesn't need to. That said, we are aware of the quirks of the setup. 

Scaling is easy if you have done it a couple of times. 

The environment I have has multiple servers. We might have around 100 servers. 

Splunk support is very communicative about our concerns. That said, the answers I've gotten back don't make sense. I'm not sure if they communicated our issue in the right way or if they misunderstood, however, they did not correctly address our issue. In the end, we do have a good dialogue. I now expect that they will misunderstand the problem on the first round and we have to go back and forth. The effort is there to try to understand. 

Neutral

The company may have had QRadar for a while before Splunk. I wasn't around when they switched to Splunk so I cannot compare the two. 

I was not involved in the initial deployment of Splunk. 

The company has witnessed an ROI in terms of the amount of time saved via being able to tweak our searches. The docs are great. They help tremendously in filling knowledge gaps. The ROI is solid. 

I don't deal with pricing or licensing. 

I've only worked with Splunk as far as data ingestion. 

The solution does take a bit of understanding. It does need improvements in some areas. I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Our technical teams are demoing various enterprise tools to develop experience and knowledge so we can better serve our clients. In addition to Splunk, we are evaluating IBM QRadar and one other solution. One of our customers is asking about the Splunk MSP model.

Splunk allows us to customize processing and dashboards, which helps us take care of our customers' needs. Splunk is costly, but it's better than other products. It speeds up security investigations. It helps us detect threats faster. Everything is faster. The only part that's lagging is the management. Otherwise, Splunk is good. It took about a month to realize the solution's benefits. 

We get few alerts except for the other solutions we have integrated with Splunk. We'll monitor those alerts and support their customers, but we don't have any other mechanisms for databases or something outside of the infrastructure. 

Splunk enables us to customize dashboards and queries, and we can add multiple admin users. We only use the essential parts, including the MITRE ATT&CK framework capabilities. Organizations share threat information under the MITRE ATT&CK framework. We do threat hunting and marketing based on that.

We do manual threat hunting. We get all the IP addresses and check the threat databases to determine if it's malicious. 

The algorithms and alerts could be improved. I would also like to pre-build use cases. We need to create the algorithm based on our use cases. 

The threat management part is still lagging. There are some gaps in threat management. Other vendors have built-in threat management systems, but Splunk lacks the threat management component in its portal. The UEBA and everything else is perfect, but it lacks a unified threat intelligence and management feature. 

We've also had problems integrating the solution. We get multiple errors, like search log errors, UI errors, etc., and performance issues. It's fine with basic content, but if we're dealing with multiple data sources and 30 GB of data, it cannot handle the load. Our customer is indexing around 10 GB of data daily, and I can't search the log without getting errors. 

Splunk Enterprise is stable. 

Splunk Enterprise is highly scalable. 

We haven't had to contact Splunk support because we can find all the answers we need online. 

We also use IBM QRadar.

Deploying Splunk is straightforward. We had no issues. 

Splunk is more expensive than most solutions, but it offers lots of value. If a customer wants the cheapest solution, we'll use that.

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten. I would give it a ten if it had built-in threat management. 

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.

We use Splunk for identity protection, threat defense, vulnerability scanning, zero-trust, and user entity behavior and analytics.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped our customers reduce the alert volume. We ended up validating the false positives manually. We have to do quite a review assessment task. It can do some automatically, but we end up doing them manually to improve the detection. 

Splunk's advanced threat detection capabilities are excellent. Recently, Cisco acquired Splunk, so many customers are migrating to the Microsoft platform, but historically, I've found Splunk does a better job of correlating and collecting the security logs of all kinds of appliances. Most customers want to consolidate their security products into Microsoft.

It supports just about every cloud solution. It is easy to collect and correlate all the data. The visibility is good. Insider threat detection can be customized. My customer was integrated with many third-party credentials and other threat sources as well. The integration part was seamless and easy. The rates for allocating valuable information and IOCs from different sources are also good. 

The incident response technique should be available out of the box. That isn't as available as we would expect. 

I have used Splunk for around two years.

Splunk is stable. We've had no breakdowns in the past few weeks.

We can scale Splunk quickly. 

I rate Splunk support seven out of 10. 

Neutral

Deploying Splunk was moderately difficult compared to Sentinel. Collecting logs, provisioning firewall servers, and indexing are all complex tasks. You need someone with expert knowledge to do the job. The process takes four to six weeks. You need to design the solution and onboard the data, then start collecting logs and doing the detection. 

I rate Splunk three out of 10 for affordability.

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security seven out of 10. Splunk needs to compete with other products like Microsoft, and right now, it looks like they're losing the race. They need to make drastic changes and accommodate more flexible options and integration solutions.