Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

I'm part of the Splunk operations team, which means I support Splunk functionality and occasionally conduct threat management onboarding. We assist various teams with threat-related tasks. If they need help bringing log sources into Splunk, we guide them through the process. Once the logs are onboarded, we create correlations to identify threats, troubleshoot issues, and help mitigate potential risks.

We handle incidents through a queue configured in our event management system. This includes automated incidents for our Splunk infrastructure, like server health checks, and user-reported issues where functionalities like the fetch score aren't working. We address all incidents, whether automated or user-raised, through this system.

We've made significant improvements to our Splunk infrastructure to support our internal teams. This ongoing effort focuses on helping application teams onboard logs from various applications for their review and troubleshooting. We've streamlined the onboarding process, improved data quality, and ensured smooth data consumption for our internal users.

Splunk Enterprise Security offers multi-cloud environment monitoring capabilities that we can utilize for our users if they require it.

We can build a dashboard in Splunk to centralize the monitoring of critical information. This dashboard can display key metrics for onboarding methods and LogSources we actively track, providing a clear view of our entire monitoring environment.

While Splunk Enterprise Security offers good threat detection capabilities, our current process limits visibility into user activity. When users request correlations, we create the code and configure everything on our end, and then they test and work on it from theirs. This lack of transparency extends to threat management, as we can't directly see tickets in their separate ServiceNow system. If they encounter issues, they share details in a document for us to review and address.

It comes with a large collection of correlation searches, but we'll need to review them to find the ones that match our specific needs for monitoring malicious activity. Once we've identified the relevant searches, we can customize or recreate them within the correlation settings to best suit our environment.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats faster.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a good monitoring tool that allows us to track specific details by creating custom queries. For instance, to monitor a particular organization's infrastructure, we would first onboard their logs and then create queries to capture relevant information. This way, any suspicious activity, attacks, or other events would be easily identified within the infrastructure. Additionally, Splunk's checkup operation minimizes the chance of missed alerts by automatically identifying detections, ensuring near-complete coverage of around 99 percent unless there are outages or limitations with global agents.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us speed up our security investigations.

The customizable dashboard for our security operations is a good feature.

The most valuable features in Splunk Enterprise Security are the cluster capabilities.

The licensing price is high and has room for improvement.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for four years.

Splunk Enterprise Security is stable.

Splunk Enterprise Security can scale according to our needs.

The technical support has been successful in resolving the majority of our cases.

While the deployment process itself is simple, the number of personnel needed varies depending on the infrastructure size and user base. A small deployment for 50 users can be completed by two people, while larger deployments supporting over 500 users may require up to 15 people.

The Splunk Enterprise Security license is expensive.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten. Splunk improves user efficiency by streamlining workflows and enabling the detection of anomalies within data.

Splunk Enterprise Security is deployed across multiple locations in our organization.

To ensure our data remains secure, Splunk servers require monthly maintenance. This maintenance includes installing security patches that address vulnerabilities and prevent unauthorized access to our information.

I use Splunk for visualization, reporting, monitoring, log aggregation, and other security purposes. We gather various logs into one place and analyze them based on specific business use cases to get high-level insights that inform decision-making at every level of the organization. We also use it to aggregate other IT logs — not just security. 

Our organization is working in a massive on-prem environment. We're one of Splunk's oldest clients. It's convenient to migrate everything to the cloud, and we would have more flexibility. However, we currently have our resources and everything established to use Splunk on-premises, so we aren't switching to a cloud environment.

Splunk allows us to monitor logs and track suspicious activity in real time. With the help of the SOAR platform powered by AI and ML, we can respond quickly. Our security posture is better, and we can resolve security incidents quicker. Splunk has improved our visibility by providing critical security metrics in our dashboard and strengthened our security controls. 

The number of alerts we receive is similar to what we saw using our previous solution. While it hasn't necessarily reduced our alerts, Splunk is improving our resolution time and overall security.

I like Splunk's automated threat detection and orchestration capabilities. Splunk offers a single solution for analyzing, aggregating, correlating, monitoring, reporting, visualizing, etc. You can get all of these capabilities in one place. On top of that, it provides a cloud, testing, on-premise, and hybrid solution, giving customers more flexibility for their use cases. 

Splunk's real-time monitoring is one of its best features.  The user interface gives you a single dashboard to directly view all the high-level information. The security incident monitoring and investigation page is also very helpful. You can document an investigation step by step. Many investigators can work on a single incident also based on their shifts. Everyone can add notes on the investigation page. 

The incident response features are based on real-time data. The monitoring team can immediately take over an incident and prioritize tasks based on risk scores. We can assign multiple technicians to one security incident based on their skill, improving resolution time.  The incident review dashboard provides many useful details, like the indicators of compromise and risk scores.

We can get threat intelligence from multiple platforms, including the latest known IOCs, to support our response to security incidents. We store the threat data from various sources in a centralized place, and it updates every six to 12 hours. 

The MITRE ATT&CK framework feature is helpful for understanding which phase an incident is in and what the next steps are so a technician can prevent it from progressing. It gives us a detailed overview of other tactics it might be associated with, enabling us to stay vigilant. We can correlate with other simultaneous or sequential incidents and take action to strengthen our security based on these incidents.

We've sometimes faced issues with upgrades. The incident review dashboard sometimes breaks after updates. When we add a space or something in the description or anywhere in the SQL, the drill-down value may be reset with a blank value. Before rolling out any software, they should test it thoroughly and ensure clients won't have issues with the upgraded version. It should be compatible with all or most of the apps. All major issues must be addressed before rolling out the upgrade.

I have used Splunk for eight or nine years. 

I rate Splunk nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Splunk eight out of 10 for scalability. Scalability is always a challenge. The larger your environment, the more issues you'll have. There aren't many problems with Splunk on the cloud, but scaling can be challenging in an on-prem environment. If you're ingesting a significant volume of data, you need a proper maintenance routine to maintain your base architecture. Sometimes, it's a bucket application. It can take a few hours to reset those things, and network issues might contribute to that. 

I rate Splunk support eight out of 10. It varies based on your data volume and number of licenses. 

Positive

I have used several solutions for different clients, including QRadar, Palantir, and Microsoft Sentinel. Splunk has more capabilities than QRadar. It's also more flexible and user-friendly. You can modify and customize the solution to show you the information you want.

The deployment depends on the environment. It may take only a couple of weeks to deploy Splunk in a small environment, but a larger environment involves a detailed process that may take months. It helps to have a larger staff. It also depends on how process-oriented an organization is. Some organizations will take much more time in the planning and design phase. 

After deployment, Splunk requires a good deal of maintenance, depending on the volume of data you're ingesting and your user base. It may require multiple resources to manage this environment. 

Splunk improves our security controls, resolution time, and threat-handling capabilities. We're saving time and resources, meaning more money for our clients. 

I don't know about Splunk's pricing because I work on the technical side, but I know it is a costly platform. There are cheaper products and some open-source ones, but Splunk costs a lot because of the features it provides. Still, the pricing is a concern for many of my clients, and more would use Splunk if they lowered the cost a bit. 

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of 10. I would recommend Splunk because it covers multiple services in one place. It also has a strong developer community. You can easily get help from community support. Splunk is a versatile product that competes well with leading security tools like Microsoft Sentinel.

For incident detection, this is the main purpose for which I can use the product. That is the only use case for my team. It may be different for my team who is actually processing the incidents and a bit different for me, as I am a manager. For me, the most important aspect is making statistics over a period, seeing who did what, and extracting all the needed information. It is quite easy and intuitive.

Incident detection is the positive impact I have seen from Splunk Enterprise Security. It probably saved the company from financial losses because of the early detection of the incidents. I cannot say about ROI because I am not involved in financial matters, so I cannot estimate any kind of cost.

There are so many products and features that it may be quite hard sometimes to find something that you are looking for. Search capabilities or maybe some kind of AI assistant helping to find what you want would be beneficial improvements.

I have been dealing with the product for about seven years.

From time to time, there are some glitches with stability. Some logs are missing, and we have an external SOC team handling this license for us. Whenever there is something wrong with Splunk Enterprise Security, they need to raise a ticket, and it can be time-consuming to wait for them to reply; this is also a disadvantage.

It is easy to scale up or down if you have the money. The solution is quite pricey not only because of the license but also when scaling it and maintaining it.

I have not raised any ticket myself, but I have heard some not very good stories about technical support from Splunk Enterprise Security. Support did not provide quick enough help.

Positive

I have not been using any other competitors.

I have no idea about installation because I took no part in it.

We have a dedicated team that is doing all the configuration of Splunk Enterprise Security for us. We are just managing what has been prepared for us.

It saved the company from financial losses because of the early detection of the incidents. I cannot say about ROI because I am not involved in financial matters, so I cannot estimate any kind of cost.

I heard the solution is quite pricey.

I have not been using any other competitors.

Users should know what they are looking for. Splunk Enterprise Security is probably customizable enough that they could achieve their goals, but they need to know what they want to get from it. On a scale of 1-10, I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight overall.

We use Splunk Enterprise Security to detect different anomalies and alerts based on our infrastructure. I work in the telecom industry. We have multiple network and security devices that collect logs. We create use cases to collect logs from all these devices.

The dashboards are very good in Splunk Enterprise Security. There are pretty good options to fine-tune the alerts, to wipe out false positives, and only get the correct alerts as per our requirements. The UI is pretty good and easy to use because it is integrated with different EDR tools. This integration is very helpful for identifying different malicious activities or malware for any of the endpoints, especially the critical servers.

The architecture of Splunk Enterprise Security is really good at collecting and parsing logs. Each detail, how it correlates, and all the features are up to the mark compared to other vendors. The indexing speed is pretty good in Splunk Enterprise Security. 

I used many of its machine learning automatic detections. It's really helpful to identify any malicious activity or the behavior of malware over time. There was a malicious activity that involved privilege escalation from the MITRE ATT&CK framework. It was very helpful in detecting that escalation, and due to Splunk Enterprise Security's machine learning capability, we tracked down the malware, remediated it, and prevented it from spreading further to other endpoints.

There should be more options for adding more visual experience in terms of dashboards. 

The integration feature with other applications, such as anti-DDoS application Arbor, needs to be more powerful.

I have been using it for almost three years.

Issues are very rare, near to zero with no downtime. 

It is highly scalable.

The tech support is really good. 

Positive

I use ArcSight as well. We did not fully migrate to Splunk Enterprise Security. We are using both solutions.

Splunk Enterprise Security has good refresh rates for getting alerts. I prefer Splunk Enterprise Security more compared to other competitors such as ArcSight or IBM QRadar. The health checks are very good. The dashboards, indexing speed, correlations, and machine learning are advantages of Splunk Enterprise Security. Even though other competitors offer the same features, the efficiency of Splunk Enterprise Security is the best.  Except for the price, I don't find any disadvantages compared to other vendors.

The migration process was complex because we were moving from one SIEM tool to another. In the telecommunications industry, there are several teams that we needed to collaborate with, and meetings were essential. Within the network team alone, there are numerous sub-teams to coordinate with.

In my current environment, this complexity made the process challenging. We weren't starting from scratch; instead, we were transitioning from an existing SIM tool to a new one. If we had been implementing the first SIM tool for our company, it would have been much easier. However, migrating from one SIM to another always presents difficulties.

Our company purchased through resellers.

It's somewhat pricey compared to other vendors. However, for big infrastructure companies such as telecom, the price is fair enough. Compared to the features and efficiency it offers, the price is good. For medium-sized companies, it's too pricey.

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

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.

There are tons of use cases for Splunk, but our main one is insider threat.

It's easy to deploy Splunk, and mostly, we don't have to reach out to the customer after it's done. It's a simple tutorial with a couple of pages, and they can configure it themselves. The simplicity of deployment has been the greatest asset

Splunk has improved our customer's ability to ingest enterprise data. We don't have to have hands-on every customer's environment. We can farm that out to the local SAs. They find the install, and it's a simple firewall update. We're getting data.  

It provides an all-in-one resource. Before, we had one product for firewalls and one for our gateways. Pairing up with Cisco helped because a lot of our information is based on our network, firewall, or router. Having Splunk intertwined with them will ensure that it's one resource and one solution.

'The solution has helped to fine-tune false positives. Sometimes, out-of-the-box solutions aren't customizable, but Splunk is. It can clone, alter, and make it your own.

Before Splunk, we didn't have a tiered solution where there was some low-hanging fruit that was easily handled by the tier ones and higher-end stuff. It went from level two to level three bordering on level four CCNA. That's what I was looking for, a maturity model. We've developed into a progression from tier one to tier two, etc. At the high end, we have forensics for long-term solutions or advanced persistent threats.

A lot of things can be handled at the tier one level, and there are 12 to 24 hours before it floats to tier two. Resources are underutilized, and not everyone's working. You're not handing a tier-one ticket to a tier-four guy who's just like, "Dude, it's this." The tier-one guy is getting a tier-four ticket. It streamlines the resolution process.

I like the ease of setting up dashboards on Splunk. They're easy to create, manage, alter, and share. You can fine-tune them any way you see fit. One of Splunk's unique features is that you can customize it for your needs, especially if you've got homegrown solutions. It accepts whatever kind of logs and can be normalized at any point. With a one-off solution, you can work with the developer who created it, and they give you the features or key information you want to keep.

Many people are talking about deploying upgrades from the deployment server. It's necessary, particularly from the perspective of insider threat. You can see if something's breached. If you notice an anomaly at 2 a.m., we've got your rules firing, letting you know immediately. It's near real-time notification of any issues.

We have used Splunk for two years.

Splunk's stability is inherent to its scalability. It's malleable and adjustable. It's like pottery that you make to fit your needs.

It's easy to divert resources where they're needed. Often, we have several projects that have reached the end of their life, and we shift the resources. The fact that you can set up a new index or set of indexes and push some feeds into specific structured indexes makes it a lot easier instead of having everything in one giant database and trying to find what you're looking for.

With the streamlining, it's a lot easier for the end customers. They've noticed a quicker turnaround for low-level stuff, and the high-level requests get directed to the right people. We used to have a turnaround window of about a month. Now it's down to a week for most tickets. In the past, they sometimes put a ticket in, and it might be a week before someone even looks at it. Now, we have a system in place where they get a response within 24 hours.

We were using ArcSight but switched because our customer said they wanted to go to Splunk. ArcSight didn't have the reach, and the complexity of deploying it inhibited a lot of customers from using it.

Deploying Splunk was easy. We worked on developing the in-house solutions and passed them off to the customers, providing a network location to download what they needed and the instruction guides. After that, it was simple to unzip and configure the inputs and outputs. We were up and running.

We've probably tripled the amount of insight into our infrastructure and environment.

They looked at Elasticsearch and the ELK Stack—trying to do things with Kubernetes and Kafka. That can be used with Splunk. In terms of cost, complexity, and ease of deployment, Splunk is often on top. It gets the data out there as quickly as possible. The fact that Splunk is as vast as it is means it isn't hard to find a resource that's touched it and can use it.

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of 10. It's missing some features that other solutions have, such as the ability to upgrade the endpoint and perform endpoint universal forwarders from a deployment server instead of using a third-party solution, such as Puppet or Ansible.

Our primary use case is for detected malware. 

The end-to-end visibility into our environment that Splunk provides is impressive. We just need to use it better.

We are a small team. For us to look at all those logs ourselves would be difficult. There is some decent insight into what's going on. It's just a matter of actually utilizing that data and taking action on it. 

We would probably see more time savings if we used Splunk more. 

We're an on-prem network. During the installation, we found several issues that we should look into. We just need to utilize more.

Splunk has shown us some gaps where we need to ingest and normalize data, and we have built those gaps.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with context to help guide our investigation. It's a starting point to actually look at the logs and figure out what we need to look into. It's useful. 

It helped to consolidate networking security and IT observability tools. We use Splunk in general a lot for operations, and then we've been able to build dashboards.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years. 

The stability is pretty good. It's fairly stable. I haven't had any issues with it so far.

Splunk support is difficult for us. There are gaps in the network. I work for a government entity so getting a classified rep to come out is difficult. 

I would rate their support a five out of ten due to their availability and talent. 

Neutral

It took what took us a while to groom all of our data correctly so that it worked well with ES. That took two weeks. As far as the finish, there's definitely room for improvement.

I would like more assistance with use cases and help with teaching us how to use it once it's installed. 

We deployed through professional services. 

We're a young team so we're still evaluating processes. We already had Splunk Core. It was already installed when I started working here. I was part of the installation team when they deployed Splunk Enterprise Security.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a five out of ten because I'm still figuring it out.

We use the solution to find systems acting strange or having strange services and security attacks.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us sift through tons of data to find relevant information we're looking for as far as activity goes.

The solution's most valuable feature is the aggregation of all the logs in one place, using enterprise securities built-in or ESCU use cases to find them.

The end-to-end visibility Splunk Enterprise Security provides in our environment is very important because we might not see everything or miss something without it.

Once you have it set up correctly, Splunk Enterprise Security works great for helping us find any security event across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data. The ability to identify and solve problems in real-time is pretty robust.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our alert volume with RBA and has helped reduce our mean time to resolve. With correlation searches in risk-based alerting, you don't have to sift through information; it is presented to you.

The solution's case management system could be further improved to make it easier for analysts to manage cases. The only limiting factor is the amount of data you're sifting through and the overall size of the number of correlations you're looking for.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for seven to eight years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support is awesome, and I love it.

Positive

I've deployed the solution a few times. The deployment is very labor-intensive and takes a lot of work.

Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution.

I would recommend the solution to other users.

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