Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

I implement Splunk products in customer environments. I am not an end user. I implement the product on customers' cloud stack.

I have full experience in the implementation part. I know the end-to-end configurations in Splunk. I know how to configure it, index the data, and then how to use it to get some alerts.

Splunk Enterprise Security has improved our incident response time quite a bit. What we usually do in the customer environment is to configure it with their ticket management tools. It creates alerts and pushes the alerts to the ticket management tool so that their analysts are able to view the tickets and then do an instant investigation. It provides a good solution for instant response.

Splunk Enterprise Security has complete information about the entities and the users in the organization. In the case of any alert, we do not have to manually verify the computer name and its owner name. In the alert itself, Splunk Enterprise Security populates the necessary data that we need. It is a great feature of Splunk Enterprise Security.

We have created dashboards related to critical alerts. For example, we have a dashboard for the inbound and outbound traffic flow of firewalls. We use a few other products or IT systems to monitor the CPU and memory utilization. We are also able to integrate web applications, Kubernetes, Linux systems, Windows systems, etc. We integrate whatever data sources are available.

We monitor most of the cloud environments with Splunk Enterprise Security. We have different cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. We have separate add-ons and apps for them. It is quite easy to integrate those. Third-party developers are also able to develop their apps and publish them at Splunkbase. We can utilize them for visualization of the data that we are interested in from different sources.

We configure most of the frameworks available inside Splunk Enterprise Security such as threat intelligence, identity management, and risk management. Whenever alerts are triggered, these frameworks do the correlation and give us visualization over the dashboards, which improves the incident response time.

There is something that we can configure to reduce false positives. If any alert is triggered, it checks against various threat IOCs, such as IPs, URLs, domains, emails, file hashes, etc. If it matches any of the threats, we can take it forward.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations.

They can also improve their capability of ingesting data from different IoT sources. It supports IoT data, but they can add some additional apps or add-ons to easily integrate the IoT devices.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for the past two years.

It is a stable product as compared to other premium solutions. I do work with other premium solutions. Splunk Enterprise security is a more stable product.

It scales very easily. We can have as much data as we want. We have customers who are ingesting more than 400 TB of data per day, so it does not matter how much data you have.

We have customers that have the Splunk application deployed in a multi-cluster environment.

Their support is good, but they can have a customization team to help us with any customizations. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

This is my first tool.

We have deployed it on-prem and on the cloud. Its deployment is straightforward. Any Splunk engineer can do it.

It requires maintenance in terms of upgrades. Apart from that, it does not need any maintenance. There is a one-hour or two-hour maintenance window to upgrade the apps.

I would recommend Splunk Enterprise Security. Its frameworks make it stand out among other tools. 

It is a great solution with multiple in-built frameworks. With other solutions, there can be limitations in configuring different frameworks within the same solution.

Overall, I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a seven out of ten.

The network department, for example, has improved its efficiency by 30%. Security relies on this for event correlation and alerts.

• The speed of the search engine

• All the types of data sources that you configure can be forwarded to Splunk.
• The ease-of-use

Cluster management can only be done via a command line. I would like them to add some GUI options for that. Permissions are not very flexible, so it would be nice to have more granular options, such as double factor authentication.

The administration of the cluster and app deployment to indexers or search
heads can be done only using ssh access and command line, there is no GUI
tools for that.

Permissions in the other hand could be improved by adding for example the
deny option to groups to see and index, etc. Also the authentication method
is just LDAP or spkunk, so some more security layers could be added as
second factor, etc

It is very stable.

It scales out horizontally.

The quality of support depends on the support and license. On the average, I would give them a rating of 6/10.

We previously used ArcSight. Splunk is at another level. It is easier, more stable, and faster.

It is very easy to set up on a standalone server. Of course, if you want a cluster, it is more complicated. In order to manage it, you need skilled people.

It is not cheap :-)

We were using ArcSight before.

My advice is to go ahead with it.

The administration of the cluster and app deployment to indexers or search
heads can be done only using ssh access and command line, there is no GUI
tools for that.

Permissions in the other hand could be improved by adding for example the
deny option to groups to see and index, etc. Also the authentication method
is just LDAP or spkunk, so some more security layers could be added as
second factor, etc

It is a very well-organized solution. I find it more user-friendly than ArcSight and QRadar. I can search, and I can do whatever I need in terms of dashboards, reports, etc.

It is the best tool if you have a complex environment or if data ingestion is too huge.

The cluster environment should be improved. We have a cluster. In the Splunk cluster environment, in the case of heavy searches and heavy load, the Splunk cluster goes down, and we have to put it in the maintenance mode to get it back. We are not able to find the actual culprit for this issue. I know that cluster has RF and SF, but it has been down so many times. There should be something in Splunk to help users to find the reason and the solution for such issues.

I would also like to be able to see all the data for internal logs. When we search for internal logs, sometimes, we are not able to find some of the data. For example, when Splunk crashes or something happens, we don't get to know what happened. We tried looking into the internal logs, but we could never figure out the reason from the logs. The information is limited, and it should be improved.

We have been using Splunk for more than four years.

Its scalability is very good. Companies nowadays are totally dependent on tools like Splunk. It is widely used in our organization. We have a huge team that uses it on a daily basis. For onboarding, we have another team, and we also have a team for Splunk monitoring. We have a large amount of data ingestion per day, so our team has more than 25 people in it.

In my current company, I have seen the tickets getting resolved soon. In my previous company, which was a startup, a P1 ticket generally took 24 hours or less. They called us back and resolved it as soon as possible, but if it was a P2 or P3, I have seen them taking a month or more.

We worked with QRadar for some time, but after that, we just came to Splunk.

It is straightforward. The deployment duration totally depends on how you are working.

We have it on-premises as well as on the cloud.

We have an unlimited one, and we pay yearly, but I don't know how much it costs. Previously, I worked for a startup, and when they started building it up, it was complicated for them because they didn't have the budget for that many licenses. It was very costly for them. So, startups might find it a little bit problematic because of the licensing, but for bigger companies, there is no issue.

If it is a complex environment and data ingestion is huge where you want to ingest Syslogs or networking devices logs, you should go with Splunk. It is better than QRadar. Nowadays, the usage of AWS is growing, and that should be taken into consideration when deciding about on-premises or cloud deployment.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. I find it great. I'm very eager to do the Splunk certifications as well.

We are using it for information assurance, system alerting, and compliance. We are using its latest version.

It integrates into our VMware environment and provides infrastructure alerting and monitoring.

The ability to ingest different log types from many different products in our environment is most valuable.

It seems to have everything in terms of features. Every time I think of something, I go out to their site, and I can pretty much find it.

The biggest problem is data compression. Splunk is an outstanding product, but it is a resource hog. There should be better data compression for being able to maintain our data repositories. We end up having to buy lots of additional storage just to house our Splunk data. This is my only complaint about it.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

It is excellent in terms of performance and reliability.

Its scalability is excellent. Its users are mostly on the backside. I know there are a lot of opportunities to allow developers and engineers to access Splunk for doing different things, but we use it purely for information assurance and system monitoring. So, our engineers and IA professionals are the only ones who access Splunk. We have a couple of them, but it supports thousands of users.

We started with Splunk Light, and now, we're using Splunk Enterprise across most of our projects. It is being used extensively. It is our primary SIEM product. I'm sure its usage will increase, but that's managed at a much higher level. The company has an agreement with Splunk on how our licensing model is established.

Their support is great. I've talked to them many times.

We used InTrust. We switched to Splunk because of its flexibility and capability.

Its initial configuration is pretty straightforward. Their repository for information and help is really good, which makes it pretty straightforward. You can just go out to their site and do a search for any question. Usually, someone else would have experienced the same issue.

It took us hours. We obviously expanded it as we were building the environment because we did it from scratch, but it only took hours to get it up and running and configured to do ingestion. We then deployed more forwarders and tweaked it as we went along.

It was implemented in-house. Its maintenance is pretty lightweight, and I take care of it. I have a couple of other team members to help make changes. We have engineers who are available for adding capacity. We have a team of six or seven people to support our Splunk Enterprise.

It is expensive. I used to buy it early on, but then they combined it into a higher-up organization. They buy it for multiple systems now. Last time, I paid around 60K for it.

There is just the licensing fee. That's all.

I would advise making sure that you incorporate enough storage and processing in order to properly support the environment.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It is definitely the best tool I've ever used, but nothing is perfect. They could do a little bit better on data compression and system resource management, but outside of that, it is an excellent product.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring our infrastructure.

The models that we use are pretty mature at this point, which means we can be assured we are given the best use cases right out of the box.

We can just plug into the applications and everything is set up. There's very little configuration necessary.

The integrations that are offered with different tools are all very good. They offer integrations for all levels of security and have offerings from some of the other major solutions in the space.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Over the years, I know they've been doing what they can to continue to add integration capabilities to their solution. If they continue to do that, that would be ideal. However, beyond that, there really aren't any features that I find to be lacking in any part of the solution.

On-premises scaling of the solution is a bit more limited than it is on the cloud.

The pricing of the solution needs to be a bit lower.

It would be ideal if the hardware could meet more universal global regulatory requirements. It would be great it the solution better aligned with global standards.

I've been working with the solution for three to four years at this point.

In terms of the cloud, scalability is very straightforward. It's just about as expansive as we want to go. When it comes to an on-premise deployment, there might be some scalability limitations. We've found we just have to cut hard on the resources as it does a lot of processing. Whereas the cloud is easy and has very little limitation, I'd advise others that on-premise may have some difficulties. 

On-premises, it's definitely on the customer to ensure they have the right plates. If they're concerned and they need 100% scalability, it's best to be on the cloud.

Technical support is very good. They know their product and they are responsive to requests. We're satisfied with the level of service provided to us.

We didn't have any issues with the initial setup. It's not too complex. We found the process to be very straightforward and very simple.

While I do understand that it is a premium tool, they could work to make it a bit less in terms of cost. It's a bit expensive.

We use a mixture of public and private cloud deployments.

I would definitely recommend the solution, having seen it work for others so well. Its ease of usage and its man integrations make it a great product. The way you can access whatever you need on the solution is very similar to a Google bar where you can search for anything you need. It's just a super quick responsive, product.

Overall, I would rate it a perfect ten out of ten. We have no complaints.

We use it for logging, essentially for auditing and troubleshooting errors in production and finding out what happened.

I have used the product personally for five years and at my current company for a year and a half.

I haven't had any problems with it so far.

There are a lot of plugins to integrate this. The client site login is pretty extensible and probably cost-effective. Plus, it is easy to configure.

I would like some additional AI capabilities to provide additional information about things going wrong and things going well.

It is very stable. We have not had any problems. 

We had to upgrade when it was on-premise, but then we went to cloud version, which is very good.

It is pretty scalability, even though we have a lot of logs. It runs well.

I assume that the pricing is reasonable, because if it was too costly, there are other alternatives. However, with some of the other solutions, you have to spend time on them and manage them yourself. It might also take you three times to get it right. So, Splunk may be more costly upfront, but in the long run, it saves on time and man-hours.

I would consider ELK Kibana a competitor for this solution. If you have time, and you want to do it yourself, you can save a little money going with Kibana. However, Splunk is pretty good and I would recommend an enterprise to switch to Splunk.

We mainly use the solution as a reseller. We give our users the latest version of the product. 

The solution is the market leader.

Our customers are always looking to partner with market leaders as you can't go wrong with them.

Customers can monitor cloud environments. 

The threat detection capabilities are quite fast and efficient based on my customer's feedback. 

We've used the MITRE ATT&CK feature and it's good. It's pretty standard and comparable to IBM. Most products offer this as well. 

It's good for analyzing malicious activities. It's good as an overall platform. It's good at detecting threats. It's a basic feature that is quite effective.

Splunk can help to reduce alert volume if you configure it properly.

They are a market leader in a lot of areas in terms of features and functions. 

It helped us speed up security investigations. I'm not sure of the exact percentage it helped us speed up by, however.

It has a lot of basic and standard features. 

It is a full-fledged solution that provides everything a company needs.

When it comes to malicious activities, however, it's rather overpriced. There are cheaper ways to detect.

There are quite a lot of security platforms on the market that do the same thing in a similar way at a cheaper rate. 

The pricing could be a lot lower. I'm from Asia, and they need to provide Asian pricing. They should price better for the region they are in. Once companies see the price, it puts them off. 

The integration could be a bit better. They charge for certain integrations. 

I've used the solution for about a year or more. 

It is a stable product.

The solution is used across multiple departments, not locations. That said, it would support multiple locations. 

We've had no issues with scalability. We usually have a solution that lasts three to five years and have had no issues scaling in that time.

I do not directly deal with technical support. 

We previously used many solutions, such as IBM. The implementation times are about the same. There are some ways that IBM is faster and other ways Splunk is faster. However, Splunk offers a more modern look.

The initial setup is very easy. It's quite straightforward. The process is similar to IBM. The deployment takes less than one day. It is done by a different team. I don't handle the initial implementation process.

The maintenance needed is very minimal. We have at least ten people that can handle deployment and maintenance. 

The solution is quite expensive compared to the competition. It's considered a premiere security option. 

We also looked at Dynatrace before choosing Splunk. 

I'm a registered partner of Splunk. 

We are using the latest version of the solution. 

We haven't used the threat intelligence management feature. We usually use another product.

The mission control feature hasn't been used. I'm not familiar with it.

For those looking for a cheaper product, I'd suggest, if they had a limited budget, to go cheaper. Likely a cheaper option that can do the same work as Splunk. At the end of the day, whether you choose a Toyota or a Rolls Royce, you get from A to B the same. The price is the differentiation. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a good product overall. 

Our primary use case is for security but we also use it as a soft tool. It gives us an advantage over traditional SOC or security tools. We get to use the existing data in Splunk to make use of the security. 

It definitely does help with both auditing and as well as regular monitoring. SOC does more monitoring, but ES also gives you other features that are auditing-related. The dashboards are also beneficial. 

Our auditing team gets benefits from Splunk, not just ES but also from general Splunk Enterprise. It's cross-functional. 

Enterprise Security has helped us reduce our mean time to resolution by 50%. Without it, there are many manual steps. You have to go to different products to see specific things. With Splunk, you have the benefit of seeing them together in one place.

The notable events and the incident review features are the most valuable. It gives you an overall idea of what's going on in terms of security in the environment. 

I also like the automation. We write custom scripts and automate certain tasks. That's also interesting. This feature saves us time.

Splunk is capable of doing a lot in real-time with data coming in that is a terabyte in size, you can still do searches in real-time. We have correlation searches that do similar functions.

It has a lot of the features we're looking for. 

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for a year and a half.

It's quite stable. It's a mature product. 

We can make it as scalable as we want. We can scale it horizontally as much as we want on our cluster.

We get support when we need it. I would rate support an eight or nine out of ten. There's always learning and improvement to do. Sometimes the communication with support happens with multiple staff. They should reduce the time to resolution.

Positive

I would rate Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. Not a ten because everything has room for improvement. 

The biggest value of the Splunk conference is meeting people.