Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

It's the mainstay of our monitoring solutions that we have for auto-logging, et cetera, for our enterprise solution.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to capture the different data streams. We also appreciate the reporting in that aspect of Splunk. If we can grow now, with any security arena, it's going to be proactive, not reactive. It allows us to digest the information, the data, the different data streams, so we can make decisions based upon information that we receive, and it is pretty robust.

The configuration could be better.

We would like to see improved pricing, however, I'm kind of out of that arena. I make suggestions based upon the flexibility with which we serve our customer base, which is millions of our veterans. I would say that if someone was not familiar with it, one of the things that I've heard is that it's kind of hard for them to understand the whole thing. Splunk is just one piece to the puzzle. It's not the whole puzzle. It's kind of not the solution's fault, in that sense. That said, if it could be more accessible to people with different skillsets, that would be ideal.

We'd like to see reporting where there's a way that we can get a higher description without being too technical, for example, where it's kind of more of an executive-level of technical.

I've personally been using the solution for over ten years. At this point, it's been more than a decade. I've used it for a while now. 

We're partners and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Splunk.

We use the latest version. I'm not hands-on. I'm called the architect, however, we do use the latest version as that's a part of our configuration management framework, that all of our applications - especially in security - are up-to-date with the latest and greatest updates, bells, and whistles. We use both public and private clouds.

In terms of creating the solution, for what we do from an enterprise standpoint, everything from monitoring to data capture to reporting, we would rate it at a nine out of ten.

I used Splunk ES when I worked for a retail company. I worked mainly in the security operations center. I have also worked in healthcare and federal spaces.

Splunk ES provided the organization with overall visibility.

Incident Review and correlation search are valuable features. These features help us create correlations and have good actions afterward. The product provides visibility and enables us to correlate data and generate alerts.

The product could be cheaper.

I have been using the solution since 2014.

The tool is very stable. Once we set it up properly, it's reliable.

The solution's scalability is good. When we started, we had two servers and two indexers. By the time I left, it was up to 11 or more. It's not very hard to add additional components.

The support team is usually very receptive and answers quickly.

Positive

The initial setup was easy because I had done it many times before.

I used the solution until December last year. It was not very hard to monitor multiple cloud environments using the product because getting data into Splunk is not very hard. It also provides add-ons that we can use to pull data from other places.

Splunk was the brain of the whole process in our organization's security operations center. Without Splunk, we wouldn't have had any way of seeing what was going on. The tool helped reduce our mean time to resolve. We got alerts faster and responded to them faster.

The biggest value of the conference is the community. The conferences help me interact with people, get insights and up-to-date information, and also get opportunities to present my work. There's always room for change.

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

Splunk just acts as an extra presentation layer, and we tried it because of the plugins they have to try and get more logs into the environment.

Splunk would be my choice for the presentation layer because it comes with inbuilt reports and a dashboard that you can customize.

Aside from the 5GB limit on the community version, I believe it is the same as ELK. It's a useful tool, and nothing comes to mind right now.

I haven't found a way for me to create my own plugins and integrate them into Splunk, but this isn't necessarily a limitation; it could simply be a lack of knowledge on my part.

Splunk is a stable solution. I am very happy with the stability of Splunk.

Splunk can be scaled to any environment. The way it's designed, it's cloud-ready, and it has a lot of performance, in-built indexing, and performance tuning options. Splunk is easily scalable.

I am happy to report that I've never needed to contact technical support. The README tutorials and the existing forums provide me with practically everything I need. So far, I haven't had to do so. This should be a testament to the solution.

We broaden the scope of IT governance and IT security.

We look at everything from SIEM to network management to endpoint protection, server protection, database protection, and anything else that can aid in visibility, policy enforcement, and monitoring.

Our organization is using a combination of Splunk and Elasticsearch. We get most of what we need from the ELK suite. ELK Stack is usually the primary focus.

ELK has the same inbuilt reports and dashboards that you can customize, but ELK is better for central logging and log aggregation. Once they've all been aggregated, you'll be able to run any kind of queries and APIs to query the logs on ELK and then use Splunk as a presentation layer for the consumers to use.

Security tools, in my opinion, are business tools and should be used by businesses rather than security engineers. I'm experimenting with a hybrid of the two, in which ELK serves as the engine for central logging and Splunk handles the presentation layer and aggregation of additional third-party logs from tools that might be difficult to integrate into ELK.

I would rate Elasticsearch a ten out of ten.

It's a cloud-ready package. It has the same characteristics as ELK. From a deployment standpoint, I don't have any issues with it. The material is freely accessible to anyone who wishes to use it. There is a virtual machine option. You can get a virtual machine by downloading it. The deployment options are simply numerous, and it is up to the implementer.

It wasn't that difficult for me. There are no complaints from me. The material is present, and there are numerous options for deployment. It's relatively simple to go from zero to viewing data with Splunk. ELK is the same way. It is now up to the implementers and their environment to provide you with more data about it.

They could improve their discounts. I think it's a good solution, and it's gaining a lot of traction, maybe they are recouping their R&D costs, Further reductions would be fantastic, and I believe that more and more people would flock to it.

We provide IT consulting services. Our customers occasionally ask us to assist them in locating specific solutions.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using this solution.

I would say the forums and READMEs provide more than enough information about Splunk. Most people struggle because they move too quickly through the implementation process. As long as you follow the guidelines, particularly the specifications for environment requirements and implementation methodology, these solutions should work out of the box.

Splunk is a very good solution, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

I work for a government agency and we use Splunk to monitor our Cisco equipment. I'm a senior network engineer and we are customers of Splunk. 

This is a very capable and flexible solution. It's based on Linux and even Windows installations use the Linux file structure. You can use it to gather syslog messages from anything; jet engines, fin-tech financial institutions, banking, regular enterprise, etc. You can gather the messages from network equipment, elevators, anything you can think of that generates syslog, and Splunk it. They also have a good API so you can write your own code to talk to it or interact with it. The solution has a lot of applications that people have written. It's the best solution on the market. 

It would be nice if they had a wizard to construct searches, including more complex searches that include math or statistics. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The product runs on Linux so it's very stable. It's important to have a well-run SAN environment to store the data. 

The solution can be scaled up to any size of enterprise or agency. I have heard of Splunk installations of over 100 terabytes of licensing.

We used Logrhythm previously but it was not a good fit for our environment. That is why we switched to Splunk.

The initial setup is fairly complex. There's a certain architecture that Splunk utilizes to handle its indexing and it also depends on the size of your deployment. If you have a relatively low amount of gigabytes per day, deployment is simple. And of course it scales to terabyte, so if you have a terabytes installation, there are a lot of additional services that need to be implemented such as licensing servers and clustering. We sometimes configure syslog NG servers to front end the date before it ends up at an indexer. If it's a large terabyte installation, you definitely want to use professional services.

This was implemented through a combination of in house and vendor developers.

n/a

Splunk charges on the basis of gigabytes of incoming log messages per day. Also I would recommend that funds be set aside for Splunk training and certification.

There is a large number of options for training and certification. The more training you have the more useful Splunk becomes. However, right out the gate you can do useful searches due to the search bar design.

Our primary use case was really as a client organization, like the government and the IT industries, we are in the telecoms sector. We analyze security reports. We use Splunk to order them and put them in a system and we use the various kinds of integration with Oracle Cloud which is helpful.

Every tool has a drawback. Some aspects of this solution are secure but getting clean data from the cloud takes time. Looking towards the future, I'm looking for a tool that is the most secure in the cloud environment. 

It's very flexible. If you look from the cloud implementation it is there. Reports are made quickly. Unlike other tools, it caters to all kinds of technical information on the front very easily. There's no need to put in any technical information. You can pull up the reports very easily, take action, and notify stakeholders.

I would like to see them develop integration with the help of a rack rest API. Which is an API that helps to secure communication with oracle cloud and pull down records from there.

This integration is currently missing in current version of splunk. I'm looking forward to see this feature getting implemented  in next version of Splunk and so that organizations can get benefit of this  feature in future.

Stability is very good. 

Scalability is good. It's scalable enough. You can play around with this tool. Scalability is one of the main criteria we look for when considering solutions. 

The setup depends on the organization. It is very simple here. You can easily install all of the businesses in the company network. Previously, it was suggested that this solution is not flexible enough. It does not give us permission to implement on-premise so we implement them on the cloud. 

We also looked at HP ArcSight and two other solutions. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. I rated it a nine because every tool will have its drawbacks but ultimately it's a very good tool in comparison to HP ArcSight. If we can add on a scalability feature it would significantly improve the solution. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to use it at least for a year to get a hands-on and technical understanding because it's a good product. Then decide whether or not to move forward with Splunk - but I would advise to stick with Splunk. 

We started using Splunk to serve as a SIEM. In addition to correlating security information, we have begun to use it as a developer and customer advocate by analyzing user behaviors and system response times. 

Log files which were previously either not reviewed or reviewed incompletely are now being used in operations daily. Security and operational events are discovered and resolved with greater efficiency than we have ever before. The way Splunk allows for data to be correlated together has given our organization a more complete picture of our system security status and how users organically move through our applications. This information has allowed us to focus development efforts which will directly benefit our customers the most. 

The ability to manipulate data in Splunk is unparalleled. Splunk’s powerful, flexible query language can morph difficult to understand log formats into usable data. 

Correlating data across different systems via one interface will allow you to know your environment or identify incident data in ways you never imagined.

There is a definite learning curve to starting out. However, there is quite a bit of documentation out there to help you get started. 

The community (Splunk Answers/Slack Channel/User Groups) can help get you started. 

We previously used ArcSight, but found Splunk to be more cloud capable.  

Truly evaluate the data you want to ingest and go slow. Pulling in data that can provide no use to your mission only wastes data against your license.  

Other options were evaluated, such as ELK, but Splunk was identified to be more feature rich out-of-the-box.

Pick it up and jump into the community!  It can help get you started a lot faster.

We are using it for logging and monitoring.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps with application events. It provides end-to-end visibility into our environment which is most important for us. It reduces the time to react to an event.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data. It can help identify and solve problems in real-time, but we have mainly utilized it for post-identification correction.

It provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. It is easier for developers to take action once an anomaly is detected. We have been leveraging Splunk dashboards for that.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations, but I do not have the metrics.

They are a good partner for Google Cloud. It provides great visibility, threat detection, and proactive mitigation of risks for our mutual consumers.

We have been selling Splunk Enterprise Security along with Google Cloud for about two years.

We had a very bespoke solution. It was a shared model. The scalability was good.

Their technical support has been good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We have not used any other solution previously.

Our customers have seen an ROI, but I do not have the metrics.

The variables and the flexibility that Splunk provides are helpful, especially in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

I would advise others to start early.

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

I use Splunk on-and-off — I started with in-house projects, then moved up to commercial projects. 

Splunk can extract all kinds of data. There's no limitation on what kind of structured and unstructured data one needs to extract — it can access any kind of data, including machine-generated data. 

The ease of deploying the agent is great in Splunk. One can easily deploy the Universal Forwarder which can extract any amount of information and put it into an indexer. The flexibility of ingesting any kind of data is good with Splunk.

In regards to action-oriented tasks, If an alert is triggered where I have to perform a certain action in the form of executing a Python script or invigorating a PowerShell script — this is easy to do with Splunk. 

The Splunkbase is great. There are thousands of apps that are already available, I can install those apps with full-connectivity and use them to extract any form of data. The community in the Splunkbase is also really strong. 

The ease of integration with third-party tools is great. In the Splunkbase, there are so many apps that are easy to integrate with. 

The user interface is really good. There is a machine learning toolkit — I like it a lot. They have use cases in place so that people with little experience in machine learning can go through these examples of use cases and gain a better understanding. 

Sometimes we experience issues when formatting and configuring files; however, this is a very technical issue that's hard to explain.

When extracting the data or structuring the data in the right format, sometimes it becomes challenging. It's up to the user to understand the regex commands. 

Our customers often complain that the price of Splunk is too high.

When Splunk is deployed on the cloud, there are certain considerations that cannot be met. Cloud-based configuration cannot be done by our Splunk admin team. It needs to be routed via a ticket. You don't have more control on the cloud from a configuration point of view, whereas, with on-premise, you are in control — you can define any configuration settings. 

When you install on-premise, many types of configurations can be done but when Splunk is on the cloud, you're dependent on their specific configurations.

I started using Splunk in 2018.

The scalability is good. If you have the money, you can expand — it's volume-based, not instance-based. 

I'd say I am happy with the technical support, not elated. They provide great support, but sometimes they don't have the answers that I need. I've only ever raised two big support issues, and both times they haven't been about to fully resolve the issue. In the end, I had to figure it out myself.

We have one or two engineers that take care of all maintenance-related issues. It really depends on the scale of your project. One of our projects required a huge deployment — we needed a huge team to match. If it's a small deployment, then two people are enough.

Its cost model is dependent upon the amount of data used — how many GBs we extract in a day determines our price. The price is not dependent upon how many instances we installed in Splunk. I can install thousands of instances, but it will only charge me according to how many GBs I extract per day. 

Overall, our customers complain that the price is too high.

I would definitely recommend using Splunk. They have free learning models available. There are models available on their learning page where you can gain a better understanding of how to use Splunk. Within one month alone, you can at least understand how to operate Splunk, whereas, with other tools, it can take a lot of time to understand.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Splunk a rating of nine. The only downside is the cost. Price is the only factor; sometimes, companies shy away from Splunk because of the price.