Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

Imagine a single application with 17 application servers and dozens of log files per server that rotate as often as once per hour. How do you track and analyze anomalies in those log files with the ability to go back and correlate data for the past X weeks? That was use case for just our team, not to mention the hundreds of other application teams.

Splunk has a single purpose in life: ingest machine data and help analyze and visualize that data. The breadth of the data sources that Splunk can ingest data from is broad and deep and it does an exemplary job at handling structured data. It does a great job at handling unstructured data. Breaking data into key/value pairs so that it can be searched is relatively painless.

Deploying Splunk as scale is not easy. It requires a significant amount of relatively complex architecture once you push past the single server instance. Breaking out your search and indexing layer requires someone with Splunk experience. Want to add search layer replication for HA? Want to host in AWS and do cross-region index replication?

Splunk expertise is in high demand today and finding talented engineers to pull off your large-scale implementation is hard. Do your homework.

Out-of-the-box functions are nearly flawless, but when you push at the edges, then things start to get a little flexible in their eloquence. There is a robust community of support to help through most issues and the documentation is exceptional.

There were no issues with scalability, but we invested some serious time and resources to design a scalable infrastructure up front.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent both during the purchase and ownership lifecycle.

Technical Support:

Technical support is mediocre. Splunk is struggling to deliver a consistently exceptional support experience. Their senior engineers are very talented, but those folks are in short supply and many of the most experienced engineers are making hundreds of dollars an hour as consultants not answering your support issues.

No enterprise solution was in place.

The initial setup was done without any prior experience and was up and running, including ingesting data, within a few hours. Setup at scale and scalability took months of effort.

We hired a contractor with significant experience with Splunk, Elastic.io, AWS, and custom development. They were expensive, but worth every penny.

TBD.

You will eat up whatever you purchase quickly. The level of insights that Splunk empowers is addictive.

We evaluated Graylog, Elastic.io, etc.

My customers subscribe to many different tools, like CrowdStrike. They ingest all that into Splunk and use it as an aggregator to launch their investigations into any threats detected.

The solution has improved our organization by providing a centralized place to start investigations. It allows us to consolidate everything into one place that kicks everything off so we can map it back to at least that Splunk instance.

The solution's most valuable feature is its data modeling. Splunk has data from so many different vendors. Moving all that or normalizing that to the data models allows us to look at one place holistically across all the different inputs.

The one problem Splunk has is writing correlation searches. My analysts are intimidated to write queries to create correlation searches. It would be good if the solution had some kind of copilot to automate or help write correlation searches. Splunk Enterprise Security should include more automation, AI, and machine learning capabilities.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for three to four months.

We haven’t faced any issues with the solution’s stability.

We haven’t faced any scalability issues with Splunk Enterprise Security.

The end-to-end visibility the tool provides is not that big of a deal. They have so many tools that can do that kind of part. Splunk doesn't have to be the one place for total visibility, but at least for visibility when it consolidates on threats.

Splunk has helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data. The tool pretty much consumes everything that we have. Everything from dozens of different vendor products gets ingested into Splunk. Splunk Enterprise Security is just that one central place where everything goes.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations. Something that requires someone to work on it at the beginning of the day would not take more than 15 minutes with Splunk Enterprise Security.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.

In the beginning, we just wanted to collect the logs from the different devices, like the nano storage, Linux, Windows, and VMware. We tried to get the uniform solution to collect and analyze all of the system logs.

Our current companies need this solution. We need it to highlight the old logging events. Based on the different device and systems, we have Splunk and we can clearly explain the everyday field logging of events in the different IT environments.

In the past, we used a different application to collect logs. We used SurfWatch and VMware to do so but we found that the Splunk has more capacity to do more in less time. They provide a faster speed to index all the events which is a huge asset.

The user can apply for all kinds of device systems, no matter whether he/she is using Windows or Linux. It can easily collect the logs. In addition, the user can have an index which can help us to collect and analyze all kinds of logs and find the outstanding issues.

Splunk is not very user-friendly. It has a complex architecture in comparison to other solutions on the market.

It is stable.

Scalability could be improved.

We used SurfWatch and VMware in the past.

I was not involved with the initial setup. 

I am not personally involved with the pricing of the solution.

We also looked at Selopene SIEM. It is a premier logging site.

We use it for logging and troubleshooting.

Every team immediately created their own Splunk dashboard, and all the product owners were ecstatic about this. We were able to create a catalog of dashboards and have a holistic view at all levels. We could understand our business much better. Real-time errors, which were buried in emails before now, surfaced up on dashboards. Even our executives could understand this, and it changed the way teams thought about alerting and reporting. It allowed us to send out real-time notifications to integrate with Opsgenie, and it changed the way IT works.

The dashboards are the most valuable feature. We like the ability to drill in and see what queries are under the dashboard, build new visualizations, edit the querying, and see the reports. The dashboards are very intuitive and similar to SQL. They are easy to set up and get running.

The query language is pretty slick and easy, but it is not consistent in parts. Some of it feels a little esoteric. Personally, some of my engineers are coming from SQL or other languages. Some things are a little bit surprising in Splunk and a little bit inconsistent in their querying, but once you get use to it and once you get use to the field names and function names, you can get the hang of it. However, if it was a bit more standardized, it might be quicker to get it up and running.

I would like additional features in different programming models with the support for writing queries in SQL or other languages, such as C#, Java, or some other type of query definitions. I would also like a better UI tool for enhancements of advanced visual query editors.

It is pretty stable, though it has gone down from our usage. We do need to keep an eye on our query volumes. Right now, it is too easy for a user to write a query, run it, make it available in polling mode (real-time mode), and bring down the server. Some more safety alerting would help and be beneficial.

We do have to educate developers on how to not blow it up. It is a little to easy to write an expensive query and overly stress the system. This could be improved. Overall, once you have people who know what they are doing, it is very stable.

Our environment is on-premise, and it is big. We have a couple hundred users. However, it was slow and unavailable at times before we trained all the engineers on how not write a long, constantly polling query.

Our internal tools team did work with the Splunk support team extensively. I was not directly involved, but from my point of view, they were able to fix and resolve issues within a day or less, so they have been okay

It is early days right now to evaluate the integration and configuration of Splunk in our AWS environment. We are just starting to integrate it with regular stuff. While I think it is okay so far, I really do not have enough information.

Most of our return on investments have been through faster error resolutions. Our meantime to recovery has dropped for issues. We can often fix things before the customer notices them. Whereas, when logging was done custom by each team in non-standard ways, it would take days to resolve issues that are now resolved in sometimes minutes.

We knew we were going to go with Splunk. It was the leader and the one we liked. We didn't consider any others since Splunk met our needs.

We chose Splunk because of the ease of the UI, querying, and creating dashboards. It has a standardized query language, which a lot of the IT staff were already familiar with it. It was the market leader from our prospective for our needs.

Go with Splunk. A lot of people know how to use it because they have experience with it. It works well. While it has some pain points, it provides reports and data visibility.

It integrates great with Opsgenie, PagerDuty and Slack. We love the Slack integration, as works great with the Slack alerts.

We use the on-premise version in our data centers and we use the AWS version. We are just starting to migrate to the AWS hosted version, and I have not seen a difference.

Security and incident management, which is helpful when organizing the data from different systems and running analysis on all the data together.

We have a more secure, robust environment, which keeps the harmful software out of the zone required.

The most valuable features are:

• Risk analysis
• Machine Learning Toolkit
• dbConnect
• Cisco products
• eStreamer
• SIEM. 

Visualizations are the best way to understand deviation techniques from the norm.

More training on PetaData using artificial intelligence techniques to identify the events which are not normal and exceptions that would help the organization identify threats and malware on the go with results.

We use Splunk for operations, application monitoring, and security. We are both cloud and on-premise based, so it has been very versatile for us. 

It helped us consolidate all our solutions into an easy tool to use for various employees.

• Unstructured data
• Linking things together
• Building out stuff which is actionable.

Once you learn SPL and what data you need to obtain and merge together, it is really useful. 

More control with Splunk Cloud as it seems a bit limited. I used to manage an on-premise instance of Splunk Enterprise and really liked having more control over it. 

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

While we did not have a previous solution, we took what little of Splunk that we have been using and have increased it greatly.

We are a nonprofit, so it is hard to quantify. 

Be upfront about your needs and expectations. Splunk is one of the top SIEM solutions to work with. 

No.

We use it alongside some endpoints to detect log ins outside of scheduled work hours. If someone logs in outside of that range, we generate an alert for the security team to review.

I can use the MITRE ATT&CK framework. With the data that I ingest into ES, the MITRE app gives me visibility into what I'm covering from the techniques and tactics in the framework, which is pretty cool and convenient.

At the end of the day, it's the platform receiving the logs from all the other apps. You're watching all the information in just one place, so it's basically the core tool in the company. So, it is really important that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. 

In a way, Splunk Enterprise Security helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data. However, there are a few tools that are hard to normalize or use data models. And some of the add-ons don't work properly sometimes. Not all of them, but a few.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped us reduce our alert volume by 30%.

Moreover, Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. And it's important because we need to set up the basis of the context of what we want to see.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped improve my organization's business resilience. It's a pretty powerful tool. We can monitor and ingest all the data, only if it's not encrypted.

Splunk platform helps consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools. We watch all that information on just one platform, so that's pretty cool. 

The risk-based alerting (RBA) is one of the valuable features. It's a really cool concept to explain and see the impact that you're having on the company.

Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to find security events across different environments, whether in the cloud, on-premise, or hybrid, is really good. Because it gives me a lot of content out of the box, the only thing I need to do is ingest the data, and I'm good to go.

I would like to see the asset and identity lookups be more automatic and less manual. I have to search everything and type it. So it should be more user-friendly.

I have been using it for six months. 

The stability is really good. It's very accessible.

Most of the time, some docs are not available. When you see the documents, they add a link, we go to the link but it's not available. 

Also, the customer service and support have a lot of old questions that are not updated.

Neutral

It's pretty easy. The first thing you need to do is the onboarding phase. After that, you need to review that the logs that you're receiving are good. And after that, you need to start working with the correlation searches and setting up everything.

The deployment was done internally. 

We have definitely seen an ROI. It is worth it!

The pricing is always going to be different because it depends on the project you are working on and how much data you are going to ingest. But it's definitely worth it.

We directly chose Splunk to begin with.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. There are a few things that need to be more automatic because there's still a lot of manual work to use it.