Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

Our primary use case is for cyber security, tracking logs, and incident response.

I haven't had the chance to properly sink my teeth into Enterprise Security but so far I like that they added the MITRE ATT&CK features. 

This feature helps us know how to plan when we have an incident, know where to look, what to look for, and aspects like that. 

The MITRE ATT&CK planning is valuable. When we see those incidents and those logs, having the information right there speeds up the process a bit.

We did not have a SIEM at the time, so we added Enterprise Security as our SIEM. We're hoping to learn more about it and grow as we progress.

They wanted us to do basic training, which was offered to our organization for free. That was great. However, ours is a cybersecurity focus. The training was mostly sales-focused, like how to monitor your sales. It was hard to then come back from doing the training and try to switch it to a cybersecurity focus because all the training we did was sales oriented. The basic training didn't really touch on any kind of cybersecurity use cases or anything like that. That would have been great to see in the training.

We upgraded to Enterprise Security a year ago but have been using general Splunk for longer. 

Stability-wise, despite these issues, it's been solid. I haven't had any issues with access to it or anything like that. The only issue we did have was with the engineer. After informing him of those issues, he went back and tweaked them, and then everything worked fine. 

It seems pretty scalable. Our network isn't extremely large, so I don't think scalability will be an issue in our case, but I definitely see the opportunity to scale if needed.

We have around 8,000 devices, so it's a fairly small network. It's across several different networks.

I have not used support yet mainly because I haven't delved into it as much because of the issues with our initial integration with our engineer not being so trained. 

We have different contractors and they have other solutions. Some of those solutions included Elastic. We want to use Splunk and our contractors want to use Elastic. We're hoping .conf23 will broaden our imagination, so we'll have more to bring back and push towards just using Splunk only.

I have not used Elastic myself. It does sound like it does a lot. There's a lot that Splunk offers that we haven't actually used. I want to play with Mission Control. We only use Enterprise Security but I do want Mission Control where everything is in one centralized application where you don't have to jump to different applications. 

I would love to get Mission Control.

My engineer had a little bit of an issue with it but it was because of his own lack of training. We were pushed to hurry up and get a SIEM. He did the best he could. I let him know what wasn't working, and then he would try to fix what he could on the backend so it could work. He was in talks with Splunk to fix those issues. The results are coming back a bit better, but I think that there is still room for improvement.

I was not involved with the setup. I came in afterward. One of our guys here was the one that was in the initial integration of Splunk. We ended up with Splunk as our main SIEM. I've never had any issues with it and I enjoyed it. 

We will see cost efficiencies mainly just from saving time and the shortened time and response to those incidents that we see. The fact that everything's organized in one application, we should see a bit of an increase in efficiency.

I do see the possibility and the opportunity to increase the meantime to resolution by a lot. We use several different applications to monitor logs. We have the vision. 

I've seen some of the updates and changes like Splunk AI and Splunk Vision Control that look nice. I didn't manage to get on some of the hands-on, which would have been lovely. I would like to get more ideas on how we can integrate Splunk into our networks. 

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. I see the opportunity and I'm hoping with our engineer that we can get to where we can make the best use of Splunk. It really seems great. A lot of our staff here were all ready to use it. We're just hoping our engineer can get to the place where we can actually make use of it. 

The biggest value I get from attending a Splunk conference is being able to see the updates, changes, the features they're adding, the Splunk AI, and Splunk Vision Control. That's been nice. I am looking forward to some of the sessions. I want to get more ideas on how we can integrate Splunk into our networks and things like that, especially focusing on cybersecurity. I would also like to see some of the stock sessions because it's a brand new stock. We're trying to stand it up. Seeing how they're using it for stocks would be great.

Our primary use case is for security audit log collection correlation. We wanted something that the security team could focus on versus going directly into our enterprise. We had some initial use cases to supplement our IT ops security into one product. We had a SIEM but not one that was as customizable as Splunk Enterprise Security.

The out-of-the-box capabilities that Enterprise Security offers were very helpful. We're not using it anymore because it was almost overkill. We have shifted to go back to just the core functionality. We were inundated with the amount of alerts and alarms that we could get out of it. It is also a resource hog and we didn't have the resources to support it on-prem so we're taking it offline now.

We saw the granularity that we could get from Splunk far exceeded what we already had. We had the ability to have our security team really focus on the platform and stay within the platform, but they could correlate with a variety of other stakeholders, and our stakeholders were growing. So we tried to get ahead of that and filter it in to create customizable KPIs for those user groups versus having a one-size-fits-all approach. That unique was very helpful for us to expand upon. The driving force is resources, and we were lacking those.

We use it to monitor multiple clouds. We weren't leveraging it for all of our clouds, but we have a presence in GCP, AWS, and Azure. The unity and uniformity across all of it would have been great but at that stage, we were only using it for on-prem coverage. We would like to go ahead and understand how we can implement it as a cloud solution as we are increasing our daily footprint too. We weren't really prepared to understand the workflows we already had in the CSPs or the new integrations of data lakes at a warehouse that were and are still being built out to get Enterprise Security to function off of that too. We hadn't gotten to that stage.

A lot of what we were doing was done manually in terms of vulnerability and remediation and is still being done manually now. Evolving to a stage where the alerts weren't inundating our customers and getting familiar with the product would have helped us perhaps get a bit more functionality and usability out of it. We are seeing some value out of Enterprise Security and think we can get similar results elsewhere. I think that down the road, as our understanding gets better of how we want framework requirements, Enterprise Security could come back into the picture.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for around twelve months.

Stability had its drawbacks because of how much it consumes. We had to justify whether or not it was worth keeping it up. The decision was to not keep up with it.

We are only on-prem so we do manual scaling. We don't have the elasticity that we would have in the cloud which limited us. Justifiably, in order to scale up the platform, we would have to go through procurements and more hardware, which was not an option. So we were limited, and we knew that. We had done pilots and buildout but a hardware refresh cycle was coming up, we had to justify whether or not it was in the cards.

I've been working with Splunk for several years now, and I've always found them very responsive and supportive in a variety of technologies around core functionality like Enterprise Security and ITSI. 

I would rate them an eight out of ten. They have a strong team through and through from the pre-presales all the way through architectural changes and shifts that we need to do to address the customer.

Positive

We've had numerous implementations of SIEM solutions over the years. Splunk offered a lot of capabilities on top of some of our old antiquated Sentinel and Azure. We had many other products before we pursued Enterprise Security. But we weren't in a position to really go down the Enterprise Security route because we hadn't quite fleshed out what our end goal was.

We're still in the evaluation stages. Looking at Enterprise Security, given the fact that we already have an investment in Splunk, it makes sense. We would like to see it grow beyond just Enterprise Security to more of not just observability, but pro actions to utilize the source of that nature. 

We had great success potentially going into a SOAR from Enterprise Security. We hadn't quite evolved to that point yet. At this stage, it's just not really in our pipeline to pursue Enterprise Security until we get a better understanding of our requirements.

Refining those playbooks and so forth also is going to take time. We have customers who have categorically unique requirements. From a security standpoint, one group's security requirements are going to be different from some of the other teams that we have. We are trying to find that uniformity across the board. We may have to entertain multiple security solutions to meet their needs.

My role was to support a lot of the backend and the configuration of the platform as it was being established.

The level of difficulty was on par with the Splunk Enterprise core. My team was involved with a lot of the provisioning from the virtual environment and on-prem to support it. It wasn't overly complicated. Once it was up it took a lot of resources. Evaluating and seeing whether or not we could actually move it to the cloud when the core functionality still existed on-prem, we weren't willing to split them at this stage.

We would almost always have Splunk support through the deployment and configuration stages of it. It was always solid. Once we had the platform up and running, we had to consider general operations and maintenance. While the Splunk team was great and the resources are available, there is a finite amount of resources on-site.

Splunk is not cheap. That's definitely a consideration as we look at other products.

We haven't seen much time to value using the solution system but it wasn't necessarily a fault of the product. It was the cycles to maintain it and support it, to make sure it's growing correctly. We hadn't gotten to that stage. Our ROI and TCO, given the fact that its footprint is being looked at because of what it takes to maintain it in terms of resources. We have the core platform, and then we have a growing license. We're looking at how we can efficiently use Enterprise Security. It's just not there at this point.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten. I think the rating has the potential to be higher. If we had time to flesh it out and vet some of the core capabilities of Enterprise Security and how it could benefit us over the core. Getting to that stage requires a lot more customer engagement on our side that we weren't really prepared to do because of budgetary constraints, hardware refresh cycles, and so forth. Overall, we dropped the product not necessarily because of a lack of capability, it was more along the lines that the timing wasn't appropriate for our security teams.

The biggest value I get from attending a Splunk conference is knowledge transfer. I work in the public so it's valuable having a lot of conversations with fellow colleagues who are in the public sector and hearing their hurdles. We don't want to reinvent the wheel every time, and we don't want to hit obstacles that could have been lessons learned. The conference is a really good opportunity to see what's new, what's out there, and how it can blend in with our current architecture and designs. It also helps to understand what's not going to work to be able to get ahead of it before questions come up. We can properly equip our customers and answer their questions. The Splunk conference is a good brain dump.

We use it to provide both operational and security dashboards based on our clients' equipment. We use it for infra monitoring and threat analysis.

We have multiple rules for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. We get the notable events from the logs and from there we drill down into the cause. We correlate that with the framework and get a score. Based on that, we proceed to the investigation.

It gives us a complete correlation between data processes and security threats. It has threat analysis and the MITRE ATT&CK framework. From a SOC perspective, it uses multiple components or frameworks and, in that way, is very useful, providing us with a lot of information for our clients. They don't want multiple teams dealing with security and malware, et cetera. Splunk Enterprise Security gives us everything in one place.

We get all the real-time logs and, based on the configuration, it's pretty easy to use to find threats. It has helped to speed up our security investigations. Before we went with Splunk Enterprise Security we had limited information but now we have threat intelligence to enhance things.

We are now handling multiple customers globally. We are able to build custom rules based on customer requirements and the applications and data they are using. It is enhancing the security of each customer's infrastructure. We are able to provide weekly and monthly reports and, based on that, our customers are honing their firewalls and other security infrastructure. Splunk Enterprise Security is very helpful in improving the security of our clients.

It gives us good visibility into multiple environments, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid; irrespective of platform.

The UI is also very friendly. You don't have to work very hard to find things.

One issue is that we are getting a lot of false positives. We are trying to reduce them by customizing the default rules, changing thresholds, and using white-listing and black-listing. It's getting better and better as a result. But they need to build components that would reduce the false positives. 

Also, we have a lot of security feed providers. If there was some kind of management tool for that, it would be a great tool to have.

I have been working with Splunk for about four and a half years.

I started working with Splunk Enterprise Security at version 6 and now we are up to 9 and it needs more resources. But it's okay because we have a lot of functionality now. It's better than it was earlier. I would rate the stability at nine out of 10.

Splunk on the cloud is scalable, a 10 out of 10.

If someone is doing the deployment for the first time, it will be a little complex. The installation is straightforward, but for the configuration, you need to follow the documentation and understand it. That is a little difficult the first time if you are doing it on your own. If you have anyone with experience who can explain the configuration, the second time it will be straightforward.

The solution requires maintenance but not much, mostly when there are upgrades 

Most of the companies we work with are keen on budgeting. They can't spend much on security. Their problem is with the cost. They would like to have it but the problem is the budget. If they got a taste of Splunk Enterprise Security and its benefits, they might be able to cope better. A 15-day trial doesn't give them much hands-on or benefit from the tool. From a security perspective, they would need to have it for six months or a year to get a sense of it.

We try to explain, to someone who is concerned about the cost, the functionality and how powerful the application is. Security people know it's better to have a better solution, but management has to look at the budget.

We tried some other solutions, but they didn't work like Splunk. We found that Splunk is the best one.

We work on multiple cloud environments including AWS, Azure, GCP, and most of the popular clouds. We have built our own combined app to monitor most of the cloud service providers. We have our own solution for cloud security monitoring.

My advice is that for big firms, because it has better detection and security, Splunk Enterprise Security is a very good tool. For big companies, good security is important, especially if they have a global market.

I don't see any other software having as much functionality and different ways to investigate security.

We use Splunk Enterprise Security as our primary security event manager. We collect data from various log sources into our Splunk SIEM to build context around what is happening in our environment. We then use the capabilities of Splunk Enterprise Security and other tools to enrich this data and help us manage the data, events, and detections.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us focus on security. It provides us with data and a number of pre-built learnings that allow us to view the content in very useful ways. We can apply filters to the data to get more value out of it. This is the primary use case for Splunk Enterprise Security: to help us analyze and leverage the content we have.

Monitoring multiple cloud environments can be relatively easy, but it depends on the vendors. There can be challenges, such as ensuring that all of the data is ingested and aligned correctly. This is because vendors, especially in the cloud, can change their log formats at any time. Additionally, some vendors may not provide the same log feeds in the cloud as they do with on-premises solutions. As a result, it is important to be aware of these potential challenges and to take steps to mitigate them.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides reasonable visibility into multiple environments by harnessing the power of Splunk and the data it ingests to unify and provide a consistent view.

Splunk Enterprise Security's threat detection can help our organization find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior. We are early adopters of the user behavior piece, so we are still working to normalize our data. Splunk is working with developers to ensure that they can intake our data. We use Windows Log Forwarding for a lot of our host-based logs. We are leveraging this with an on-premises GPO. The gathering mechanism is a little bit different than what Splunk has seen, but it is still within the realm of acceptable. We are working through this issue.

We have a few different STIX and TAXII feeds that are being processed by the Threat Intelligence Management feature. We are members of a few different organizations that provide these feeds, and we use them as needed. The feeds also feed into some of our security products.

Actionable intelligence provided by Threat Intelligence Management is valuable, but it is important to be aware of its limitations. Threat intelligence can help organizations to correlate and build context around security events, but it is important to remember that the information provided is often brittle and can change quickly. For example, an IP address that is associated with a threat actor today may be used by a legitimate user tomorrow. Additionally, some threat intelligence feeds may be contaminated with false positives, which can lead to false alarms. It is important to carefully evaluate the quality and reliability of the threat intelligence before taking any action. Organizations should also have a process in place to verify and validate any threat intelligence before using it to make security decisions.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a valuable tool for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. I am glad we added it to our security stack. Previously, we ran for a year or so without it, and while we had some capabilities, we were truly missing out on some things by not having Enterprise Security. It definitely added value for us, and I would not go back to not having it. I think it has been a solid addition to our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats faster, but the lion's share of the work is still in the process of customizing it to our needs. Taking enterprise security and modifying it to apply to our needs is where we see the biggest bang for the buck. From that perspective, it is probably better for us.

A lot of the prebuilt capabilities in Splunk Enterprise Security are extremely beneficial because they cover all the use cases. I think another important aspect is the consistency of their approach and how methodical they are. This is very helpful because it sets a structure for how we view our data and what we can leverage from it. This page clearly drives us to what is happening and what we need to do, and it has a workflow associated with it. This also helps to reinforce the process. When we deal with security issues, this can always be a challenge. We are dealing with a fire drill, and we need to be able to react. We don't want to make mistakes, and it is easy to do so if we are trying to wing it. However, the structure of this approach helps to reinforce that. I think this is another area that is beneficial in terms of the workflow and how it approaches what it does.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us reduce the volume of alerts we receive. However, we still have to take action on a number of items. Splunk Enterprise Security helped us to do this by ensuring that our input data is accurate and reliable. We are still evolving and maturing in our use of Splunk Enterprise Security, and we believe that it will continue to help us to reduce the volume of alerts we receive and improve our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps speed up our security investigations to a degree. The workflow is improved, and when we encounter an incident, we can take ownership of it, manage it, dive into individual facets of it, run queries, and expand on them. It makes some items easier to access or understand.

The varied prebuilt feature is the most valuable because it ensures that we have complete coverage over all of the key questions. By seeing how others analyzed the data, we can develop new dashboards and approaches. It is always helpful to see how someone else used a tool to spark ideas about how we can enrich our items based on our specific needs. This feature covers a lot of our core general questions and is helpful, but it also allows us to see what someone who is really focused on this area has done and how we can tune and tweak it to our needs.

It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk. This includes making sure that the log feeds are aligned correctly so that when we look at data and alarms, everything makes sense. Sometimes, I see alarms that are caused by data sources that have snuck in. For example, if my firewall says something about AV, it might get mapped into antivirus. This can happen because firewalls are multipurpose devices, and they can end up in models that aren't really applicable. Part of the problem is the infrastructure within Enterprise Security with how they group data types. For example, authentication data, firewall data, network data, and user-based data are all gathered in different ways. This can lead to confusion, especially when multifunction devices are involved. For example, if a firewall says that antivirus is not enabled, it might still detect something as if it was antivirus-related. This can blur the incidents and the information we have. It is important to identify items that creep in or issues that need to be cleaned. This will help us identify problem areas and their root causes more effectively and quickly. We can then clean up the data model, make sure the lines are correct, and get higher-quality alarms.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for over a year. We have used Splunk as a security SIEM for at least three to four years.

We previously used free Splunk apps.

I believe that Splunk Enterprise Security is worth the price, but it is expensive. I am always trying to balance the need for security with the need to be cost-conscious.

I give Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

Using a SIEM is not cheap, no matter how you slice it. So, the first question I would ask is, what are we trying to do with our SIEM? In my opinion, Splunk, including ES shines when we are willing to invest in learning and modifying our SIEM, our solution, and our environment to align it with what we do and how we do it. If we are willing to make that investment to contextualize the security and visibility, then Splunk is a tool that can help us do that. If we are looking for a turnkey solution, where we can just throw logs at something and then pull the arm of the slot machine and get things out, then Splunk is not necessarily the right tool for us. We can get there, but it will be a pricey slot machine. I think we will get the most value out of Splunk if we want to get things that are more contextual to us. We may need to enhance or build off of the Splunk dashboards that ES includes, and that will help us to create dashboards that are extremely relevant to our environment. If we are comfortable with creating Splunk queries, then we will have a lot of power at our fingertips.

To those looking into the solution, I would ask: What are they looking for? What are they willing to invest in? Do they want to understand queries? Do they want to build the knowledge around how to structure them? Are they willing to put in the effort to get the real power out of it, or are they expecting something to tell them what is going on? They need to realize that it is never going to be built for them at that point. So they are going to be getting something generic. They have to consider their specific situation, such as how many people they have on their team, etc. They should also probably take a good stock of what they are trying to log and how long they have to retain it. I have been very happy with our Splunk Cloud instances. They have been very reliable. I think it has been incredibly powerful for us. I think that is also another aspect of whether they are going to have their SIEM in their environment or outside of their environment. They need to think about some of these items. Obviously, Splunk can go either way. They have to make their decisions there. We have been very happy with our Splunk Cloud instance. So that's what's been really good for us. And, also, it takes some of the administrative aspects and puts them on somebody else. That's valuable for us too.

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 are using Splunk in the standard information security use case. We're also using it for various application use cases around identity management, windows active directory, and those types of use cases.

Splunk has provided a venue for us to determine student engagement during COVID, for which we didn't really have any other way except by looking at data that we captured off of our student systems and our authentication servers to see who's logging in, and who's logging out, and for how long they've been logged in.

The feature that I have found most valuable with Splunk is the ability to sift through a bunch of data very quickly.

We have about a 500 gig license with Splunk, so it's not like petabytes of data, but even 500 gigs is kind of hard to sift through sometimes.

Splunk has been improving consistently over the last couple of revs. I still think there are some administrative features that they could improve on and make them less kludgy, but from a user perspective, it has gotten very clean and very sexy looking over the last few builds. So the users seem to like it.

By less kludgy, I mean that in the version I'm running, I still have to go into the command line and modify files and then go into the GUI and validate that they got modified. So it's not all in the GUI, but it has been moving slowly to the GUI over the last several versions. It would be nice if they could move all of the administrative features into a GUI platform so that when you're in the Splunk distributed environment management platform, you then don't have to go into the command line to add new applications or new packages that you then want to be able to push out to your forwarders. Their forwarder management is still kind of split that way.

I don't really have any feature requests in Splunk's space. They seem to be doing a good job of keeping it contemporary from that perspective. 

Splunk's mission is to move everyone to the cloud and charge us a bunch more money. Their goal is to cloud source everything, and quite honestly, the price of cloud sourcing the product, even at smaller 500 gigs a day (which isn't a lot of data by Splunk standards) in the cloud for that is ludicrous. The cost for me to buy equipment every three years and own licensing and run it local to my prem, is significantly less from a three or five year license. I'm going to spend X amount of money on hardware every X years, and I'm going to have to pay licensing costs on software of X over that same period versus that amount that I'd amortize over five years is what I would be paying every year in the cloud.

That is the point with the product. It seems like they are so focused on forcing everyone into the cloud that they seem to be not understanding that there are people that don't have those really deep pockets. It's one thing for a Fortune 50 company to spend a million dollars a year in the cloud. It's another thing when you're a nonprofit educational institute to spend that kind of money in the cloud. Even though we do get some discounts in most of the cloud space providers, it is still not on par with the big public businesses.

I have been using Splunk for probably 10 years.

At least in our environment, it is super stable. When you think about how much time you spend working with other applications, just Windows Server requires more feeding than Splunk does, you see that Splunk is a very low maintenance care and feeding product.

We have probably 150 users in the environment and their roles vary from being application management folks to application engineering folks to the executive suite, so lots of different use cases. The executive suite tend to prefer more curated content and the application owners have a mix of curated content and dynamic search functions they can perform. Then the engineering tier basically gets some curated content and some free reign to do whatever they want for the most part. I'm the guy that supports this instance. So there's one person.

I support not only Splunk, but I am also the campus security engineer and I'm also the dude that runs or is responsible for all of our campus monitoring infrastructure. So that tells you how little maintenance is required.

We are adding new use cases on a fairly regular basis and we are adding more licensing to our indexing license. I don't see Splunk going away. There's nothing else that I think provides the ability to do this much data analytics from just the numbers of equipment that you need to run it. Also, the number of people that you need to actually make sure that it's functioning well. In higher ed., everybody always says we should do open source. And I respond that what I do in Splunk with 20 systems, I would need three racks of equipment to do on an open source platform. I have basically 70 - 75% of the racks now and I'd need three times that or more to run this as an open source product. And it wouldn't be as cute and it wouldn't be as beautiful or as flexible.

I know other folks in the higher ed. space that are running petabyte size instances with Splunk. So I would have to say it scales very well just from talking to the folks in my market silo.

Their technical support sucks.

My engagement with their technical support was for a product which they basically took over from an open source product and they just seemed to not be able to figure out why it's not doing what it's supposed to do. The number of times I've had to engage with Splunk for solutions has been for a couple of use cases. And in every one of those use cases, support was very painful. It took a very long time and it seemed like they were more interested in burning their queue volume than actually satisfying me as a customer.

I work in higher ed. Here in higher ed., it costs us a lot of money to run it. The support from the company that you spend a lot of money with is pretty poor. I get most of my support through the Splunk sales folks because they seem to know more and they're more incentivized to keep me as a customer. When I call in to open a ticket with Splunk support, they really don't know, and this is going to sound terrible, they don't really care whether I have a 50 Meg license or a 50 petabyte license. If it's not on their workflow, their pre-programmed triage, they can't do it.

Splunk came into being at Case Western when we were looking for a better log product than Check Point was providing at that point in time. My entire investment in Splunk, in hardware and software and integration cost, was cheaper than what Check Point was going to provide, or what the Check Point solution path was for just looking at firewall data. We knew we needed to be able to do more analytics than what we were currently getting out of our firewall products and Splunk was brought in to do that. It can do this and a whole lot more.

Splunk is a complex critter to put in and it's a more complex critter to keep running. We have 10 search heads and four indexers and universal and a heavy forwarding cluster. We have clustered indexers and clustered search heads. This is definitely not a drag and drop product.

We engaged a third party Splunk integrator to help us do our Splunk deployment and they did our initial deployment. We used a different integrator to do some of our upgrades, which we probably won't use again. Our implementation strategy was we really just wanted to look at the classic security use case when we put this in 10 years ago. Then after that came in, and everybody was happy with what it was doing, we added some other use cases and universal forwarding and so on and so forth.

We used an integrator.

The integrator we used to do our initial deployment was excellent. The integrator we used to do our last round of upgrades was less than excellent.

When I hire an integrator to do an upgrade in an environment, I expect them to come back and say "all of your application layer apps are upgradeable, but your OS's need to be upgraded. Do you want me to do that? Or should you do that?" I now have different versions of OS's under Splunk running in my Linux world and it would've been nice to upgrade the system OS and then upgrade Splunk, even if it was more disruptive. I guess I have to read the statement of work more closely in the future.

The TCO and ROI are really great if you're in the private, non-public sector and you're in a more standard business sector. The return on investment in total cost of ownership on Splunk is from somebody who doesn't fit into that neat silo. Do we calculate that stuff? So our return on investment is by being able to solve problems that we never knew we could solve. My answer to it is the flexibility to be able to figure out student engagement when COVID hit. This was the only platform we could do it on.

I can comment on price in this way - in education in Ohio, we're part of the Ohio supercomputer consortium, and they act as a collective bargaining agent. So we get our licensing as a piece of the State of Ohio's Splunk license. So my pricing is very much not list or even reduced list because of the volume that the state buys.

We generally spend about $20,000 a year in third party integrator costs to get us past some of the rough edges that we get with Splunk support.

We briefly looked at the open source product and we obviously looked at a Check Point product. When we looked at Splunk it seemed like they had a smaller cost to procure it, and a much smaller cost to maintain it than all of those other solutions. So it was kind of why we went with Splunk. This is very non-intuitive since everybody says they love Splunk but it costs too much.

My advice to anyone considering Splunk is to understand exactly how much data you want to look at and you want to bring in on a daily basis. Then create a rational strategy to bring the data in, in reasonably sized chunks, that fulfill a use case at a time.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Splunk a really good nine.

I'd rate it a really good nine because it's really versatile. You can do a lot of things with it. It allows you to do a lot of analytics in the platform without needing a bunch of other third partyware to help you figure it out.

When configuring our use cases and describing the overall purpose of Splunk Enterprise Security, I would focus on the main use cases that I encountered with this tool.

The ease of use and building queries, specifically SQL queries, is notably beneficial as it is easy to build, and the data model itself is very simple. The advanced correlation capabilities are very useful for identifying patterns or malicious activity of users.

I have worked with Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

I have contacted the Splunk Enterprise Security support team once, but mainly the other team responsible for onboarding contacted them.

I am preparing my master's degree and conducting this review for completing it at KFUPM University, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, located in Saudi Arabia, to prepare for my defense. I have experience with blue team tools, specifically Splunk Enterprise Security and some other solutions.

The company name is Cyberani Solutions, and my email is first name dot last name at cyberanisolutions.com. PeerSpot will create an account and email the login credentials, and my feedback will be published and possibly shared with third parties if I choose to not remain anonymous.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight.

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.