Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

We essentially use Splunk for our Security Operations Center (SOC). All of the notables that we create for the SOC are done in Splunk Enterprise Security. It is our SIEM.

I cannot put a value on it, but it has been pretty good. Previously, we used to use ArcSight. I used to do incident response when I first joined the SOC, and there were times when I used to sit down and run a search right at the start of my shift, which is at 7 AM, and I used to hope that it would be run by the end of the shift at 7 PM. I used to hope that it would run in 12 hours and not time out. When we got Splunk, it was a game changer. It took seconds to a minute depending on how intense the search was.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. It is easy to ingest data in Splunk. Based on what I hear from our customer success manager, he has customers who have issues ingesting logs, but for me, it is one of the easiest things ever. Their documentation is fantastic.

Splunk Enterprise Security has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environments. It is very important for us. When we first got cloud, it was like the Wild West. Anyone could spin up their own cloud infrastructure, and we would not know about it. It was public. We did not know what they were doing with it. Now, we have a better grasp and understanding of what is out there, so Splunk makes it easy for us to keep track of our endpoints that are public-facing.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our mean time to resolve. As compared to ArcSight, it has saved at least three to four hours per incident. We utilize a SOAR platform. We do not use Splunk SOAR. We use a different SOAR platform, but with the combination of Splunk Enterprise Security and our SOAR platform, we are able to cut down our mean time to resolve. The time saved varies depending on the case. A normal case would probably take less than ten minutes per investigation. A critical P1 case would take more time, but a normal day-to-day case would take less than ten minutes for our analysts to do their work. A normal case is where a user clicks on a phishing link in an email, or your EDR solution says something happened and there is a threat actor in your environment moving laterally trying to access data.

The correlation searches are most valuable just because we are able to do things like RBA. One of the things that we started pretty recently is our insider threat program, and it has been pretty good, especially using RBAs as our framework for the insider threat.

The UI could be better. This is applicable to Splunk in general. I know that a lot of people who get their hands on Splunk are hesitant to use it just because they find it overwhelming. There are a lot of options. If you open Google.com, you just have a search bar. You just search and hit "go," but when people look at Splunk, they are just overwhelmed. I see that with our analysts. Even after training, if they do not use it every day, which they should be doing, they kind of lose it.

Its learning curve is a bit steep. It is hard for users to use it. For individuals who know how to use it, it is fantastic. It is great. For example, if you are a Splunk Cloud customer, and you had an outage or there is a maintenance window, those individuals who are power users would know immediately when it happens or they would know that there is a maintenance window coming up because they are the experts. They are the SMEs on their teams, and they are the ones creating value using Splunk. Individuals who do not know how to use it are intimidated.

We have been using Splunk Enterprise Security since 2017. It has been about six years.

Its stability is amazing. It is always up. It is fantastic.

It is awesome. When we first purchased Splunk Cloud, our ingest rate was about one terabyte or one and a half terabyte. We moved from the ingest-based license to the workload-based license three or four years ago, and now, we ingest about 10 to 12 terabytes. It is handling that just fine as if nothing has changed.

I would rate their support a six out of ten because there are times when someone picks up a support case, but they do not know what they are doing. I have to guide them. It is like, "I have already done the research. This is what needs to be done. There you go. Do it." I expect a little bit more from support in terms of having the knowledge upfront.

Neutral

We had on-premises ArcSight. We had one guy run it for our enterprise. Our enterprise has roughly over 130,000 people. We are a global company, and we had one guy run the entire infrastructure. We could tell when he took days off because it would not work. When we moved to Splunk, we went to Splunk Cloud immediately. We were one of the first Splunk Cloud customers or one of the bigger ones. That is what I was told when we made the switch.

I do not know whether we have seen any cost efficiencies by switching to Splunk Enterprise Security because I was not there during the ArcSight days per se. I was there at the very tail end, but I would assume that we have seen cost efficiencies just because ArcSight was only used by the security team, whereas Splunk is used enterprise-wide, not just by the security team. It should be cheaper for us. The value is there. It is cross-functional.

I was not involved in its deployment.

Its time to value was about a year. It took us about a year because back in 2017, we were making that conversion from an on-premise ArcSight deployment to a Splunk Cloud deployment. We had to make sure that everything that was being sent to ArcSight was sent correctly to Splunk. We had to make sure that everything was in a common information model format and that we could rebuild the content.

Splunk Enterprise Security is cheaper than competitors, but I do not know whether it is just our contract. 

Everyone says that Splunk, in general, is expensive. I have talked to many peers within our industry, and I know a lot of individuals who are moving away from Splunk just because of the price. That is one of the reasons why we are looking at other competitors to see if anyone is doing something better than Splunk and has a cheaper rate.

I have looked at other competitors. We recently looked at CrowdStrike's LogScale solution. It feels like Splunk to me. I cannot say how we would reproduce what we have done in Splunk on the infrastructure side or backend. Our environment is uniquely different. Technically, I am the only person who runs Splunk for our entire organization, similar to the way the previous person ran ArcSight for the organization. If I were to compare apples to apples, Splunk to me is still number one in that category.

Splunk's community is the biggest benefit. It is so easy to go to Slack and hit someone up. There is a good chance that you will find someone out there who has run into the exact same issue that you are having. Their documentation is fantastic. Because I am the only one who runs it for our organization, it is easy for me just to Google it, find the document, and just follow it. It is as simple as that. It gets a little dicey with XDR and all the other things that are happening in the market, such as using a data lake. Instead of putting our eggs in one basket or using Splunk, we might use something like Snowflake.

I get introduced to new ideas by attending the Splunk Conference. In the year before last, someone did a talk about business email compromises. Within our company, we did something similar, and we did it about nine to ten months before the talk. I listened to the talk to see if we were doing anything different from what they were doing. I found out that we were doing the exact same thing essentially. I thought, "We could have done a talk like this too." These talks are very helpful. For example, they showcased the attack analyzer, and currently, we are looking for an automated online sandbox, just like the attack analyzer. We have been looking at cloud-based sandboxes that are out there. Being able to see it hands-on and how it interacts with Splunk makes it much easier for us to make that decision.

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

I use the solution in my company, and most of the use cases are security-specific. My company uses it to transfer from our detection engineering team to our incident response team. For observability, our company is looking for security events within the tool, and we are logging all the critical security infrastructure and security-relevant logs to a platform for security operations.

The tool has helped to streamline our company's mean time spent in understanding security-relevant events and mitigating those risks.

Some of the tool's best features are RBA and UBA. I also like the tool's single point-of-view dashboard for incident response. The case management area is one of its good features.

The tool has reduced the mean time needed to resolve. The reason is that the dashboard offers a single point of view, especially in areas where people aren't spread out. Our company is getting all the relevant data in there, and we are able to identify the problem instead of having to go to multiple tools or different interfaces.

It is very important for our organization that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. It is our company's way of understanding what is going on in our environment, and then it is our way of handling security events, relevant events, mitigating risk, understanding risk, quantifying risk, producing metrics, and everything else.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides our company with the relevant context to help guide your investigations. The tool has allowed us to gain better visibility and accuracy into security events.

The tool has helped our company improve the resiliency of our security operations. This is based on the fact that we don't have full adoption of the tool for all users in our organization, especially not Splunk Enterprise Security.

My company uses the tool for security operations, and we have built our security operations around Splunk based on what it can do and its performance.

I think Splunk is already improving its products. Some of the features that Splunk has been bringing out, like Splunk Attack Analyzer, while covering some of the other areas, like regulatory compliance and asset security, are good. It is just a matter of the customers being able to see the new features introduced by Splunk and get a demo to see if it makes sense for their work.

I already have Splunk Enterprise Security set up. My company is interested in seeing Splunk Attack Analyzer, and that is why we are dealing with Splunk's point of contact right now.

The area of concern revolves around the fact that Splunk is an expensive product. Splunk's expensive nature is an aspect where improvements are needed.

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

It is a very stable solution. I never really had a hiccup with the tool. Even for migrations or anything, our company has never had to use Splunk's partners, and it has been a seamless process.

The tool's scalability has been good, but it depends on the organization and how Splunk is being adopted there.

The solution's technical support can be hit or miss, but it is mostly positive. I can't give you all the scenarios, but the one thing that I do like about Splunk is that if there ever is a hiccup, a simple phone call from our end can ensure that Splunk's technical team takes care of our problems. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have used many products in the past, but they were not in my present organization. It has been a long time since I used some products, as it was done back during my engineering days. I used to use HPE ArcSight. I have been through McAfee products, such as McAfee Nitro, back in the day. I have been an active Splunk business owner for almost a decade now.

The product's initial setup phase has been perfect since our company uses the cloud services offered by Splunk.

The solution is deployed on the cloud services offered by Splunk.

The reseller that my company gets in touch with to help with the implementation part is called GuidePoint Security. My company's experience with GuidePoint Security has been good.

I think that based on my experience in the organizations that I have been in with Splunk, the tool definitely fetches a return on investment because it allows us to streamline security-relevant events that we need to take care of quickly. Overall, the tool saves us from any impact on our finances and business.

Most of Splunk's customers are trying to find ways to keep the pricing from the ingest licensing model of Splunk down. What that comes down to is that we have to manage the platform. For our company, being a security enterprise and using it for security-relevant data allows us to streamline and control the ingest licensing model because we don't put in a lot of stuff in the tool. We have other things that we output to different data lakes. Splunk has always been on the expensive side.

The ease of deploying the tool, its great customer service, and the development you can do within the tool is very seamless, so I would recommend the product to my peers since it is a great solution.

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security a ten out of ten.

We use the solution for monitoring and detection and for threat hunting.

On the threat-hunting side, we can easily hunt down what we're looking for because Splunk's language parses the data coming in and allows us to utilize it to filter down through the data we need.

I very much enjoy Splunk's robust search nature, which enables me to find the data I want within the data I have. It's helpful for doing an investigation, whether that's an incident response or threat hunting.

It is important to our organization that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. That way, we can see where the data is throughout the entire process, depending on where we are in the incident.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data.

Splunk Enterprise Security has, by far, the best search capabilities. It ties that into alerts and notables, allowing you to refine what you want to see in your data.

There's been a big push for SBC compute over the ingestion model, which will hamper us. We're trying to increase our search counts with things like risk-based alerting, and I think that change will hinder our process.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for eight years.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a stable solution.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a scalable solution.

I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing. I don't know if that was the right move for us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have used Splunk for eight or nine years. 

I rate Splunk nine out of 10 for stability. 

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use Splunk Enterprise Security as the main SIEM system for our operation center. We use it for monitoring detection, and alert management.

We implemented Splunk Enterprise Security to help detect attacks on our network.

Splunk Enterprise Security is highly flexible, allowing us to create whatever we desire. This exemplifies its inherent power. The visibility it offers is notably robust. We can craft it to our needs and even utilize various frameworks within Splunk, prepackaged for security purposes. We possess distinct applications hosting diverse dashboards, catering to numerous security products, including those from different vendors.

The effectiveness of Splunk Enterprise Security insider threat detection capabilities, aimed at identifying unfamiliar threats, relies on whether we establish alerts based on the rules we formulate. If we construct rules incorporating user behavior criteria, the system functions optimally. It appears that there is an Extended User and Entity Behavior Analytics add-on available, which requires a separate license in addition to the enterprise security license. This add-on utilizes machine learning and encompasses multiple developed use cases. While it has limitations, it effectively serves the specific use cases it is designed for.

The threat intelligence framework within Splunk is also highly potent. We can ingest, link, and integrate external data feeds. Concerning IOCs, there are numerous pre-configured alerts within the system that rely on a feed of undesirable IPs. If one of these IPs triggers any of the alerts, such as those generated by our firewall's traffic logs, and the IP matches the bad IPs in the threat intelligence feed, the system correlates this information. If the flagged IP is detected within our network or appears in our firewall logs, an automatic alert is generated. We simply need to ingest the external feed. Subsequently, if the system identifies the IP anywhere, we will receive corresponding alerts.

I appreciate the new MITRE ATT&CK feature. I believe it's a valuable addition and reasonably priced. It seems the feature has been largely developed through marketing efforts, utilizing the capabilities of Splunk to display the MITRE ATT&CK map and the associated rules. This is important since MITRE ATT&CK encompasses over a hundred techniques. It presents the information to us based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework to illustrate ongoing activities. However, achieving a comprehensive understanding of each technique within the MITRE ATT&CK framework requires significant effort and adjustments.

Splunk Enterprise Security has enhanced our organization by offering increased visibility. If any adverse incidents occur, we are promptly informed. Even without configuring the custom rules, Splunk provides effective out-of-the-box rules that help prevent attacks. Consequently, it effectively halts these attacks. In fact, we have been able to detect and thwart potential attacks in their initial stages. This exemplifies the benefits it provides us.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped to speed up our security investigations. We are now able to complete our investigations within three or four days. 

The most valuable features include agility and Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to quickly search for alerted items, as well as the capacity to create custom alerts using the SQL language employed by Splunk. This makes it a highly potent and versatile solution tailored to both user and company needs.

Splunk could enhance its services by providing more comprehensive professional assistance aimed at optimizing our investment. This aspect seems lacking as our expenses increase with higher data connectivity, seemingly without much consideration, as this translates to increased revenue for them. The challenge lies in the fact that we don't always require all the amassed data. Oftentimes, clients are uncertain about their actual data needs. Therefore, if Splunk integrated a service dedicated to system optimization and pricing, focusing on essential monitoring data while eliminating less crucial elements, it could potentially lead to cost savings for the customers. This strategic move would demonstrate their commitment to customers beyond just financial gain. It would highlight their genuine intention to provide support, streamline operations, and maximize the potential of this technology for individuals and their respective companies.

Splunk provides automation for large-scale environments where numerous servers are present. Consequently, efficient management of these servers becomes imperative. Currently, our management server operates using a top-down approach. This involves establishing connections from the main management server to every individual leaf and subsequently, to each lower-level server.

However, this architecture lacks inherent security measures. In the current setup, Splunk employs multiple collectors to gather data. Subsequently, this data is relayed upward, filtered, and then once again transmitted to the main management server. Notably, data traffic consistently flows from external sources toward the central management hub. This design enhances security, as even if a hacker were to compromise or gain control of the management server, their influence would be limited. The data originates externally and travels inwards, preventing unauthorized access to the entire system. 

In contrast, the proposed approach for managing extensive infrastructures situates the management hub at the core. This central position allows us to establish connections from the hub to the various peripheral components, even if they are located on a secure network. However, this configuration carries significant risks. A security breach at the central hub could potentially grant an attacker elevated permissions. This would enable them to compromise the entire network by gaining access to all Splunk nodes within the company. This architecture is vulnerable and has room for improvement.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for four years.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security's stability a seven out of ten. This is because the system lacks built-in protection against certain issues. It alerts us when there are problems in the system, which we then need to address. However, these issues are not always easily fixable, setting it apart from other systems. For instance, sometimes the system slows down while we're working. This can occur when a new alert is implemented, leading to high resource usage and system instability. We are then required to identify and rectify the specific cause of this problem. This might involve disabling or adjusting the alert to ensure it doesn't negatively impact the system's performance.

Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to scale is good. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Previously, I used QRadar, McAfee, and ArcSight. However, Splunk Enterprise Security is a more modern solution. While ArcSight from HP is powerful, it is an older system with limited flexibility and complex architecture. Many companies implemented SIEM systems before Splunk became available. It seems that most large companies might still be using ArcSight, but other competitors have entered the market since then.

McAfee attempted to develop a similar system, but it lacked scalability and was better suited for small businesses rather than larger enterprises. QRadar, on the other hand, remains robust, but it lacks Splunk's flexibility. One of Splunk's notable advantages is its ability to generate alerts and then allow users to enter searches and queries to investigate network activities and log data. This process, known as threat hunting, enables users to conduct specific searches, such as identifying individuals who accessed a particular system and the internet between four and five o'clock on a Friday. Splunk promptly provides the desired results, typically within a few minutes, making it a strong choice for this purpose. Additionally, Splunk Enterprise Security features a highly effective filtering mechanism.

I participated in the planning and implementation of Splunk Enterprise Security, as well as the creation of all rulesets and alerts. I am also configuring it to align with our technical framework.

Individuals who market Splunk Enterprise Security often claim that it can be deployed within half a day, which is quite amusing. While it is conceivable to perform the installation in that timeframe, the real complexity arises when we must establish connections with numerous systems. This involves accessing each system external to our main setup, configuring it, and directing the system to send its logs to Splunk. On the Splunk side, we encounter the need to create parsing mechanisms that allow proper data reading. This entails installing applications capable of correctly parsing the data, and addressing issues where parsing is inadequate. We then proceed to work with the data. Although Splunk provides some pre-configured rules, we also need to develop our own rules to identify specific events and potential attacks. The process of rule creation demands a substantial investment in writing rule sets. Additionally, integrating a threat intelligence framework becomes essential. We aspire to leverage the micro-framework we have established. Splunk Enterprise Security undeniably possesses considerable capabilities. Nevertheless, it necessitates continuous effort to unlock its full potential and achieve ongoing enhancements.

The solution's complete implementation may require up to one year. Throughout most of the deployment, we had a team of two members, occasionally expanding to three.

For the implementation, we used two integrators and Splunk Professional Services.

Considering the fact that Splunk Enterprise Security aids in thwarting attackers from gaining access to our environment, I would correlate this with a return on investment.

Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is high. Larger companies may afford it, but I believe that in the current market situation, where everyone is facing challenges, financial resources are tight. Even stock market tech companies are embracing cost-saving measures. Expenses are now more constrained compared to a few years ago when companies had greater spending capacity. Companies are reluctant to make hefty payments. While Splunk is cheaper than Microsoft Sentinel, QRadar is priced at half the cost of Splunk.

Splunk Enterprise Security's licensing is typically determined by the data throughput we handle. Additionally, they offer an alternative pricing model which involves payment based on CPU usage. This newer model was introduced as a response to Elastic Security. However, Splunk enforces licensing in either scenario. 

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten.

We do not monitor the cloud environments with Splunk. While we have several cloud environments, we avoid using Splunk for this purpose due to its high cost. To utilize Splunk, it would be necessary to place the Splunk engine in the cloud and gather all the logs from various cloud sources, resulting in substantial expenses due to the large volume of logs. As a result, our primary usage of Splunk is on-premise. Instead, we employ different systems to monitor the cloud, generating alerts through various security mechanisms. These alerts are then processed in Splunk, reducing both data traffic and costs.

Splunk Enterprise Security's capabilities to analyze malicious activities and detect breaches are similar to those of other systems. Its effectiveness depends on the rules we develop within it. To truly maximize its value and tailor it to the organization's needs, a significant amount of additional work and utilization of professional services are required.

The reduction of the alert volume presents a challenge due to the X number of personnel in the security alert center. They can effectively handle only Y alerts per day without experiencing fatigue. When the volume surpasses this limit, they tend to merely open and close alerts without thorough investigation. It's as if they've become weary of the process. Therefore, we must determine the optimal number of alerts per day and adjust the rules accordingly. The primary objective is to achieve a statistically reasonable number of alerts per day. This number should be somewhat higher than the current rate, but not three times greater, as exceeding this threshold would render their efforts ineffective. Conversely, if the number of alerts is too high, the personnel's capacity to take action is undermined, resulting in a lack of meaningful outcomes. Striking a balanced middle ground is imperative. This approach enables us to effectively identify and address crucial matters while ensuring our personnel can thoroughly investigate each alert.

Depending on the goals an organization aims to achieve, if their sole focus is on finding the most economical solution and they do not prioritize comprehensiveness, then QRadar would suffice. However, if they seek instant access to answers, I would recommend Splunk Enterprise Security.

Splunk Enterprise Security is deployed across our entire network.

Maintenance is necessary for the system, and updates are needed periodically. Whenever we acquire a new system, we must connect it to Splunk.

Resilience constitutes a crucial component of Splunk Enterprise Security, contributing significantly to the safeguarding of our system.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise Security for organizations that have the budget, time, and skill to properly utilize the solution. I do recommend paying for Splunk Professional Services.

We use Splunk for monitoring and investigation and recently integrated it with ServiceNow. It's a SOC tool, and any malicious activities on the client's side trigger an alert here. 

Splunk has improved our operations by giving us access to more information and allowing us to deploy more use cases. We have integrated Splunk with ServiceNow, so the information from the queries running on the back end is now directly forwarded to the analysts, reducing the manual work. We are pulling data from Splunk into ServiceNow, so the security analysts have all the user details to conduct their investigations. 

It's easy to monitor multiple environments with Splunk. The cloud model is better than the previous on-premises version. The custom dashboards are helpful. We have created multiple dashboards for user activity, logins, phishing, etc. If you miss an alert, you can check the dashboards. For example, if you need to check some user activity, we have a dashboard for Azure Active Directory, and Mimecast is integrated for monitoring email-based attacks like phishing. It throws the information up on the dashboard when we get an alert.

The monitoring aspect of Splunk could be improved. We have to do some queries to get as much information as CrowdStrike or other solutions provide. If you run a big query, you will see a delay. That is the only concern we have because it will take some time if you query large data sets. 

I have used Splunk for more than three years.

I rate Splunk 10 out of 10 for stability. 

Splunk is a highly scalable product. 

I rate Splunk support 10 out of 10.

Positive

Deploying Splunk is somewhat complex, and it requires maintenance afterward. 

Splunk is expensive based on our current requirements, but it's obviously worth what we pay. 

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of 10. I see Splunk as a monitoring tool, not as a security tool. It provides alerts, and we conduct an analysis and investigation based on the information we receive. I believe having another sandbox integrated with Splunk will be helpful for the investigator.

Since we have an IT services company, we have been using Splunk for the deployment to the customer locations as well. Sometimes the customer will come back to us and say that we need to have a SIEM tool, and when we do the benchmarking, we'll do a couple of deployments on the Splunk side and at the customer's locations as well.

As an example use case, we deployed Splunk to a banking institution a few years ago. There the use case was basically this: the customer wanted to set up a security operation center, and they wanted to have a pretty large deployment in terms of the number of endpoints and number of switches and routers. There were many regional branch offices and they have data centers and therefore, many assets in terms of endpoints. They had 30% of their assets are running on the cloud and they needed a complete solution from an incident monitoring and management perspective. That's why we deployed Splunk. 

They wanted to reduce the MTTR, and meantime resolution, and maintain detection. They didn't want to add more SOC analysts into their SOC as the organization scaled up. They have a plan to scale from 5,000 endpoints into 15-20,000 endpoints. They're very particular about deploying the SOC operation center.

Splunk has since acquired Phantom as a SOAR platform. Therefore, we have tried to manage the security automation using Phantom with the help of Splunk deployments. It helps us meet the customer's requirements.

In terms of support, we're able to get the right support at the right time. If there's a break or an appliance issue, they're are on top of it.

This is very important during large-scale deployments. It's not easy to address product-related issues or appliance-related issues, and the number of collectors or number of logs that come into the collector, and managing the collectors across the branch offices, across the corporate offices, etc. It is a cumbersome process for us. That's why it's integral that we get the right support at the right time - and they make this happen.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the dashboard. It's very intuitive. 

The reporting is excellent. The team and the SOC analyst are able to easily track the alerts and the correlation is very good compared to other SIEM tools. 

There are a lot of competitive products that are doing better than what Splunk is doing on the analytics side.

The automation could be better. Typically, the issue that we face is that it has to go to the analytics engine, then goes to the automation engine, basically. Therefore, if there are no proper analytics, the SOAR module is going to be overloaded, and we are not able to get the expected result out from the SOAR module. If they improve the analytics, I think they'll be able to solve these issues very quickly.

The playbooks which they create and provide to premium users can improve a lot. They have to create a common platform wherein the end-customers like us can choose the playbooks, and automation playbooks readily available.

In terms of integration with the third-party tools, what we are seeing is that it's very limited compared to the competitive products. Competitive products have a lot of connectors and APIs that they have developed, and that's where the cloud integration, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud integration comes in. There are a lot of limitations to this product compared to other products.

In terms of Splunk, I've been working on it for more than three years in the current company. Prior to that, I worked with it at another company as well. In total, I have been using Splunk for close to six or seven years.

The solution is stable, however, sometimes in some of the collectors, we are facing a lot of issues. That said, overall, if you rate it from one to five, I would say in terms of stability, it will stand at a three. 

The scalability is perfectly fine. It's very awesome compared to all the other tools, as easily we can integrate with the log forwarding modules and the collector management appliances or modules. That aspect won't be a problem. 

If you look at the SIEM as a market today, Splunk is expensive compared to other competitive products. I'm also into the SIEM evaluation in my current role. I've seen that there are many tools are coming up in the last one and half years. I have also seen many other mature tools that are available now. If you compare next-gen SIEM tools compared to the Splunk, it's expensive. Therefore, it's possible we may not use this in the future or expand on current usage.

In terms of technical support, we don't have any issues, as the professional services which they have extended to us are very, very good. We're able to manage many of the critical issues with their support. I'd say we are definitely satisfied with the level of service provided.

In terms of deployment, it's not so complex compared to the competitive products, however, we will be able to manage that deployment. We don't feel there's any problem on the deployment side. In that sense, I don't think deployment is a complex one when somebody going for Splunk as a tool.

How long it takes to deploy the solution depends on the size of the deployment, basically. Even a large deployment won't take more than a week. When I say deployment, I'm considering all the log collection, log management, and the curation of the incidents, and how incidents are created and routed properly according to prioritization. 

In terms of ROI, for example, if you look at one of our customers today, they are managing close to 100 million events per day. If you look at a traditional SIEM with 100 million events, they need to manage this environment with at least 25 to 30 people. That's 30 security analysts that have to be there. However, when Splunk was deployed, a lot of automation was added on top of it, and today we are managing the same environment with Splunk with close to 15 people. In that sense, if you look at it that way, the ROI is between 30-40%.

In terms of a comparison with the rest of the competition, the licensing cost would be, I would say, 30% higher than most.

Before choosing Splunk, we have evaluated QRadar and LogRhythm. QRadar is much more expensive. LogRhythm lacked reporting.

We ended up choosing Splunk due to the pricing and the reporting features. It also had the kind of scalability that was required. We felt it would help us in terms of positioning from both a cost perspective and an incident alert perspective.

We're partners. We have a business relationship with Splunk.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I'd advise potential new users to ensure they do proper sizing before deploying the product. If it's a very large deployment, the number of endpoints will be quite sizeable. You need to figure out the correct number of endpoints as well as endpoint devices, switches, routers, etc.

It's also a good idea to look at use cases. Splunk is very strong in some use cases. It's important to look into deployment scenarios and check out the use cases before deploying anything.

My biggest takeaway after working with the solution is that the environment is very important. You need to be clear about the problem you are addressing and it takes a lot of planning at the outset.

I mostly use the solution in my company for incident response, ticket management, and integration with other endpoint products.

The benefits my company has seen from the use of Splunk Enterprise Security revolve around the speed of detection it offers.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the correlation searches. The one-stop shop shows me all my insights, and alerts, and can send alerts to my analysts.

I would say it is fairly important for my organization that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility in our environment. At the same time, my company has other products that cover the observability piece. From a security perspective, we use data outside of our security data to piece together the whole picture. I think our company's perspective is that no matter how we get the whole picture, we will do it, even if it is from outside Splunk Enterprise Security. I think Splunk Enterprise Security plays a major role in this.

In terms of Splunk Enterprise Security for helping our company find any security event across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments, I would say that it is great once you get past the learning curve. The learning curve is higher than normal.

I think Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data in a great manner. Splunk is a great product and provides these features, but not so much when it comes to identifying and solving problems in real-time because there are always data delays. There is always onboarding, mapping, creation of correlation search, and then enabling Splunk ESCU part. It works in a general sense and not on a real-time basis.

In terms of whether Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce alert volume, I would say that it is the only active SIEM tool my company is currently utilizing. Reducing alert volumes involves tuning up certain areas of the engineering team. If I look at the product alone, I would say it can help reduce alert volume. If I consider the learning curve, I would say that you have to learn how to tune it the right way with the help of professional services or experts. You need to utilize your resources, which I think is the best way to do it.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides our company with relevant context to help guide our investigations since the correlation searches with the enriched data do help gain insights on all of our investigations. At the current point, we are still trying to get past the tool's learning curve so that all of our analysts and everyone on the security team can utilize the tool the best way they can. The more they learn, the better it gets, so currently, we are doing our best.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped reduce the meantime needed to resolve our issues because we have all our data in a centralized location and mapped to a data model. As long as we know what detection and data we are looking at, we can go to our data model and figure out where the issue lies.

Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to help improve our organization's business resilience revolves more around observability. Our company recently migrated to Splunk Cloud, and I think we have more hands-on experience with the ingestion side than ever before. I think it is a lot easier for us since we moved to Splunk Cloud as we don't have to focus on maintaining the infrastructure so much, and we can focus more on the data. I think this is outside of Splunk Enterprise Security's scope and falls under Splunk Cloud's capacity.

Speaking about Splunk's unified platform helping consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools, I would say that my company is not there yet.

In the next release, I want Splunk to offer more openness to integrations with other products that may be more of a preference for my incident response teams.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for five years. I am an end-user.

In terms of stability, if configured correctly, it works great.

With Splunk Cloud, I think using the tool's scalability feature is easy since one can just call the product's support team.

The solution's technical support is great since they have been very responsive and very attentive while answering all my questions. If the support team can't answer my questions, they escalate it to their engineering team. 

I have had nothing but good things to say about Splunk's technical team. There have been times when I had to rephrase my questions or when there were communication issues, but the time to respond, escalation, and the attempts in trying to find help and answers from the support team's end have always been great. 

I think the only thing lacking is that there are some answers that I couldn't find about the tool without reaching out to support, and it had to be escalated to the engineering team. If this process is the only way I can find answers, I think it is a little bit limiting for an engineer who supports a real-time incident response team. I rate the technical support a nine and a half out of ten.

Positive

I have personally not used any other product before Splunk Enterprise Security.

The product's deployment phase was pretty easy to manage since our company has a migration team and support staff. We also had a really good project manager from Splunk to help us, who walked us through every step, and it was a great experience.

The solution is deployed on Splunk Cloud, which runs on AWS.

My company works with Splunk directly to help us with the implementation, and our experience with the product has been great.

I have not seen an ROI.

The pricing model is great. You can choose between workloads or volume. I am not part of the conversation about pricing in my organization. I just know what I know about the tool from learning about Splunk.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.