Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

There are a lot of use cases for Splunk Enterprise Security. The main one is when you are trying to detect an authentication attack. There are lots of people trying to get access to a system, so they are constantly trying to authenticate. Splunk Enterprise Security can quickly detect that through its correlation engine. If there is a specific attack of the anomalous amount of users trying to log into a system, it generates an alert. Our SOC is then able to analyze that alert and determine whether it is a false positive or a true event. If it is a true event, they can work towards containing that attack. If anything is a success, they can quickly provide that information to our incident response team.

The benefits that we have seen from using Splunk Enterprise Security have been faster response time and faster enrichment of information so that the analyst can act and respond in a more timely and efficient manner, which then provides more information to leadership, such as myself. We are then able to respond. We know how to present risks and how efficiently our SOC is doing to our senior leaders. There is a 30% to 40% improvement because, with the system we had before, the capability of figuring out what was going on to analyze the event was cumbersome. Splunk Enterprise Security has driven and given analysts the ability to analyze a lot more efficiently.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. It is very critical for us.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us find any security event across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments. It helps in all of this. We have multi-cloud environments. We have all four main cloud environments. We also have our on-prem environments. We have also set up a hybrid environment. It has improved our ability to detect and find needles in the haystack that we were not able to see before. There are lots of things they have been able to detect. People were installing things and misusing AUP violations that we were not able to see before.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped reduce our alert volume with the implementation of risk-based learning. When you are doing risk-based learning, you can definitely reduce the volume, but initially, when you move from one SIEM to Splunk Enterprise Security, you do not really reduce volume. You are generating more. Because you are getting better visibility, you are generating more information for the analysts to look at, and then over time, as Splunk Enterprise Security and the team learn the environment, you are able to tune down and then use the risk-based alerting to help reduce a lot of false positives.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigation. There are limitations, which is where Splunk SOAR helps with the enrichment of the information, but it definitely provides good context. In the notable alerts, it provides a lot of key information that you need, and then there is the ability to drill in to see what the actual events were, so it really helps.

Splunk Enterprise Security is efficient at predicting, identifying, and solving problems in real time. With the correlation rules, the ability to have adaptive responses, and the ability to tie in even machine learning into that, we are able to do real-time analysis and quickly gather and detect.

Splunk's unified platform helps consolidate networking and security tools, but sadly, our organization does not use IT observability tools. We are purely from a security perspective.

It has so many features. The incident review pane is the best part of it because that is where the SOC lives. It is the heartbeat of what the SOC needs to do. You are able to start the investigative process. As you are sitting in the incident review pane, you see the alert, and from that one alert, which is called a notable alert, you can drill in and see all the different specific details that are tied to that. You then have adaptive response action that can be taken automatically on that, or you can even drill in to look at what events drove that alert to be created. You can then start doing more hunting and querying that way. There is so much information contained in the notable alert itself in that panel. It helps to drive the direction of where the engineer should go.

I am looking forward to seeing what is coming out in the new release that was announced, but case management is an important thing. Being able to have a one-stop shop where you have the alert, but then you can generate the case right there from Splunk Enterprise Security instead of having to pivot to another tool such as Mission Control. You do not have to keep bouncing between them, so if you could do it all in one place, that would be great. The new release is supposed to start getting in that direction.

I have one environment that has been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years in the Splunk Cloud. I am currently in the process of migrating my on-premise corporate environment to Splunk.

At this point, Splunk Enterprise Security is very stable.

It is very scalable. Particularly, when you do search and clustering, you are able to scale rapidly to be able to meet the demands of what is needed for your SOC. The data model setup helps to quickly drive and get rules created without having to need a new data source or a new rule. You just send that new data source to one of the data models, and you already have the rules there, and it automatically starts generating alerts based on those existing rules.

I would rate their support a seven out of ten. Sometimes, you get some solid people, but other times, it takes a bit of effort to get across what the actual issue or situation is. This is a challenge for any help desk organization particularly when you have lots of customers calling in and all of them with unique situations.

Neutral

We were using another tool previously. There were many reasons for switching. One big reason was the ease of integration of data into the tool. With the previous tool, to integrate a normal log source, such as an identity access tool, into the SIEM, we had to pay for PS engagement in order to even get the information in. Splunk has native integration with all these different apps. It is natively tied to all the different IDAM and ID tools out there. It is very easy for the team to implement it themselves. They do not have to go and get extra help to do it. They can install the app, get the keys and authentication set up between the two new tools, and then it just works.

Our deployment experience was just fine. I deployed Splunk at other companies before, so it was not new to me to do it with this company. The pricing and everything else went smoothly. The Splunk team was super helpful. They were very engaging. They helped to build it. We were able to get access to Splunk engineers who worked for Splunk, and they helped define the sizing. They went through and evaluated what our current solution was and helped us build out what we needed in order to meet and exceed that capability. Splunk has been super helpful.

For one environment, I am using the public cloud, and then for my other environment, I am using an on-premise setup. We have the AWS cloud.

We did use professional services to help with this. At my previous company, I would not have used professional services because I had a team of Splunk architects who knew what they were doing and knew how to do it. In this company, we were moving from a different technology to Splunk. My teams were not as familiar with Splunk, so I needed the extra help. We had the help of Splunk professional services and third-party professional services. We used Verizon.

The environment that we had set up has been running for two years. I had planned that initially for a certain amount of growth, but within the first year, we had already doubled the size of the data. It was able to handle the information so much more efficiently that a lot of the groups that were not integrated into the SIEM before started saying that they needed their data monitored as well, so we started growing quite quickly. It has helped us exponentially.

I evaluated several SIEM solutions before choosing Splunk. With Splunk, we had the ease of integration of data because getting the data in as quickly as possible and making use of it is important. Another area is that in certain tools, you have to generate one rule per data source, whereas Splunk has the data modeling capability where you have all the data sources going into the data model, and then you create one rule per data model instead of per data source. It helps reduce the workload for the system, so there was that aspect of more performance than any other solution.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. It is a market leader from an SIEM perspective. It has bells and whistles, but it does not let you get lost in those bells and whistles. It helps drive the analyst into what is the most important thing that they need to focus on, and that is protecting the company. They are able to be more efficient. They are able to help do what the mission of the company is, and that has enabled the company to not worry about the security part. Without a risk, they are able to do their business and help their customers.

I am a SOC lead, and we use Splunk Enterprise Security for alerting and working on incident review and incident response.

We have a hybrid environment. We have multiple clouds, and I am not sure if I know all of them. We have Azure Labs that we run for our students. We have cloud infrastructure. We have cloud applications on which we need visibility.

It is incredibly important that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. Especially being someone who goes through and reviews the work that my analysts are doing, I definitely need to be able to see what is happening all across different domains of our network.

We work for a large university, and we have different tenants. We have our students, we have our employees, and then we have our faculty as well. We definitely need to see what is happening across the domains and across all of those different tenants.

It saves so much time for the analysts, and it empowers analysts to carry out and triage an investigation, wherever needed. It is incredibly hard when you are working with different sources. I am sure everyone else knows that you cannot expect your analysts to be on the same page a hundred percent at the time. They might say, "Hey, I am going to go into this tool and look at these alerts here, or I am going to look at these learnings from this tenant." We need to be looking at all of those sources and all of those domain tenants at once. Being able to see that across the board and not having to jump through hoops to get the data that we want is extremely valuable. I do not have metrics for how much time it has saved because I do not know our life before Splunk. I know that it has done a great deal in saving time, and now with SOAR, that is exactly what we are looking into. We are looking into how we can empower that even more by combining it with Splunk Enterprise Security.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data. Splunk is definitely a leader. I cannot imagine leaving and going to another toolset and losing the capabilities that I have and the knowledge that I have. One of my favorite parts is that Splunk really does work. It seems to me that they work with actual users on a regular basis, so they know the pain points and they know what our issues or our primary concerns are.

In the beginning, it did not help to reduce our alert volume, but over time, it has definitely reduced that. Something that I am working on primarily with our SOC right now is increasing our alert volume because we are at such a low rate because of the work that we can do with Splunk's capabilities. We are looking into what areas in the network we are not alerting on. We have these out-of-the-box solutions, but there is more that we can build on. It is empowering our analysts to be SOC analysts, but the more advanced employees can work towards the threat detection engineering side or SOAR playbooks development side or even just on the backend of setting up and working with the configuration.

I wish I knew the metrics for the reduction in the alert column. I do not have any approximation, but our SOC is very manageable. We are a small team, and the number of alerts varies. On average, we get about 300 alerts a day on the high end and 150 alerts on the low end. If it is a very slow day, such as a vacation for everyone, and we do not have a lot of activity going on in the network on our endpoints, it is very manageable for a small team. Our SOC team has four full-time employees, and then we have intern/student workers because we partner with the university. We have three of them. Overall, there are seven, but, of course, students are only able to work a maximum of 15 or 18 hours a week or something like that, so the amount of man-hours that we have is pretty low.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. There could be a little bit more, but that also depends on the analysts and where they are in terms of maturity. I have a lot of capability to go and expand what I need to, but others do need a little bit more guidance. It is not easy on the first look for someone who has never done it before, but after being taught or learning about it themselves, it is pretty easy. It can still do a whole lot. If we are looking at an anonymous login, we are getting context from different sources. If there is an activity that is going on in the host machine, such as we have some login from Russia, which has never happened before, there is a firing of alerts from the EDR. We can see our email gateway firing alerts regarding their account. That allows us to contextualize and correlate the activity very easily.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s business resilience. We are able to take action immediately when we need to. Especially with risk-based alerting, we are able to understand what needs attention right now. We do work with young junior analysts a lot, and we are able to teach them how to identify what needs action right now or what needs to be investigated or triaged immediately. We are basically protecting our crown jewels first rather than some low-hanging fruit that we see everyday, but we cannot take a look at them because we have some important things going on in our network.

Being able to aggregate detection and alerts from various sources is valuable. Like everyone else, we have a wide range of tools in our shop. We are able to stop at one spot and look at all the data. All the data is able to come through, and we can then jump from source to source or index to index. We can dig deep whenever we need to and get a good high-level understanding.

The first thing that comes to mind is a little bit of UI improvement. It sometimes can be a little bit buggy or it can be a little bit slow, but that varies from customer to customer.

They can continue building out the Splunk community. They can give incentives for customers to collaborate and expand on what they are working on but also provide the tools to do that. There are good resources such as Splunktern. I love the Splunk education and training platform. It is amazing, but I wish there was a little bit more. Especially with the training and applications, they should give us real-world use cases and a little bit more specific scenarios. Splunk is doing a much better job than a lot of other organizations or technology platforms, but they can give more information. I know a lot of my Splunk users do not even realize the things that they can do. On the user end or analyst end, they need to be more proactive by giving more of a heads-up. For example, I found out about Splunk research today. I have been using Splunk for two years. I wish I had known about that more. They can reach out more. The incentives can be anything. Some people love stickers, and some people love shirts. They can create that community a little bit more.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

I do not have much to compare it to, but it is stable. We hardly have any issues, and if we do, they are intermittent. 

The growth that we have seen in my time with our team has not been so much. However, we are adding more tools or trying to gain visibility into different areas of our network or applications that have already been there. Being able to throw some logs in and figure out that we should be monitoring this has been painless. We can just forward them all over. It takes an hour or so. We get the answers and the visibility that we need.

I have not used it very often. I have used it once or twice, but I would say that the engineers I have worked with have been extremely knowledgeable. They have helped so much. We were working on SOAR, and we were pretty new to it as a SOC. We were able to work all of that out with a Splunk engineer on a call. They were able to answer our questions. They knew our needs and goals, and they were able to guide us to meet those. That has been very effective for us. I would rate them a ten out of ten. I have not had any bad experiences.

Positive

We have had Splunk since I have been in this company.

Specifically, I cannot say what return on investment we are getting. However, when we look at other products, we know we are not going to have the same capabilities and we are not going to have the same response times and correlation capabilities. Even working with other vendors and getting their logs into Splunk can be a nightmare, and that is enough to make us say that we do not want to buy their product.

Personally, I have not evaluated other solutions. We do have some friends and family connections who use other solutions. Based on their stories, we will continue using Splunk.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. If it were a ten, it would do my job for me.

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 provide comprehensive infrastructure support and ingest mine data in three ways. The first is Agent-based where the information is sent from client machines to an agent. The second is TCP port forwarding where data is sent to Splunk through an open port. The third is the HEC token. We then use the Splunk DB Connect app to ingest data as per the client's requirements.

We are currently onboarding data from AWS to GCP. We are moving data from on-cloud to our production and deployment level environment. Additionally, the data is being added to the services on those machines. To forward the logs to Splunk, we have created a default index, which is a way of storing data in a particular way. We have created the index based on the requirements of the data storage.

Currently, we are ingesting all kinds of government security PI data. Similarly, we can ingest any kind of confidential data into Splunk using masking. This allows us to filter the data and mask sensitive information. For example, if a user account number has ten digits, we can mask out the first six digits so that only the last four digits are visible. We ingest this kind of confidential data into Splunk, and we also ingest PI data and Splunk governance data.

We are using the threat intelligence management feature. We have a separate security team, called a soft team, which is responsible for finding vulnerabilities, threats, and malware alerts in our Splunk environment. We use the threat intelligence management feature to identify any suspicious activity that may be coming from outside users. The soft team continuously monitors these alerts and creates proxy alerts to identify any potential threats.

Splunk's insider threat detection capabilities help us to easily identify threats by using Splunk queries. We have predefined Splunk Insight and are also using the one in the app, which is configured on top of Splunk machines. This allows us to quickly identify how many unknown IPs are syncing into other machines, and we can use this information to identify threats.

We use threat pathology and MITRE ATT&CK. I am currently supporting a financial institution with its infrastructure, which is split into two teams: one for complete infrastructure support, including hosting and operations, and the other for security-related matters. My team is continuously investigating new security threats, so we will take care of the onboarding process. As part of the infrastructure support team, I am responsible for handling all onboarding tasks. If I encounter any security concerns, I will escalate them to the SOC team.

We have a lot of operations using the Mission Control feature in Splunk.

Splunk helps us analyze malicious activities and detect breaches. We are using a Splunk SaaS application in a multi-class environment. To maintain high availability with zero downtime, we have maintained close to 70 indexes and 50 searches. Splunk provides us with alerts from the entire infrastructure, which helps us maintain our service. We use Splunk Mission Control to iron out any issues. For any special needs, we can go to Mission Control to verify and mitigate alerts.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped us reduce our alert volume. Splunk currently ingests five terabytes of data, and we can set parameters to exclude rotational works and backlogs to reduce the number of alerts.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations.

Splunk has a wide range of features that customers use to find and analyze all kinds of logs. For example, they can use SQL queries to identify vulnerabilities. Additionally, they can create dashboards to visualize and filter their data, and to create real-time alerts when thresholds are exceeded. Splunk Vision is a popular tool for data modeling and visualization and is used worldwide.

The price has room for improvement.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for five years.

We are maintaining a multi-cloud environment across multiple regions, and for the last two years, Splunk Enterprise Security has maintained a 99.999 percent uptime.

We open cases on behalf of our customers with Splunk. If the technical support resolution is not up to par, we request a meeting call to work with the support team and resolve the issue for our client.

We also use the Red Hat OpenShift enterprise Kubernetes container platform. OpenShift is a more popular container tool with excellent support, but all of our OpenShift deployments are on-premises, along with production clusters around the world.

For the deployments, we scan the data to ensure that the Splunk machines can support it. If we identify anything on the machine, we ask the customer to remediate the issue by upgrading the version of Splunk. Most of our customers are using version 8.3.3.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of ten.

Organizations that value their security should not choose the cheapest SIEM solution. They should expect to invest in a SIEM solution that can meet their specific needs, even if it means spending more money.

Monthly patching maintenance is required. 

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for our security analysts for them to be able to view incidents. They are not 100% dependent on Splunk Enterprise Security as their incident source. They do have other tools that they use and other things like whois data, threat intel, and lookups for our domain. They are able to quickly look at the activities done for the assets that we have.

I am not from the management or the leadership, but I do feel that it has been helpful for us Splunk engineers who are responsible for looking at all the data and logs. Splunk Enterprise Security quickly gives us a view of an endpoint or a user or identity. If I want to look for an identity or an asset, I just quickly go into Splunk Enterprise Security. I know where to go and get a quick analysis for a respective object. The analysts have their dashboards, and they have their action items. They use it differently. They follow all the common procedures.

We are on-prem. We are not on the cloud. As of now, Splunk Enterprise Security does not provide us with end-to-end visibility, which is one of the drawbacks of why we need to use other tools. It is not that Splunk Enterprise Security cannot do it. It is just the way it is configured right now. We are working with Splunk engineers. We have a lot of professional service hours that we spend with them bringing all parties into the picture and doing working sessions.

Right now, Splunk Enterprise Security is in the middle in terms of helping us find any security event across our environment. Based on the way the configuration is done in our environment, it would not be right to say that the incident would be reported accurately from Splunk Enterprise Security. That is because not a lot of data is being put into Splunk Enterprise Security to make something a notable event and report about it. If we configure it better and have more data models normalized, and then we use it, it will be more helpful. It has been a long-term goal, but we will reach there soon.

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

Splunk's unified platform has not helped consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools. I am an engineer, and I am more into administration and creating user interfaces on Splunk Enterprise itself, not Splunk Enterprise Security. We have done some work on Splunk Enterprise Security and then left it with analysts. It is up to the analysts now. Splunk Enterprise Security is not 100% configured. Some basic data models have been set up. They are generating notables, and we are generating alerts out of it, but it is not 100% there. They do have to use other tools such as their networking tools to get a full picture for incident reporting.

One of the most popular features that I personally like is that in the case of an event, I should be able to run a desired action for that on a threshold, but that is not how we are using it right now, unfortunately. We have a pretty manual process. We have an operating procedure, and we follow that. I would like to see it automated. I do not want analysts to decide whether the action needs to be done or not. It should be done provided the policy says so. If the policy says it needs to be done, it should be an automatic process rather than a manual process.

At Splunk .conf24, I saw a demo for Splunk Enterprise Security 8. All the things that they have done in Splunk Enterprise Security 8 are what it can be better at. They have put Mission Control as a part of the notable or finding itself. The investigation shows the findings, and the findings allow us to do everything that we are doing in Mission Control right there on that same screen. That is what we want now. They said it is going to be released in two to three months. We are hoping that we will be able to use it. I was hoping that I would be able to see version 8 when I am here at Splunk .conf24, and when I go back, I would be able to help them implement it, but it is still 7.3.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

It is pretty stable.

It is pretty scalable. We have a huge deployment. It is good.

We are a huge agency. It is in the public sector. We have 15 terabytes of data.

They are good. We have a huge team of Splunk engineers within our company. Some of them are contractors, and some of them are employees. They are pretty responsive.

Based on my interaction, I would rate them an eight out of ten. Some engineers do not understand what is there to solve, and they start pushing their perspective on the customer, which is not how it should be because it is not their environment.

Positive

We did not use any similar solution previously.

The deployment of Splunk Enterprise Security was very simple.

We have professional service hours. We worked with Splunk engineers, and we had live working sessions. We were doing it like that. We did it for over a period of time, but that did not give us the full power of Splunk Enterprise Security. For that, we need to be able to configure our own data models and normalize the data. That is not happening 100%.

It is quite expensive.

We did not evaluate any similar solutions.

At this time, I cannot assess Splunk Enterprise Security in terms of the ability to identify and solve problems in real time, but we do use regular Splunk to pinpoint a lot of problems. It helps us a lot. We are able to pinpoint a lot of things, whether they are vulnerabilities or pointing to some logs in the firewall or authentication logs. All the analysts use it very frequently to write searches.

Splunk Enterprise Security has not helped improve our organization’s business resilience because we are not 100% dependent on it. 

Splunk Enterprise Security can provide us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. However, the input is not 100% perfect, so the output is not 100% perfect.

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

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.

We use Splunk daily to find the root cause of attacks and analyze users attempting to access our system. We create incidents and address 5 to 7 simultaneously. Once we analyze and record the activity, we can delete the incident. Our admin team will verify whether it originated externally or internally. 

We use Splunk to respond to security incidents and for data analytics. We conduct custom correlations for the customer and write reports on any attacks. We set alerts for user behavior to discover threats, like if someone is constantly attempting to access our internal domain. The admin will identify that threat and block it. 

Splunk helps us be more proactive. We can take predictive action to identify and block threats so that nothing harmful gets into the system. With Splunk, we can monitor the entire environment from one place. It's a single point of control for all infrastructure, whether in the cloud or on-premise. Splunk has sped up our security investigations. 

I like Splunk's Notable Events. We have created several dashboards for our customers, where you can see the activity and number of alerts. The database receives data about the mask and domain IPs of any user trying to gain access.  We ingest logs from multiple antivirus products and firewalls and analyze them to prevent attacks and threat activities.

Splunk could have more built-in use case presets that customers can build on and customize. 

I have used Splunk for 9 years. 

Splunk is a stable product.

I rate Splunk technical support 8 out of 10. 

Positive

We previously used Dynatrace but switched to Splunk because it has more features. 

Splunk is easy to deploy if you have some basic knowledge. You need experience. It doesn't require any maintenance after deployment. 

Splunk is a good value for the features it provides. The license is costly, but it's better than the other tools. 

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security 8 out of 10. I would recommend Splunk to others. It's one of the most powerful tools available. It's a valuable tool for monitoring infrastructure. 

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for security correlation and event management.

Splunk Enterprise Security is deployed as a hybrid model where the core component is on the cloud and is integrated with an on-premises solution.

Splunk Enterprise Security offers strong visibility through readily available use cases and supports integrations with most standard log sources. Its search capabilities are also commendable. Compared to other tools, Splunk Enterprise Security delivers superior visibility.

While we haven't integrated UEBA yet, it's in our plans. As a proactive monitoring solution, UEBA offers several benefits. It can identify Indicators of Compromise based on historical threat intelligence and generate alerts for suspicious activities. This allows us to potentially detect compromised accounts or ongoing attacks before they cause significant damage.

Splunk offers its threat intelligence service, which helps prevent IP replication and malicious threats. This information can be integrated or configured for our specific use cases, delivering more relevant and high-value insights.

Threat topology and MITRE ATT&CK are frameworks used to understand and analyze attack patterns and techniques, which can then be used to formulate and refine IOCs.

Splunk Enterprise Security's effectiveness in analyzing malicious activities or detecting breaches depends heavily on its configuration and correlation settings. Therefore, it's impossible to definitively label any tool as inherently good or bad. Ultimately, its success hinges on the organization's implementation. This includes onboarding the tool with the appropriate block sources for security detection, employing a sound risk assessment methodology, and aligning the tool's capabilities with both business and security use cases. When configured correctly, Splunk Enterprise Security can undoubtedly contribute to improvements in MTTD and MTDL.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats faster. It allows us to define use cases, integrate with multiple threat feeds, and even connect to vulnerability solutions. In essence, by configuring all relevant log sources and defining appropriate use cases, we can achieve the primary objective of any SIEM solution: reducing mean time to protection.

Splunk Enterprise Security has reduced our investigative time by 25 percent by consolidating all logs into a central console. This eliminates the need to log into individual tools for log retrieval.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps reduce the number of false positive alerts.

In terms of monitoring capabilities, Splunk Enterprise Security performs adequately. However, its user interface requires training for efficient use. Compared to competitors like IBM QRadar, McAfee Nitro, and RSA Security Analytics, Splunk has a steeper learning curve, making it feel less user-friendly.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for almost four months.

We use a licensed third-party Splunk partner for support, and I haven't heard of any issues so far.

Compared to IBM QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security offers faster alert resolution. Its superior indexing and searching capabilities deliver quicker query results. While QRadar boasts a more user-friendly interface, Splunk provides numerous pre-built use cases that effectively reduce false positives and feature comprehensive application dashboards.

For instance, I encountered a use case unavailable in QRadar which appears to utilize the Cyber Kill Chain framework. MITRE ATT&CK enjoys wider adoption, and Splunk leverages this framework whereas QRadar persists with the Cyber Kill Chain. Additionally, Splunk integrates with a third-party app exchange, offering functionalities like vulnerability dashboards, threat intelligence, correlation dashboards, and EPS dashboards. This extensive library of applications caters to diverse business use cases. Users can install these applications as needed, making Splunk a highly customizable and feature-rich solution. Although undeniably expensive, its capabilities justify the cost.

While Splunk is a powerful enterprise tool, I'm new to it myself. I've heard Splunk is often preferred over other options, but the cost can be prohibitive for smaller organizations.

There are cheaper SIEMs available, but they require much more manual configuration, typically by developers with scripting knowledge. Splunk does not require this manual configuration, and its parsing, indexing, and visibility are superior.

Based on the limited time I have been using the solution and the feedback I have received from other users, I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a six out of ten.

Without a SIEM solution, we rely on individual point solution consoles. For example, logging into a firewall reveals only local logs. Imagine the firewall detects suspicious IPs generating unusual traffic. Confirming this as a true or false positive is difficult solely based on firewall rules. Conversely, a SIEM offers multiple options for correlation. Say the firewall denies traffic, and threat intelligence identifies the source IP as malicious. Additionally, web server logs might show suspicious activity or bad actors attempting an attack. With multiple logs and threat indicators, the chance of false positives drops significantly. Correlation enables confirmation of genuine traffic versus malicious activity. Without a SIEM, pinpointing true attacks from false positives becomes challenging.