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reviewer2137659 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Director - Lead IT Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Helps to reduce security event volume and mean time to detection , but the UI has room for improvement
Pros and Cons
  • "Scalability is the best feature of the solution."
  • "The algorithm and machine learning have room for improvement and can be more user-friendly."

What is our primary use case?

We have around 95 different use cases for Splunk SOAR that help secure our environment. 

How has it helped my organization?

The solution has helped us automate and customize some of our servers.

I give an eight out of ten for the ease of creating a playbook. The visibility of the solutions playbook viewer is user-friendly.

We have integrated 15 plus services with Splunk SOAR. Splunk SOAR is easy to use for investigations as long as they have experience with the solution.

Splunk has helped us reduce our security event volume. The solution has also helped us reduce our mean detection time by 80 percent and has helped our security IT staff save time to work on other projects.

Splunk SOAR has as well helped us consolidate tools in our environment. 

What is most valuable?

Scalability is the best feature of the solution.

What needs improvement?

The algorithm and machine learning have room for improvement and can be more user-friendly.

The integration with the phone system, price, UI, and performance have room for improvement.

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February 2025
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For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I give the stability a seven out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I previously used Swimlane which has a better GI than Splunk SOAR.

How was the initial setup?

I give the initial setup an eight out of ten. There is a lot of documentation available online to help with deployment and as long as we know how to configure it, it is straightforward. For basic deployment, we do not require much time.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I give the price a six out of ten. Splunk SOAR is priced higher than most other solutions.

What other advice do I have?

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

I recommend Splunk SOAR for larger organizations.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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reviewer2499669 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Defense Center Capability Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Helps analysts with investigations by automating repetitive tasks and presenting them with scripts that include user lookups, and other information
Pros and Cons
  • "We are not a 24/7 SOC, so the most valuable feature of Splunk SOAR is the auto-response to threats when we are not in the office and the notifications that it sends to the on-call engineer."
  • "It would be ideal for us if Splunk SOAR could integrate with Teams."

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk SOAR to automate response for ransomware attacks.

How has it helped my organization?

We are triaging with SOAR. It helps the analysts with investigations by automating repetitive tasks and presenting them with scripts that include user lookups, and other information. It also includes widgets for notes.

Splunk SOAR has helped us save on repetitive tasks. Before we had SOAR, we used to triage in Splunk Enterprise using our app but we have migrated most of the searches into SOAR. Now with SOAR, we can get it to close the alerts we know about automatically. It is much faster so the analyst doesn't have many alerts to deal with. Now that we have migrated, we are moving more towards automation and using SOAR to work more for us. Splunk SOAR has freed up the time of three full-time analysts to focus on other tasks.

We only use Splunk SOAR on-premises, but end-to-end visibility is key to having a fast response to ransomware attacks even when we are not in the office.

Splunk has saved us time in threat response.  

What is most valuable?

We are not a 24/7 SOC, so the most valuable feature of Splunk SOAR is the auto-response to threats when we are not in the office and the notifications that it sends to the on-call engineer.

What needs improvement?

The banks have recently bought Splunk Enterprise Security. We haven't implemented it yet. It is being built. The new version coming out is going to incorporate Mission Control and SOAR. It looks like we will need to move Splunk again and do our triage in Enterprise Security. The reason we took the step to SOAR was for the functionality available for the triage which is now being incorporated into Mission Control. We can easily migrate the data over to Mission Control. For us, the next steps will be to use it as a backend server where we can run playbooks and triage in there.

It would be ideal for us if Splunk SOAR could integrate with Teams. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk SOAR for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The version of Splunk SOAR we are on now is stable. We did have issues with the failover in the early days but now with how we have it configured there is hardly any downtime.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We use about one point six terabytes of data per day with Splunk with about 6,000 users. We don't need it to scale at the moment.

How are customer service and support?

We use Splunk technical support a lot. They are good and we have a good relationship with our Account Manager who helps us with the tickets and provides us with articles.

Splunk technical support wasn't always readily available, and in one instance, a support representative didn't have the expertise to resolve our specific problem.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Before Splunk we had our analyst log in manually to Carbon Black. No tool automated the tasks until we switched to Splunk.

How was the initial setup?

We had to get a small engineering team of about three people to be dedicated to Splunk SOAR so we could have Splunk professional service come in and give us a startup. That worked well. They passed their knowledge to our engineering team and we maintain it in-house now.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed with the help of the Splunk professional services team.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I found the price of Splunk SOAR to be good.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk SOAR nine out of ten.

Our initial Splunk installation was a successful proof of concept but needed to be made more reliable. Splunk professional services offered assistance, but due to limitations in finding a suitable SOAR solution, we opted for a cold standby implementation. This allows us to switch to the standby instance if the primary SOAR becomes unavailable.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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February 2025
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reviewer2499567 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Automation Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Top 20
Helps improve our business resilience, reduce our MTTR, and save time overall
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable features are the Splunk SOAR apps and playbooks."
  • "Providing Splunk app developers and playbook developers Python Stub files so that way when they create custom code through their IDE, they can have IntelliCode suggestions."

What is our primary use case?

My use case for Splunk SOAR is security automation.

We are running a Splunk SOAR cluster. Three nodes in three different environments in a dev-test and prod environment.

How has it helped my organization?

The SOC team has been much less burdened since implementing Splunk SOAR. They're able to completely automate away some events. At the very least, they get so much information gathered from our automated actions that they're able to almost immediately take action if action isn't already taken by the playbooks that are being run.

Splunk SOAR has helped reduce our mean time to resolve. It has reduced, for example, ten-minute investigations into 30-second ones. Sometimes all our analysts need is a little bit of context, and they can immediately make a decision based on that. There are some events that we have where normally investigating them would take about ten minutes. We get a ton of those a day. I did the math and Splunk SOAR saves over 70 hours a week, which is massive. That savings is only for those types of events alone. In that context, it is a huge improvement.

Splunk SOAR has helped improve our business resilience. It's an extremely powerful tool. I do think that the ability it has depends on the people implementing it, though. The implementation needs to be good. If it's not, that's not Splunk SOAR's fault, that's the organization's fault. If they do it right, it is incredible.

Splunk SOAR has saved us time with alert triage. Even on simple events that might take ten minutes, we're taking that down by around 95 percent. Almost all events can at least have some sort of automation that saves minutes and every minute counts and saves us so much time.

Splunk SOAR has saved us time in threat response.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are the Splunk SOAR apps and playbooks. I am a Splunk SOAR developer, and my job is to make sure that integrations with third-party systems are done well. I give guidelines for how to properly make Splunk SOAR apps. These two features are essential in how the apps will work.

What needs improvement?

One area for improvement in Splunk SOAR is version control for Splunk apps. Currently, for Splunk playbooks, we can hook up a Splunk store to a Git repository with playbooks in it, and it will pull them down periodically, which is amazing. Splunk apps don't have that, and that would be extremely helpful because we do custom coding a lot. There are many vendors out there. And because there isn't source control, we need to emulate that same behavior, which causes us to do other things. For example, we need to create a Git repository somewhere on SOAR and create a clone job that periodically runs a Git pull action. After that, we bring all that SOAR data into that repository. We need to have a Git Hook that automatically tars the app we just created and then uses the API to automatically upload it. Because of that, now we have this app data that's being doubled up because we have SOAR apps in the Apps directory on the back end of Splunk SOAR, and we also have this Git repository, which holds all the same information. That could be highly simplified, and that is a big gap that would make my life and probably other developers' a lot easier. 

There is a specific situation that comes into place when we have a Splunk SOAR cluster we have to work with. If we also don't have it hooked up to an external Splunk Enterprise instance, trying to debug what's going on in the cluster is extremely difficult because there are 45 different log locations. That could be extremely difficult to try and find out what is going on with all the microservices that are being used in a Splunk SOAR cluster. I had to personally develop a tool to be able to monitor all those logs at once and then parse it out and query that log once we're done with whatever operation so that we can get a clear picture of what's going on in the SOAR cluster, which has been immensely helpful, taking hours off of debugging time to do that. It would be nice to have a tool like that natively available in Splunk SOAR to begin with. Even without the cluster, I believe it's over 30 log sources that could go wrong. 

Providing Splunk app developers and playbook developers Python Stub files so that way when they create custom code through their IDE, they can have IntelliCode suggestions. It could be dangerous for someone who is coding to constantly have to look back at the documentation and not see, for example, a Python dictionary where they are expecting it. In reality, it's a list, that could cause errors when a playbook runs or when an app runs, and that could be a potential incident that now goes unresolved or a serious issue. That's dangerous. Providing SOAR app developers with some Python Stub files that they can use for IntelliCode suggestions would also be helpful. Also having slight changes to the way that it's expected to create custom modifications to already existing apps on GitHub or Splunk base by essentially inheriting from the base app when we want to have custom modifications, and developers should have to explicitly override any methods from the base class that's there. That way, we're not modifying any of the underlying layers of the base app that's there. We could also hook it up to a Git Repository to receive those updates into the base app and then the custom app. This way we have these custom app features, we have all these extra things being put into it, still on the custom app end so we can have our features and the base app all in one. I think that'd be a novel solution.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk SOAR for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

As a standalone instance, SOAR is extremely stable. I don't have any issues with it. The only reason there might be an issue is if we lack resources on the hardware itself, and that's more of a problem from an architecting, and engineering perspective, not exactly Splunk SOAR. When it comes to the Splunk SOAR cluster, it is pretty complicated. There are five different microservices, and if we have an issue there, we have 45 different log sources to get that info from, and it can be hard to debug it. If we have a problem, it can be hard to diagnose which microservice we might be having issues with.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk SOAR scales well though when we get to I believe, more than five nodes in a Splunk SOAR cluster, it becomes a little bit unwieldy, and it takes long for things to happen. If we need to update something in the cluster, things can get slow and we have been told by professional services to try and keep it at three nodes because anything more than that is unwieldy as they have said. I believe that is a known issue with Splunk SOAR.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support from Splunk has been good. Whenever we need to engage in professional services, they're always able to give us new information that we did not explicitly know, or they're able to validate what we need. Usually, when we talk to professional services of some kind, which is the main form of customer service I think that we use, it's usually quick and to the point in exactly what we need, which is fantastic. There have been times when we requested professional services, something we needed, and that was developed in-shop just for us, which is fantastic. The tool that was made to remove SOAR cluster nodes was requested by us, and then it became a feature later on. So that was amazing and helpful.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was extremely easy as a stand-alone instance. It's a straightforward process, especially for someone like me who has had to set up other servers containing security tools on them. In terms of setting up a cluster, I unfortunately haven't had experience setting up a cluster explicitly. I have had experience removing nodes from a cluster and with a new tool that was released, I believe, in version 6.0. It was made easier. When it comes to deploying Spunk SOAR, involves downloading the tarball, extracting it, running the pre-install script to ensure proper configuration, and then running the installation script. As long as system resources are sufficient, the installation itself should be quick despite the application's size.

What was our ROI?

The biggest metric that I've seen as a developer admin and DevOps engineer is the time saved. I don't think that on our end, we have set up the ROI functionality in SOAR yet, but I know that the timing has been massive. We should get it set up in  SOAR that way the customers see the value.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk SOAR nine out of ten. It's a fantastic product it needs a few more features to make it amazing. The clustering does need to be simplified a bit. Version controlling for apps and making app development just a little bit easier for developers would take it to the next level. There's no other SOAR product that does what Splunk SOAR does as well. All other SOAR are frankly inferior, but it just needs that little bit of extra functionality to make it a truly great product.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partners
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reviewer2399178 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Customized workflows, easy to onboard, and lots of time savings
Pros and Cons
  • "Workflow management is most valuable. It is easily customizable"
  • "Portability is one thing that is currently lacking. The open-source product that I evaluated had portability. It would require a lot of development effort, but it will save the cost of rewriting all the playbooks."

What is our primary use case?

I am the CTO of a startup. We evaluated this product.

Our major requirement was to open APIs to our product. I felt that the open-source product that I evaluated was better in terms of open APIs to integrate into the existing product because Splunk SOAR is an enterprise product and not an open-source one. However, after evaluating the go-to-market time and how soon we can implement things, the customer preferred Splunk SOAR because it could be easily integrated. Over time, they may choose to have the capabilities inside the in-house product instead of using Splunk SOAR, but at this point, they are using Splunk SOAR.

We have our own product. We were developing our in-house engine based on user analytics and behaviors, but because of funding issues, we stopped working on that. During that time, I started looking at Splunk SOAR to compare its features, and that is how I was able to recommend it to the customer. I told them that instead of creating these capabilities in the in-house product, they could start using Splunk SOAR. In the future, we will be able to import the workflow from Splunk SOAR into the product. We would need a standardized backend to be able to import the workflows. At this point, it is not available, but in the future, just like JSON or XML, it should happen. There should be portability. I am not sure if it is in their roadmap. It is their loss in one aspect, but it is a gain in another aspect because they can claim that workflows are portable across platforms.

How has it helped my organization?

A major use case for my customer was dealing with DDoS attacks. The customer is in the BFSI industry. The major issue for them was people trying to get access to customer accounts by logging in or generating OTPs from different locations. They wanted to limit access to OTPs and logins from particular geographies because 95% of their customer base is from an Asia-Pacific country. They were able to do that and solve that issue. They were also able to reduce the cost of customer care because when a customer gets a message about an OTP for a withdrawal, they tend to call customer care. Instead of generating an OTP, they created a workflow to avoid generating an OTP when it is requested from other geographies. They developed a workflow to make a call to the customer and confirm if they have requested the OTP for money withdrawal. In our geography, rules are becoming stricter and stricter, and banks are held responsible for such cases. The customer was able to meet the requirements of the government. They were also able to save money and reduce operational costs. They could save 75% of operational costs.

I have used the solution's playbooks and the visual playbook editor to help automate tasks. I am a technical person, so it is easy for me to use the playbooks and visual playbook editor. I also write playbooks at the code level.

Spunk SOAR has saved us time in alert triage.

Spunk SOAR has saved time in threat response. They were able to stop 75% of the cases of sending OTPs to the wrong people.

Spunk SOAR's automation helped reduce tedious manual tasks. Based on the input that I got for the first two quarters, there was somewhere about a 75% reduction.

What is most valuable?

Workflow management is most valuable. It is easily customizable. 

What needs improvement?

Portability is one thing that is currently lacking. The open-source product that I evaluated had portability. It would require a lot of development effort, but it will save the cost of rewriting all the playbooks.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Its stability is pretty good. UI is more responsive than other tools for writing playbooks and other things.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

When I evaluated, there were just one or two users. They have been using it only for two quarters. I will know its scalability better after a year or so.

How was the initial setup?

It is SaaS-based. Being a BFSI business, most of their core applications are on-premises, but the applications that we have evaluated stay on AWS.

It is much quicker to onboard compared to the open-source tools I have used. We were able to onboard initial applications in a day. It is very fast.

What about the implementation team?

I helped the customer to onboard it. There was also help available from the Splunk team. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I evaluated Splunk SOAR and a few other SOAR solutions. I evaluated an open-source solution and the IBM solution. I preferred Splunk SOAR because of its log processing and the way it allows you to customize workflows. I felt it was better than any other competitor in the market because it is a next-generation SOAR tool.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk SOAR a nine out of ten because there is no portability.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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reviewer2238954 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cybersecurity Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
An affordable and easy-to-deploy solution that has an extremely helpful technical support team
Pros and Cons
  • "The product’s integration with other Splunk products is valuable."
  • "Some of the training materials are on a basic level."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution to automate some of our legacy processes. We review items like phishing and emails.

What is most valuable?

The product’s integration with other Splunk products is valuable. It's easier to collect and enrich all the data to give our incident response teams better access to the information to make their decisions.

What needs improvement?

Some of the training materials are on a basic level. They don't feel like they're really in-depth. I would like to have more advanced and in-depth training.

For how long have I used the solution?

My organization has been using the solution for two months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There have been no issues whatsoever with stability. I wouldn't expect there to be any downtime.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have a large environment. We have more than 10,000 devices in our organization. It's a complex environment, depending on which areas we're working with. We have different types of regulations.

How are customer service and support?

The team we're working with right now is extremely helpful, and it's easy to coordinate with them and get them involved. They're very welcoming and open to helping us. They are going out of their way to set up meetings to answer questions and help us with the process.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

There's a lot of overlap of concepts between our current SOAR solution and Splunk SOAR. The dashboard's functionality in Splunk SOAR has great value compared to our current platform. It was not easy to make dashboards or reports at a high level in our current solution. It was a bit tedious and difficult. It’s a lot easier to facilitate with Splunk SOAR. Splunk SOAR integrates nicely with all the other Splunk products. We can enrich the data.

How was the initial setup?

We are still going through the initial deployment of the product. The deployment is easy since it is a SaaS solution. There's not much for us to configure right out of the box.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

One of the biggest factors that helped the management to decide to switch to Splunk SOAR was its cost. The solution's cost model, Mission Control, and other features make it cost-effective.

What other advice do I have?

We are fairly new to the solution. We are still adjusting Splunk SOAR. As I use the platform more, it'll become more intuitive. My core focus is on the SOAR platform. We're still beginning to get the tool fully customized for us. We are going through the basics to get all the way to fully leveraging the tool. We are still considering how to go from our current setup and expand it.

Our organization monitors multiple cloud environments with Splunk SOAR. It is important for our organization that the product has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment. It allows us to have better incident response. Having visibility on where the attacks or different issues are coming from allows us to better respond to them.

The workshops are the biggest value I get from attending Splunk conferences. I'm getting a lot of real-world examples from different companies. It helps with networking and meeting other individuals who are going through the same type of process or are already leveraging Splunk SOAR. I can get feedback on how they're leveraging the platform. It gives us a lot of insight into things we should consider as we start to set up and build environments.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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reviewer2239935 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineer at a university with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Has the ability to connect it to external apps
Pros and Cons
  • "It has definitely saved a decent amount of time for our analysts so they can focus on other tasks."
  • "We've run into a few minor issues. Some of the playbook writing is a bit complicated. We've had a few hiccups with the source control. We'd really like to use GitHub deployment keys for a dedicated account. We haven't been able to do that. I think those are some of the major ones."

What is our primary use case?

We are primarily using it to automate tasks for our incident response team. They use it to block suspicious traffic from our network detection system and for alerts from our endpoint security system. Those are the two major use cases we're using it for right now.

How has it helped my organization?

It has definitely saved a decent amount of time for our analysts so they can focus on other tasks. This gives us more value for man hours.

It has definitely improved our business resilience. It's given us greater visibility into the environment we have and the ability to collect all of the threat and log data and put it into one central place.

What is most valuable?

The ability to connect it to external apps is the most valuable feature. We've also gotten a lot of use from writing custom apps for some of our authentication systems for password scramble.

Splunk's ability to predict, identify, and problem-solve in real time is really good.

Splunk's ability to provide business resilience by empowering staff is fairly high. It detects issues as they come up and responds to them.

We have seen time to value. I did help configure it, but we do have the cloud solution, so it was mostly in place.

It has definitely helped to reduce our meantime to resolve. Having it there to automatically take action as events come in and not needing the analysts to have to go out and have a look is how it saved time.

What needs improvement?

We've run into a few minor issues. Some of the playbook writing is a bit complicated. We've had a few hiccups with the source control. We'd really like to use GitHub deployment keys for a dedicated account. We haven't been able to do that. I think those are some of the major ones. 

There is a general learning curve as far as playbook writing goes. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using SOAR for four to five months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is good. We've had a few hiccups with apps, but never a major outage. I would rate it an eight out of ten.  

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I haven't really grown it very wide yet, but I could easily foresee us doing that.

How are customer service and support?

I've opened a few tickets for different issues with apps, and they have always been responded to fairly quickly. I'd give support a ten out of ten. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I did help configure it but we have a cloud solution, so it was mostly in place.

The development was fairly straightforward. There were some issues setting up the single sign-on, but we were able to get help from Splunk to get all that straightened out. The roles in user accounts and onboarding were all fairly straightforward. App configuration is also something that's pretty streamlined and intuitive.

We did it all in-house.

What was our ROI?

We have seen ROI in its ability to streamline and automate mundane tasks that we would run into on a daily basis. It freed up DevOps people from having to maintain custom tools that were previously used to complete similar tasks.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk SOAR a nine out of ten. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Siddharth Matalia - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Reliable with a customizable playbook and helpful support
Pros and Cons
  • "The customizable playbook is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
  • "What we have seen is if the workflow gets halted or if we want to halt a workflow, it cannot be resumed."

What is our primary use case?

Basically, we are using it for most of our automation, and not as per the SOAR, although it is a SOAR application. We are not using it just for security purposes. We are using it for various purposes like maintenance. 

We do have our own data center where we have our maintenance on the infrastructure side, and the application has to be brought down. Here it has done exceptionally well. We shut down all our different applications by writing our code in the shell languages, and we upload through GitHub. It means that we can just call that script, and it gets triggered on the particular server, and it shuts down. It's like a workflow.

The workflow has been created in such a way that it helps us. Earlier, when we used to have to manage it manually, when we shut down the application, it used to take a lot of time. Now it is done within 30 minutes. In our environment, we have SAP applications, and SAP has its own commands to shut down the applications, databases, et cetera. So it is just not limited to all those shutdowns and this. We do have various other stuff as well, like upgrades. So we have written the upgrade codes, and now we can upgrade X number of SAP applications and databases as needed.

How has it helped my organization?

It has helped us with the SAP kernel upgrade. Recently, due to security fixes, and security bugs, we had to upgrade the various SAP applications. To do it manually, it would have taken around five to six months to complete. However, with this product, we were able to complete it within two months since we just wrote a script, and it got triggered in various systems, and it fixed everything. We were saved from the security perspective as well since it ensured we had less vulnerability for less time. Also, thanks to SOAR, only two people were needed to run all those scripts, and just have to monitor everything. That's less personnel. 

What is most valuable?

The customizable playbook is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

With the Splunk vendor itself, the vendor is supporting us in the creation of those playbooks. We have created playbooks in such a way that they are a universal playbook, where we just have to bring in any type of command which needs to be triggered, and it works. If we did things another way, we would have to install our agents to connect the particular application. Here, we don't have to have to do that. It can work in the playbook itself. We just have to give our credentials. The credentials also are in an encrypted format, so we are much more secure.

The solution is stable. 

Technical support is helpful. 

What needs improvement?

What we have seen is if the workflow gets halted or if we want to halt a workflow, it cannot be resumed. We have to trigger the entire plan from step one. That is a bit annoying. If something is wrong, we can't just resume stuff. We'd like it to be possible to pause things without having to start from square one. 

Reporting could be better. We are getting reports, yet not in the way we want. Whatever fails, for example, we want all those errors, the logs, in an attachment, which can be sent easily over an email just by the click of a button. Right now, we cannot send over an email. We have to pull everything, and we have to download it.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using the solution for the past two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is great. I'd rate it eight out of ten. It's not breaking very often, and the playbook makes things easy for us. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I'd give the level of scalability seven out of ten. There is still room for improvement. We'd like to have more use cases and automation.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support has been good. I work on technical parts of the product and bring in use cases, et cetera. If there are any problems, my colleagues check with the vendor and so far, we have had good support from them. We haven't had many issues. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using IBM BigFix before this, and we used it for various purposes like patching on the Windows server. The same solution was also used for the automation of shutting down the system, upgrades, and many other things. Ultimately, we decommissioned it, and we moved ahead with the Splunk SOAR.

What about the implementation team?

The vendor was the one who deployed the solution. Later on, they just installed it on our site. We gave everything to the vendor, and the vendor supports everything since it is on the cloud. 

What was our ROI?

We have witnessed an ROI, and it is good. We've gotten good feedback from senior management. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't handle the pricing aspect of the product.

What other advice do I have?

We are both partners and customers of Splunk. 

If you are a company looking into SOAR and if you are a customer of Splunk, then you should definitely use it. And if your product is most probably looking for security or for some alerting purposes, it will help you to automate your many, many use cases. You can build many, many things with Splunk and on the SOAR side and you can automate your end-to-end process. Also, companies should know that a minimal language knowledge of Python is required.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. Even for people who are not too technical, it's a good product.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Srikanth Nuthalapati - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineering Manager at Deloitte
Real User
We can customize playbooks and incorporate custom code, but the support is subpar
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution allows us to customize playbooks and incorporate custom code, allowing us to drag and drop elements while still writing code to build the integrations we need."
  • "Splunk's support for integration is subpar and has room for improvement."

What is our primary use case?

We wanted to automate the process of creating playbooks, orchestrating events, customizing integrations, and deploying applications such as Thread Connect and Wireless Total for enrichment and threat hunting. We have tailored these applications to meet our specific needs and redeployed them.

What is most valuable?

As a programmer, I am glad that Splunk did not position itself as a no-code or low-code platform. The solution allows us to customize playbooks and incorporate custom code, allowing us to drag and drop elements while still writing code to build the integrations we need. This makes Splunk a great solution for a solid platform.

What needs improvement?

Splunk's support for integration is subpar and has room for improvement. 
Splunk should make more effort to keep up with the latest developments in the external world, so that their applications, integrations, and enrichment apps are up to date. Additionally, the documentation and support should be improved, as the experience, their users have had in the past has been unsatisfactory. We were very disappointed that our queries were left unresolved for six months, as it was a time for response rather than solutions. Additionally, several tickets were lodged with Splunk, yet the issue persisted for half a year.

I would request that SOAR add a feature that allows the extraction of documentation from playbooks. This would enable developers to quickly understand the features and use cases associated with a playbook, so they can modify or interact with it. This would eliminate the need for someone to manually explain each playbook in detail. 

I would suggest making the app customizable and deployable in an easy and straightforward manner. This would save time and effort compared to the current process.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Although not the most stable solution, I would say the overall stability of the updates is satisfactory. I give the stability a seven out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We had difficulty with scalability, but I would not attribute this to Splunk. It could have been due to our lack of knowledge or lack of support from Splunk. I give the scalability a six out of ten.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Our company utilizes a variety of SOAR tools, including Splunk SOAR, Swimlane, and Palo Alto XSOAR, along with ServiceNow for SecOps. Initially, Splunk SOAR was chosen as the SOAR tool due to its compatibility with the majority of our other tools. Unfortunately, it became apparent that SOAR was difficult to install, service, and price, leading some teams to switch to SwimLane and Palo Alto XSOAR.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is not necessarily an easy task, nor is it overly complex, so I would say it's of medium difficulty. Splunk could have provided more documentation and support, considering it is not a free product. It would have been much more helpful if Splunk had provided basic understanding and assistance for those installing the solution.

Deployment took several hours each time to install and upgrade, and we often encountered broken pieces of functionality due to miscoordination or non-sequential startup processes. I remember there were five items that came with Splunk SOAR. Deployment was a difficult process, and we ran into issues every time we had an upgrade.

We used Git version control to deploy our playbooks to SOAR, and then we would pull them back to the production SOAR to bring them into use.

What other advice do I have?

I give the solution a six out of ten because of the scope of building playbooks and automation. Unfortunately, this is accompanied by a downside due to a lack of support, bad applications, inadequate documentation, and a general lack of support.

We have thousands of people using the solution.

I would suggest alternatives to Splunk SOAR due to the cost and poor support. However, if cost and support are satisfactory I would recommend the solution.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: customer/partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Splunk SOAR Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: February 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Splunk SOAR Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.