Splunk SOAR Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using Splunk SOAR for one year.

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

We use Splunk SOAR internally.

We are resellers and an integration company.

Our customers find it easy to conduct searches and consider it an excellent content management system.

The initial setup could be simplified.

In my opinion, the focus should be on improving its simplicity, specifically the interface, and configuration.

I have been familiar with Splunk SOAR for six years.

In our experience, Splunk is very good. When it comes to stability, it's the best of the best. 

We have worked with many other products, and we have not encountered any issues or received any negative feedback regarding Splunk's stability.

Splunk SOAR is a scalable product.

Splunk is used by 20 of our customers. They are large enterprises such as banks and government agencies.

My engineer recently stated that there was no need to reach out to Splunk support because the product is very stable and well-documented.

We work with both Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security.

We only have limited expertise with Splunk SOAR.

We work with various other products besides Symantec. Around six or seven years ago, we also worked with Symantec, where we evaluated Symantec Closet, our Configuration Management (CM) solution. However, we eventually chose Splunk as our preferred product and currently use only Splunk, not any other products.

The initial setup is complex.

We don't have much experience with this project as we have only been working with it for a year. I may not be able to provide you with extensive information about it.

In my opinion, the price is high, but if you want good products, you have to be willing to pay for them.

There is a licensing fee required.

I believe that the cost per customer typically ranges from one hundred thousand to one million US Dollars.

I believe that Splunk is essential for us and our customers, and we require qualified engineers to use it effectively. However, if we have a skilled engineer, they will likely not have any further questions or issues with the solution.

I would rate Splunk SOAR a nine out of ten.

We are doing some automation on the SIM and we are getting some SIMS and we are looking for some automation to improve the security environment. That's how we are currently using Splunk.

Comparing this product to other SOAR tools, most of the items are the same, however, the UI of Phantom is pretty good if you compare it against other SOAR tools.

The work formation and the templates based on some use cases all look good.

The product is very easy to use and has a very good user experience.

The solution is very stable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

We've found the written documentation to be excellent.

The performance is very good.

We've found the solution has recently improved its UI.

The customization continues to be excellent.

In the beginning, we couldn't find any specific documents for every function. It wasn't easy to navigate to what we needed. However, lately, it has improved and we are able to find Splunk documents for all the functionalities of Phantom. 

It would be helpful, on the other hand, if there were videos regarding each functionality. That would make it even easier to work with Phantom. We are able to find some documentation in written form, and that's fine. If it is in a video format, then it would be better due to the fact that, in some environments, we find some other issues or something and it would be nice to have a visualization of the process.

The solution is a bit more expensive than other offerings.

I'd recommend that the solution add some new apps, or some average services, like bots or G-Suite. We may already have G Suite in Phantom. Bots, like any common VPN service, would be great, however.

I've used the solution for about one year or so. It hasn't been an extremely long amount of time just yet.

We haven't had any stability issues at all. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy. There aren't glitches that I've seen. It seems very stable and very reliable. 

We have had an issue related to the firewall. However, that had nothing to do with Splunk directly.

We have five or six individuals that handle Phantom at any given time, as needed.

We didn't try to scale Splunk due to the fact that we already have a VM and we are working on that. We don't use Phantom too much as we have some community license. Based on the license, we are running simple actions only, and therefore we are not giving that much of a workload to Phantom.

I haven't been in contact with technical support at all. I can't speak to their responsiveness or how helpful they would be.

That said, some of my colleagues have done a boot camp with technical support, and they likely have had contact. I haven't heard of anything negative.

I didn't previously use a different tool. This is my first SOAR tool. I've also used Demisto. These are the two tools that I have and that I currently work with.

It's my understanding, from a customer's perspective, that the better solution is Demisto based on licensing costs, however, in terms of the performance and efficiency involved, it's Phantom. Phantom is a bit more expensive in general.

The initial set up seems pretty easy. While I didn't personally handle any part of it, it's my understanding that it's not a big issue to implement everything. We were able to install the file easily. It was straight forward. When we were handling the clustering part, it was a little difficult as we had some license issues. We need a license to get that clustering part set up. It would be ideal if they offered at least a trial license so that we could see how it works and the formation, etc. Right now, without any license, we aren't able to do this clustering part.

I'm unsure as to how maintenance is handled on the solution. I believe we need to handle it manually as we did not install any bot that would handle anything. There may be alternative workarounds in newer versions.

I'm not working deeply on Phantom. In fact, I'm concentrating more on SIM. My colleagues are the ones working on Phantom. Therefore, I'm not sure if we actually had outside assistance or handled everything internally.

We use a community license. We don't have to pay for any actual licensing. However, the solution, when you have a paid version, is quite costly. That said, in terms of performance, it's worth the extra cost. Also, it's my understanding that everything is included in the licensing cost, once you pay for the product. There aren't any added fees.

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

We're using the solution on our VM and also on our database cloud.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. Compared to other products, Phantom seems to be easy to use and the ability to customize is high. Compared to the older version, the newer version is very customizable. We can very easily create custom functions. The UI looks good and is also improved. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are a consulting firm and this is a solution that we use for ourselves, as well as implement it for our customers.

Our use case is to establish a platform for threat analysis across different data sources that we have in the company. Essentially, it is an orchestration platform and we want to make sure that we can tie into different endpoints or data sources from which traffic originates. We need to then detect and analyze threats.

The most valuable feature is the risk-based access control.

The team collaboration when it comes to detecting a threat is helpful.

I like the fact that we can leverage the API to be able to establish a connection and share information across different repositories.

The flexibility that it has when using different protocols, like TLP, for communicating, is fairly good.

This solution supports the automated handling of phishing attempts through the collection of potentially malicious emails from end-users. It analyzes them, identifies threats, and assesses risk.

Phantom was only recently acquired by Splunk so it is not fully integrated yet. Our area of concern is that Splunk Phantom works with the other Splunk products. At this point, there are certain things that are not fully operational across the rest of the product line.

The extension of the product to allow for better integration with other data sources is something that needs attention. We want to see improvements made to the APIs such that we can connect to many different systems and data sources.

The search capability could be improved by way of better indexing and also integration with third-party solutions such as Elasticsearch.

I would like to see escalation management and integration with communication tools like Slack.

I would like to have more capability around analytics.

There needs to be a better facility for documenting and storing issues, as well as being able to find those issues. Splunk does a good job of that, so I think that it will be done.

The solution overall is stable, but it could be more so. It is an application server and there is a vulnerability when a traffic overload occurs, or if there is an incompatibility with a backend or another data source. There is a risk that something can freeze up.   

High Availability / Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) is key and Splunk Phantom’s product offerings must ensure sharding and clustering to enable scalability and automated failover

Because this is an orchestration platform, it's supposed to offload the users from being directly involved in looking at and analyzing security issues. It is something that you just let run. From an administration standpoint, we have a team of ten people that work around this platform.

Prior to Splunk acquiring Phantom, the support for this solution was subpar. Now, however, the support model has changed and it is pretty reasonable.

The initial setup takes some time because you have to configure it and then connect it to different data sources and make sure that they operate properly. It requires an engineer who's fairly knowledgeable in security, interaction, setup, and administration.

In terms of the deployment time, I think that it is something that you can get up and running in perhaps two or three months. I don't think that you could get this up and running fully in a week, for example.

It is a subscription-based licensing model that varies depending on how much data is processed by Spunk. There are built-in volume discounts.

There are some additional costs if you want to get some front-end support or installation or setup, which is part of professional services. There are also some modules, such as analytics, that Splunk will provide for an additional fee.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is to first really understand the requirements that you have, well enough. You need to identify and understand the data sources that you need, prior to purchase, to ensure that there is a need and also that there are no issues with incompatibility or connectivity. You also need to have the right resources to assess, implement, or oversee the implementation. You're going into an environment that requires a little bit of understanding of artificial intelligence because the SOAR platform requires setting up some rules. You also need to have a technical support group in-house to be able to help, otherwise, you would be dependent on Splunk for assistance.

Overall, this product is fairly good but it's not quite mature yet. It needs some enhancement and some stabilization in some areas.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for supporting or automating the email spam items and some ISMS monitoring items, et cetera. 

I'm not implementing the solution. I'm selling the concept. Therefore, my technical knowledge is limited. 

The solution is stable. 

It is very scalable. 

Technical support is helpful. 

There are only problems if the customer is not ready with emergency plans or standard procedures if something breaks. There is some homework to be done before you can really properly use Splunk SOAR.

Resolution times could be faster in terms of support.

It could be easier to implement. 

We've used the solution for two to three years. 

The stability of the product is pretty good. It's really stable and the customers are satisfied with the solution, however, they must be always aware that it's a living project. It's always run against hackers.

It's pretty scalable. It's outstanding in administration, so you don't have to put too many HR resources on it. That's one of the advantages. The implementation must be proper and thoroughly thought through. However, afterwards it's really working very well and with less administration compared to QRadar or something like that.

We have customers that have users that range from 100 to 10,000 people. 

The support is quite good. Sometimes, of course, you want to have a shorter resolution time, however, it also depends on the service that you buy.

The initial setup requires some work. It may not be easy for everyone to implement. 

The deployment times differ. You can't say, for example, every time you need 100 days or 10 days or something like that. It's specific due to the use case and what you want to implement or automate.

We have around five and up to ten people in the core security team that deal with the product in terms of deployment and maintenance. 

We are able to implement the solution for our clients. 

Usually, you have a yearly license. However, Splunk must be more flexible and they have to be more sensitive about this topic. My understanding is that they're working on a new pricing model.

We install the solution for our customers and use the solution as well. We're an implementor. 

I'd advise new users to start at a small scale, since you have to learn about it. You can't implement it with a big bang. You must really go through it and do your homework. You have to have your backup plans, you have to have a real transparent view of your IT landscape. If you have this and your logs are quite good and the playbooks are implemented properly, then you can really scale up. You just have to do it step by step, as it's a bit of a learning curve that you have to go through.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We're not really creating the use cases. Our internal team is developing the use cases. Right now, we have automated the whole phishing process. After that we are still planning to automate a few more things like malware investigation and then from there other processes.

We're in the POC phase. We need more time to get used to the solution and to understand it better to discover the most useful features.

So far, the interface is very easy to use.

The GUI is great.

The features in the Phantom playbook are all very good.

You can build different playbook and you can play with the playbook. One playbook can give you insights into URL applications, one playbook you can give the reputation about the file access. You can build different playbooks and after integrating all the playbooks you can come up with some organizational directions and decisions. It will give you very good insights into various incidents.

The solution is great for automating redundant work.

It's difficult sometime to manage the amount of reported suspicious emails. Using an intervention like this solution helps make that task easier.

We haven't had too much experience on the solution.

The solution is relatively new in the market.

It would be ideal if we could automate processes even more.

The interface is great, however, they could still keep refining it to make it even more user friendly.

We have used the solution over the past year.

At a previous organization, I did work with another tool in Beta. It was able to provide UVA capacity. I'm not sure if they used a different tool at this current organization.

The Phantom has better GUI, however, I'm not able to clearly see the risk fabric.

I wasn't part of the deployment team. I have no idea if the initial implementation is straightforward or complex.

Technically, we are still in the deployment phase. We haven't finished yet. We are yet to go live. IN the next few weeks we'll go live, however, only on the phishing features.

I'm not aware of the company looking into other options before choosing this solution. All of this was handled by the procurement team, and I am not a party to their decision-making process.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're currently using.

If a company wants to automate redundant work, this solution is perfect for that. Very specific processes can be easily automated to save time. That way, analysts can invest their time elsewhere. Phantom is one of the great tools for reducing redundancies. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of the solution is for fine tuning. We provide professional services for our customers to enhance their ability to use the functionalities of Splunk. We're integrators of the solution. 

The most valuable feature of Splunk is a very flexible integration with other tools. Compared to other products in the market, Splunk is very user friendly, and not very complicated. It integrates with most of the endpoints and that's a very positive side of the solution. There's no need to remember a lot of things and documentation is great. I really appreciate that aspect. Since it is cloud-based there is a lot of flexibility. And most of the challenges that I have faced with the solution can be found in the documentation itself.

At this point, I'm very happy with the solution. There's nothing there that disturbs me. Security orchestration is a new emerging issue in the market. If I have to compare with other security orchestration tools, Splunk is a good solution. Many vendors have opted for Splunk because of easy usability and connectivity to radius devices.

I've been using this solution for about six months. 

Stability is good

Scalability is good, allows flexibility. That's what makes life easy. 

There's great documentation and most of the challenges I've faced, I've found the solution via the documentation. I've never contacted the technical support which attests to the quality of the documentation. 

I know RSA and Splunk are similar solutions even though I've never used RSA. I know that Splunk is user friendly and doesn't require in-depth knowledge. Everything is file based, applications like RSA rely on databases. I have the confidence of being able to use Splunk efficiently and there are a lot of features I can handle myself the way I want to. 

Initial setup is very straightforward and simple. Much easier than other tools, it takes a couple of days depending on the architecture. 

The solution is for our clients so we don't deal with the licensing aspect. 

It's important to know your customer's requirements so you can choose the correct solution. The budget also needs to be taken into account. Most customer's budgets suit a Splunk solution whereas RSA is much more expensive. 

I would rate Splunk Phantom a seven out of 10. 

The automation part of the product is great. 

Splunk SOAR can easily be connected with a lot of solutions that are available out there. The in-built apps are pretty useful to me.

It's easy to install and offers good documentation. 

I don't have much experience with that. I'm not sure as I don't have much technical knowledge about SOAR in general. I have a little bit of experience with SOAR. I can't speak to any shortcomings right now. 

The scalability could be better.

It's an expensive solution. 

I've worked with the solution for the last year or so.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We faced a couple of issues scalability-wise, I would say it is average. 

I've never contacted technical support. I wouldn't be able to comment on their level of helpfulness. 

The solution's initial setup is easy and straightforward. They do offer great documentation, which helps with the process.

I'm not sure how many people were involved in the deployment or maintenance of the product. 

I can't speak to if consultants or integrators were involved. I just have general knowledge of the setup and the solution itself. 

I use a trial version, not an actual version. We are partners. We have our work license. My understanding is that the cost is pretty high compared to others, however, I'm not sure of the exact price. 

Users just need to pay for their package. There are no add-on costs on top of that. 

I'm not able to compare it with other solutions as I don't have experience with other solutions.

We're a Splunk partner. 

I'm dealing with the latest version of the solution. 

I'd recommend the solution to companies just starting out. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.