Head of Cloud at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
Great support, good pricing model, and good integration with various clouds
Pros and Cons
  • "Its interconnectivity with the cloud platforms, such as Azure and AWS, was valuable."
  • "There can be more modules and more integration with other areas in the cloud and on-prem. I am not sure whether it includes network devices and things like that."

What is our primary use case?

I used it in my last organization for monitoring, intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention.

We wanted to take preventative actions so we implemented it.

How has it helped my organization?

The monthly security reports were detailed, and we got to know about a lot of vulnerabilities that we did not know about before.

It integrated well with other systems and applications in our environment. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of integration.

Splunk Cloud Platform had a good impact on decision-making processes in our organization.

It was helpful for data access for compliance and privacy regulations. I would rate it a nine out of ten in this aspect.

Splunk Cloud Platform had a very good impact on our organization’s security posture. The resilience that it offered was very important because we were dealing with client data.

For reporting, a lot of manual intervention was required to create the reports, but after that, it worked well.

What is most valuable?

Its interconnectivity with the cloud platforms, such as Azure and AWS, was valuable. 

We had multiple cloud environments. It was easy to monitor multiple cloud environments using the Splunk Cloud Platform’s dashboard.

What needs improvement?

Considering its price point, it does not need any improvement. However, it does require manual implementation.

There can be more modules and more integration with other areas in the cloud and on-prem. I am not sure whether it includes network devices and things like that.

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Splunk Cloud Platform
May 2024
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For how long have I used the solution?

I worked with this solution for one year and a half.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability and extensibility.

How are customer service and support?

I got great support from them every time. I would rate them 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?

We were not using any similar solution previously.

How was the initial setup?

It was deployed on a public cloud. Its setup was quite complicated. A lot of steps were involved in implementing it.

What about the implementation team?

We had some engineers from Splunk to advise on a couple of things.

We had three people involved in the deployment. They were all cloud engineers.

It did require maintenance. We had one person involved in the maintenance.

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

It was a good model.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated other solutions, but I do not remember the names. I know there was one from AT&T.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten.

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.
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Automation Developer at TNS
MSP
Reduces infrastructure overhead, but the process for custom apps can be streamlined
Pros and Cons
  • "Not having to manage Splunk Cloud's infrastructure is valuable."
  • "They can streamline the process of creating custom apps."

What is our primary use case?

On Splunk Cloud, I mainly look for errors in applications or issues that come up with our internal applications. I have also used it to create dashboards and display customer data to customers in an effective way so that they have insights into their data.

How has it helped my organization?

There is less overhead now for infrastructure management. There are fewer issues that we have to worry about on the infrastructure side. This has freed up more of our resources' time to work toward initiatives on the Splunk platform itself. It is hard to measure the time savings. If one resource was working on it, that resource could save anywhere between 15 to 20 hours a week.

It must have reduced our MTTR, but I have been with Splunk for as long as I have been in my current environment, so I do not have anything to compare it with.

It helped improve our organization’s business resilience. The solution helps us find where errors are and potentially where threats are a lot faster. We can more effectively push out alerts not only to our team but also to the teams across the enterprise. It is nice to have on hand.

It is quite effective at helping us identify problems very quickly. We do not participate in real-time searches within our Splunk environment, but close to real-time is possible, and it is quite effective.

What is most valuable?

Not having to manage Splunk Cloud's infrastructure is valuable. Being able to deploy within the cloud and not having to manually manage our configs on the infrastructure side and set up our own architectures has been the biggest help.

Other than that, the new Dashboard Studio has been a pretty big win, but I do not know whether that is more cloud-specific or not. Dashboard Studio has a cleaner look for customers that want to see their data but not necessarily search. For the customers that want to see their data, having an easy and effective way to drag and drop to see where things are going to be if they want to change them has been pretty beneficial.

What needs improvement?

They can streamline the process of creating custom apps. I do not have a lot of experience with it. It was not very difficult for me to do so, but there is probably a better way to present the ability for people to push their own custom apps to the platform and go through Splunk's manual and automatic reviewing process.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for about three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have not seen any downsides when it comes to uptime and availability. Being in the cloud reduces downtime, especially compared to being on-prem where if something goes wrong, you will have to go in and fix that infrastructure yourself.  I have not necessarily seen significant downtime with Splunk Cloud or on-prem at this time.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I quite enjoy the fact that if we need more indexes or search heads, it is very easy to plug and play with Splunk Cloud. With the infrastructure model that we had before, we would have to go in, set up a new search head out to the cluster, and add a new indexer to the cluster if we needed it. It will have more benefits going forward as we move more and more into the cloud.

How are customer service and support?

I have worked with Splunk support, and I would rate them an eight out of ten. It depends on where you are and what project you are working on at the time. It would be quite beneficial to work with them if you have a specific project that you are working on, and they have some insight into it. I do not work with support too often myself. Usually, one of our Splunk Infrastructure managers works with them, but there is always room for improvement. Availability in terms of making the time to gain insight into specific projects and problems that we are having is an area that can be improved.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

My company has been with Splunk for quite some time now. We are well integrated at this point, and we are in the process of migrating over to Splunk Cloud specifically. We used Splunk on-prem for a while. We are currently in a hybrid situation, and we are making our way toward being completely on the cloud.

How was the initial setup?

I help from time to time with the migration process, but I am not necessarily in charge of the total migration functions that we currently have today. The most I have done in terms of deploying to the cloud was creating a custom alert action for the cloud environment, which is one of my biggest contributions so far. I am not completely in charge of it, but from time to time, I will assist in the migration process. It is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get more and more familiarized with the cloud and how to benefit from it by using features like federated search, it becomes easier. It is somewhere in between in terms of complexity.

What was our ROI?

We would have seen an ROI. I do not have a specific number, but assuming that we did not have Splunk Cloud, we would have to manage our own infrastructure. Not having to manage nearly as much infrastructure and not having to have the personnel to manage that infrastructure on a regular basis, frees up that time for them to do what they are really designed to do. This has definitely added value.

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

I am a little bit familiar with the pricing and licensing model. I am not sure about the particular pieces of the actual price that we have, but I do like the idea of going towards a more CPU-based approach rather than the ingesting approach. This CPU-based approach gives us the ability to ingest more data if we need it.

What other advice do I have?

The biggest value that I get from attending Splunk conferences is the insights from everybody here. You have people from many different companies doing very different things and deploying very different models within their different Splunk instances. You get an idea of where everybody lands and maybe grab some ideas that you would not necessarily have thought of by looking at it from the inside of someone who is in a completely different field than you are.

There is definitely a big difference between Splunk Cloud and on-prem. For me, one of Splunk on-prem's biggest features is being able to deploy my own custom applications internally, which is something that is a bit of a process with Splunk Cloud. So, given the information that I have, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Splunk Cloud Platform
May 2024
Learn what your peers think about Splunk Cloud Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2024.
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Lakshman Kanuru - PeerSpot reviewer
Module Lead at ValueLabs
MSP
Top 20
Allows to easily monitor multiple cloud environments and offers good resilience to users
Pros and Cons
  • "In my organization, Splunk Cloud Platform has improved the issue revolving around transactions."
  • "When it comes to the integrations with the other platforms, there is a little bit of a lag in the observability part, making it an area where improvements are required."

What is our primary use case?

Splunk Cloud Platform is a product I use since my company has different platforms on Splunk, like Splunk ITSI and Splunk Enterprise Security. Splunk ITSI and Splunk Enterprise Security are the two packages known as paid packages under Splunk Cloud Platform, and my company also has an ad-hoc search head. Splunk ITSI is totally related to the infrastructure monitoring that my company does, and from it, we derive the service analyzers, episodes, and alerts and see if we want to integrate anything with ServiceNow, Jira, or any other monitoring tools we have. The product can be integrated with other tools, while my company can also use its alerting feature and its ability to notify the consumers with particular alerts, so the total infrastructure is covered under SIEM, making it possible to attach to security information. My company also created a couple of use cases, like in the case of continuous resetting of a password more than three or four times, then there will be a security incident that would be created so that if any end user is doing it as malpractice, like, phishing or something, my company can detect it and inform the user that you have crossed the four limits, and there is some attack happening owing to which we need to reset the password. Based on the aforementioned process, SIEM monitoring will be handled through its application. The aforementioned areas consist of the use cases related to the tool, along with a couple of more activities, like onboarding a user onto Splunk, creating apps for them, creating dashboards, creating alerts, and creating a couple of use cases for them as per their requirements.

How has it helped my organization?

In my organization, Splunk Cloud Platform has improved the issue revolving around transactions. If there are any issues with the transactions, then my company notifies the end users that their transactions failed, after which they can fix the issues so that there are no issues with the transaction part, especially regarding the application availability. The tool makes it possible to fix issues without any downtime.

What is most valuable?

I mainly work with Splunk SIEM and Splunk ITSI, and these are the two major products recommended for all consumers. If it is related to security, I recommend Splunk SIEM, and if it is related to infrastructure monitoring, I recommend Splunk ITSI to others. I used to take care of the observability part as well with the aforementioned tools. For observability purposes, I use Splunk-related applications. I also do the onboarding of the data into Splunk with the help of observability functionality.

What needs improvement?

If I focus on the observability part of the product, I see that it is an area that doesn't offer more integrations compared to what Splunk Cloud Platform or Splunk Enterprise offers. When it comes to the integrations with the other platforms, there is a little bit of a lag in the observability part, making it an area where improvements are required.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for 5 years. My company has a partnership with Splunk.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable solution. Cisco has acquired Splunk recently, so I think it will be a more stable product in the coming days.

How are customer service and support?

It takes a lot of time for the support team to resolve issues. In short, it takes a lot of time for Splunk's support team to troubleshoot an issue, meaning they are unable to resolve issues within a certain time frame. I rate the technical support a 6-7 out of 10.

How was the initial setup?

The product's deployment phase was straightforward, especially compared to the ones I have dealt with in the past.

The solution is deployed on a hybrid cloud model.

For deployments starting from scratch, I deal with the documentation part. I prefer to look through Splunk's recommendations on the limits of how much the server configuration should be while trying to meet the configuration requirements of the consumer. In general, I deal with whatever configuration files are needed and how the consumers want to approach it, like if it should be a heavy forwarder or universal forwarder or if they don't want to directly ingest data to the indexer bypassing the heavy forwarder. Basically, I try to understand the consumer requirements before taking care of the deployment part.

For a limited deployment involving four to five servers, only a single person is required. If the deployment involves twenty to thirty servers, the number of people required to deploy the product will have to be increased depending on the requirements, and my company will also have to manage everything. The number of people required for deployment is based on the capacity at which my company plans to do the deployment.

My company has the entire Splunk Enterprise package, and we have many universal forwarders set up at fifty different locations. In around twenty locations, universal forwarders have been set up. My company also has fifteen indexes that directly send data to indexers. My company also has four heavy forwarders that collect information from applications like Azure. My company uses add-ons with the heavy forwarders in Splunk.

What about the implementation team?

I was involved in the product's deployment phase.

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

My company has a license for Splunk Cloud Platform. My company also has a license for Splunk Enterprise. There are two packages that my company has access to when it comes to Splunk, and I am also aware of the configurations and setup phases related to the tool, from scratch to production.

What other advice do I have?

Splunk Cloud Platform has improved our company's incident response time. For example, if any event is ingested into Splunk, within less than a minute, we trigger an incident to the end user based on the assignment group in ServiceNow.

There are many benefits attached to the tool in the areas of machine learning and predictive analysis. In Splunk ITSI, there is predictive analysis, which can be used for protection with the alert capabilities, especially if there is an alert storm coming up. My company can directly detect particular alerts from the trail to the attack and notify the end user about it. With the machine learning toolkit, my company does anomaly detection with the help of Splunk SIEM platform. With Splunk ITSI, my company does predictive analysis. The aforementioned area covers the two different platforms my company uses, along with two different approaches and the tool's machine learning capabilities.

My company interacts with our consumers. For example, if I am a consumer of Azure products, I would want to onboard all the data from Azure, even if it consists of user data. I recommend that more space be set on a particular index so that Azure data can be used. My company has all data related to Azure about its users and the changes if you have a license or if you have Azure Event Hubs, including any other things that it may have. I recommend more space in Azure, but if it is a network-related application like Aruba, I recommend that it has a little bit less space compared to Azure. The scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform can impact our company's data management, though I recommend the space required for a tool based on the use cases.

I am aware of the federated search features in the product. If a search is not running up, then my company needs to check whether any permission related to the search has any issue or if anything is going wrong, after which my company needs to check and fix those searches. I have not used much of the tool's federated search features.

My organization monitors multiple cloud environments with the tool's help. It is easy to monitor multiple cloud environments using the product. For example, if my company takes into account Splunk ITSI with service analyzers, then we define how one service is related to GCP. One service will be under the cloud services offered by Azure, while another service will be related to AWS. My company can divide the services based on locations and KPIs. My company monitors the total locations of the cloud so that we can get more insights from the service breakdown, which is why I recommend the use of Splunk ITSI. I used to work more with Splunk ITSI, a reason why I recommend it to others, as it is easy to understand and handle, even if you have 1,000 or 20,000 applications. With Splunk ITSI service breakdown, it is very easy to handle applications.

The visibility of the tool in multiple environments can be explained with the help of an example, where, if my company considers Splunk Cloud Platform, the visibility will be less compared to what we get from Splunk Enterprise. Splunk Cloud Platform is totally managed by Splunk's support team, so if anyone needs to do anything, my company needs to raise a request for a change in the tool, though we can modify a couple of services, like a couple of applications using ACS, which was introduced by Splunk. With ACS, if you want to update, create a token, or modify anything from the HEC token information, you can do it with the particular services offered by the solution. Considering the aforementioned area, I recommend that 30 percent of the work be done with ACS, and 70 percent of the work needs to seek assistance from Splunk's support team. Our company handles Splunk Enterprise, and we have 100 percent visibility on it compared to Splunk Cloud Platform.

The integration of the product with other services is possible. I have integrated it with ServiceNow, Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, and I can say that it has been okay till now. It is good to integrate Splunk Cloud Platform with other tools. If we take a cloud service like GCP into consideration as an example and say that it is not working properly, then there will be an incident directly assigned to the support team based on the integration with ServiceNow. If you want to notify all the consumers in a scenario where GCP is not working properly through particular notifications with Slack channel particular notifications, then one can inform all the thousand consumers in a particular company about it, and it is possible with a single integration.

My company uses the tool for alert reporting. For example, if the top management of an organization is looking for the availability of websites, especially a couple of websites that are critical to their applications, then my company monitors such applications with the data in the report from the last thirty days or seven days, to ensure that availability of a particular website is 100 percent. If anything goes wrong as per the reports from the previous seven days, then the availability is reduced to 80 or 95 percent, which is based on how much time it was down, and it will be then notified to the consumer or top management, stating that the availability got reduced, and how there is need to fix a couple of applications in the back-end so that the availability can be increased. The top management will be made aware of the things that have been going on for the last seven or forty days. In general, a report is good for notifying the top management or consumers so that they can make decisions or check if their licenses or server capacity needs to be increased. With the alerting report feature, my company can be confident that the top management or consumers know about a particular issue in the tool that we can fix as soon as possible, but there will be a cost involved in doing so every time. If the consumer or top management is aware of the issues in the tool with the help of the alerting report feature, then they can make a decision.

I am currently not aware of how the product has an impact on decision-making.

The product has helped my organization with data compliance and privacy regulations since we were able to set up the terms and conditions with Splunk. In general, it is good when it comes to the terms and conditions revolving around the security part.

Maintenance is required to upgrade the applications, so we need a downtime of no more than fifteen minutes.

The product offers value in terms of resilience. Whenever my company faces difficulties, it is the solution we use for all our monitoring purposes.

In terms of the extensibility of the product, I feel it is a good solution.

Everything is supported by Splunk support, though it may take some time to find and resolve certain issues. If Splunk's support team resolves issues within a certain time frame, I can provide a nine out of ten rating for Splunk's technical team. Splunk Enterprise is totally handled by our company, so I can give it a nine out of ten.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise to others, especially when compared to Splunk Cloud Platform. If any notifications are needed, it can be done with no downtime, and it can even be completed within a week. If we want Splunk's support team to do the same aforementioned procedure for our company, then it may take a little bit more time.

I rate the overall tool a 7-8 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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SIEM Engineer at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
Offers excellent visibility, and cloud performance, and requires zero maintenance on our end
Pros and Cons
  • "he cloud performance is good."
  • "Splunk should offer various options for real-time monitoring."

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Cloud Platform to monitor our environment.

How has it helped my organization?

Monitoring multiple cloud environments is made easy with the Splunk Cloud Platform due to its fast ingestion and data recovery times.

Splunk's visibility into multiple environments is excellent. I have found that a hybrid environment works the best, as the login portion remains on-premises while the rest is in the cloud. This reduces the maintenance required on-premises.

There are two types of integration. The first involves bringing something into Splunk, while the second entails moving something out of Splunk. Bringing data into Splunk is relatively straightforward, with multiple options such as RAS, SysLog, and Splunk's built-in functions. However, exporting data from Splunk is more challenging and not as straightforward as the process of bringing data into Splunk.

Splunk Cloud Platform has influenced our decision-making processes. Splunk is primarily employed for security purposes; thus, it excels particularly in SIM. It encompasses an asset and identity framework that effectively gathers information about an organization's assets and individual identities, encompassing all users. Therefore, when considering Unified Business and SIM, Splunk proves to be highly proficient. 

What is most valuable?

The cloud performance is good.

Not having to perform any maintenance because it is handled by Splunk saves our administrators time which is valuable.

What needs improvement?

Splunk should offer various options for real-time monitoring. If we could enhance the speed of data ingestion or data retrieval, that would be an added advantage. Additionally, there is room for improvement in SaaS-to-SaaS integration. I believe that reintroducing HTML dashboards would be beneficial, as they provide dedicated web features. This, in turn, gives users the flexibility and freedom to create custom dashboards more easily.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I would rate the stability of the Splunk Cloud Platform as an eight out of ten. We still encounter some lagging and errors, but not as much as with the on-premises deployment.

How are customer service and support?

I occasionally get in touch with Splunk technical support, usually regarding data onboarding. These include routine activities like installing or uninstalling applications, as well as making changes to existing ones. On average, we submit at least one ticket per week to them.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

I have used many tools including Elastic, Grafana, Tableau, and Sumo Logic.

Splunk is indeed superior in many cases, but other tools are also making progress to catch up, with Elastic being one of them. They have begun developing their own SIM offering, complete with its own SIM features. Similar to Splunk Cloud, Elastic also has its Elastic Cloud Stack. Some of the features provided by Elastic seem to outperform Splunk. Therefore, there is room for Splunk to enhance these aspects. As for pricing, it could be more competitive, considering that other tools also provide the freedom to choose the Cloud Stack. Although Splunk offers this flexibility, the process often involves extensive discussions, making it less adaptable compared to other tools.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is somewhat complex regarding the CI/CD pipeline, and Splunk manages the deployment. Splunk provides a feature called ACS, which enables us to manage the deployment ourselves if desired, but it's simpler to have Splunk handle the deployment on our behalf.

The deployment took around one month and required ten people from Splunk's DevOps team.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed by Splunk.

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

The pricing is high for small organizations. The cost makes more sense for organizations that have a large amount of data ranges.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten.

There are numerous tools that offer real-time reporting and alerting capabilities. Splunk is indeed effective, but due to the prerequisite of registering logs beforehand, a delay is inevitably introduced. Therefore, while Splunk is suitable for real-time reporting alerts, it may not be as optimal as some alternative solutions.

Resilience has added value and contributed to the improvement of our organization. This is highly significant. In most cases, the SOC team relies on the tool for issue mitigation and ticket resolution. Therefore, it is crucial for Splunk to remain consistently up-to-date and respond as quickly as possible. This holds immense importance.

The extensibility is good, but there is room for improvement, especially in integrating certain logs. Enhancing the process of incorporating raised logs is possible. In most cases now there are limitations on log creation. Previously, a direct option existed to import logs. However, this process has been altered, requiring users to develop an add-on for log integration, leading to increased complexity. Furthermore, users are expected to have knowledge of Python. This can be problematic in cases where users lack such expertise. Therefore, this aspect could certainly be enhanced.

For those who want to evaluate Splunk, it comes down to the volume of data. If they are dealing with a substantial amount of data flowing into their SIM, Splunk would be the superior option. Splunk effectively manages extensive datasets in comparison to other technologies. It also offers numerous additional functionalities, such as an enterprise security suite, assets, and identity framework. Moreover, it has undergone industry testing and has been employed in the field for a considerable duration. In contrast to other organizations, they provide a wealth of features.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

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

Other
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Infrastructure Admin at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Has end-to-end visibility in our native environments
Pros and Cons
  • "It's made searching for data easier. Users like it. We're still in the migration process, but overall, it's a lot easier to use."
  • "The administration could use improvement. We have to rely on support more often than we're used to."

What is our primary use case?

We're migrating our on-prem environment to Splunk Cloud Platform. We're consolidating two separate Spark clusters because of a merger. Our primary use case is for unifying all of that data into one place.

How has it helped my organization?

It's made searching for data easier. Users like it. We're still in the migration process, but overall, it's a lot easier to use.

What is most valuable?

It's important to use that Splunk has end-to-end visibility in our native environments. We have to have that visibility because we manage multiple app applications that rely on it.

Splunk helped to improve our organization's business resilience. That's very important to us. Our users rely on Splunk heavily for the health of their applications. It helps them to get ahead of issues, and if there is an outage, it enables them to resolve them faster.

Splunk gives the different application owners the ability to configure alerting specific to their needs so they can customize it however they want. If they know their applications better than you know, admins, I'll give them that flexibility.

What needs improvement?

The administration could use improvement. We have to rely on support more often than we're used to.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for nine months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability has so far been good. We haven't had any issues.

How are customer service and support?

Their support is great, especially the agent that we have now. They're very responsive, willing to help out, and give suggestions.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We previously used Splunk Enterprise. We switched to Cloud Platform because we wanted to consolidate a couple of instances to one place and we're moving our security team to the cloud. 

How was the initial setup?

I wasn't involved in the setup directly but I was aware of what they were doing. The setup is a little complex. We had some issues we had to deal with. Bringing both environments together and getting the different environments to communicate with Splunk Cloud was complex. We have a lot of data. Getting a handle on that before we were able to start sending data to the cloud was complex. 

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

It's expensive. We're still trying to figure out Cloud licensing. 

What other advice do I have?

It's not so easy to monitor multi-cloud environments using Splunk. We have some difficulties, but we have some things in place, but it's not easy.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten. There's a lot we haven't tapped into yet, so the rating can go up.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Performance Engineer at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Works very well and helps to find outages and performance impacts faster
Pros and Cons
  • "Dashboards and alerting are the most valuable features. The dashboards let us see how the system looks in terms of anomalies, and the alerts trigger us to go and look at what possible problems are happening."
  • "There could be better searches, but mainly, it needs to improve the performance with a vast amount of data. That will make it better and easier to use."

What is our primary use case?

We mostly use Splunk Cloud Platform for monitoring performance and looking for performance events.

How has it helped my organization?

We have seen many benefits of Splunk Cloud Platform, which is why we are still using it. With the alerting, we can find outages faster, and we can find performance impacts faster. We are then able to use them to diagnose and dig through our logs to find out what possibly caused it or look for a time when it happened to find a correlating deployment or something else that caused the problem.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. Splunk Cloud Platform is pretty good for monitoring multiple cloud environments. We have it all come into the same index irrespective of the system. Even though we have multiple data centers, everything comes into the same Splunk index, so we monitor it all in the same place.

Splunk Cloud Platform has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment, which is very important for us because otherwise, we would not be able to have the data or be able to diagnose and find issues.

We have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for a very long time. I do not even know a time without it, so it is hard to say how much it has reduced our mean time to resolve (MTTR).

Splunk Cloud Platform has improved our organization’s business resilience. We use it very heavily to look for issues that may arise. In terms of Splunk’s ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time, we mostly rely on our own searches. We do not rely on a lot of advanced observability features. We are mostly using our own alerts that we have written and our own dashboards.

What is most valuable?

Dashboards and alerting are the most valuable features. The dashboards let us see how the system looks in terms of anomalies, and the alerts trigger us to go and look at what possible problems are happening.

What needs improvement?

Its performance can be better. The searches sometimes take a long time. There could be better searches, but mainly, it needs to improve the performance with a vast amount of data. That will make it better and easier to use.

Their support can also be better.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this platform for 12 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Its stability has been very good. We have only had a few outages that I can remember where Splunk has been down.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Its scalability seems okay. Most of our issues come with our data storage. We are storing mass amounts of data, and it seems to handle that right now.

How are customer service and support?

Their support has been lacking a little bit. We have several outstanding bugs that have not been fixed yet, and we are still waiting for Splunk to fix them. For example, we cannot use Splunk Mobile because of an issue with the authentication and what permissions are available. We have not been able to use Splunk Mobile since the new app. I have used the old apps, and I was quite disappointed when they were broken. I have never been able to use the new app.

I would rate them a seven out of ten. For emergency issues, they are good. For lower-priority issues, we are still waiting.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in its deployment.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I know that the company evaluated a few other solutions, but I have not been as involved in those. We are still using Splunk.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten because it does a good job at what it does. I wish I could use the mobile app, but the rest of it works very well.

The best value that I have received by attending Splunk conferences is finding out new things that I can do with my own job. Most of the time, it is disappointing because a lot of the new features have new applications that we have to buy, and I have no say in the purchase of new applications. However, there have been some new improvements in the applications that we already have, and I come for those updates. I am able to see if the new features in the existing applications are more useful to me.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Software Engineer at Wipro Limited
Real User
Offers real-time monitoring, seamless integration, and improves security posture
Pros and Cons
  • "I like the Cloud monitoring console feature."
  • "Splunk currently manages the components, which restricts our ability to access them directly."

What is our primary use case?

We leverage the Splunk Cloud Platform for log ingestion. This allows us to create dashboards, alerts, and reports from security and application log data.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud Platform offers real-time monitoring capabilities. It continuously ingests data from various sources, allowing us to track its flow. We can set up alerts to be notified of any anomalies, such as spikes in CPU or memory usage. These alerts can be configured to trigger email notifications, keeping us informed of potential issues. Additionally, Splunk Cloud Platform provides real-time dashboards that visualize the data as it's collected.

The federated search feature is useful for our cybersecurity team to complete their log analysis.

Splunk Cloud Platform offers seamless integration with other systems and applications. This is achieved through apps and add-ons developed by Splunk.

Splunk is a good reporting tool. It allows us to generate reports and attach them to emails in CSV or PDF format.

Splunk Cloud Platform has been instrumental in helping our cybersecurity team continuously monitor our data for anomalies and attacks. Its usefulness extends beyond security, though. Teams that ingest their logs into Splunk can monitor various services. If a service goes down, Splunk will trigger an alert. Splunk offers a robust monitoring suite, including dashboards, alerts, and reports. We can monitor system resources like memory and CPU consumption, application logs, Azure logs, and even Office 365 logs. For example, Splunk can reveal who sent emails, who participated in group email threads, and who added or removed members from Active Directory groups. This audit log capability allows us to investigate activity even months or years later. Splunk provides a wide range of use cases for our organization. We noticed these benefits as soon as Splunk started ingesting data.

Splunk has improved our decision-making process thanks to its clear dashboards that help us analyze information and make informed choices.

Splunk has been valuable as a compliance tool because it centralizes log ingestion. Any tool generating logs should be configured to send them to Splunk. This allows us to easily identify compliant applications – those whose logs are collected. Conversely, uncollected logs raise security concerns, as they represent a potential attack surface.

Splunk has significantly improved our organization's security posture. As a primary security tool, Splunk allows us to collect application logs, monitor activity for potential attacks, and conduct searches to identify suspicious behavior.

What is most valuable?

I like that Splunk Cloud Platform is managed by the vendor.

I like the Cloud monitoring console feature.

I like the support for all the apps and add-ons.

What needs improvement?

Splunk currently manages the components, which restricts our ability to access them directly. I would like to be granted read access to be able to review the components.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for one and a half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The Splunk Cloud Platform is stable as long as we perform proper maintenance to prevent bugs.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This system is very scalable. That means it can be easily adapted to accommodate our needs. We can increase the number of licenses we use, or add more resources like CPU and memory. We can also request additional components, such as adding more user accounts if our team grows from four to eight members. Overall, the scalability of this system is a major advantage.

I would rate the scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform nine out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

Splunk Cloud Platform offers excellent technical support that is both knowledgeable and responsive.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward but it takes a month or two to complete because of the applications that need to be onboarded.

We first need to calculate the amount of data we need to ingest. Then, based on that amount, we can plan how much data we need to onboard and what components we'll need.

Two experienced people were involved in the deployment.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed in-house.

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

Splunk Cloud Platform is more expensive than some of its competitors, but it offers a wider range of features.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate the Splunk Cloud Platform eight out of ten.

Splunk Cloud Platform is deployed in multiple locations.

Splunk Cloud Platform requires maintenance.

I recommend the Splunk Cloud Platform to others.

If you're using cloud services, Splunk Cloud Platform is a good option. It minimizes management overhead for you since Splunk handles the underlying infrastructure. Splunk Enterprise however requires more resources to manage.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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PeerSpot user
Software Engineer at Tigma Technologies
Real User
Helps to improve our incident response time, provides multiple search modes, and is stable
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk Cloud Platform's search modes are a powerful feature."
  • "The Splunk Cloud Platform dashboard could benefit from some improvements."

What is our primary use case?

My manager typically requests dashboards, alerts, and scheduled reports. Based on their specific requirements, I create reports and dashboards that visualize the data. We leverage the Splunk Cloud Platform to fulfill these needs.

Additionally, my teammates may approach me for insights. I analyze the data and provide them with these insights, which they then use for team meetings and further data analysis. This ultimately helps them make informed decisions.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud Platform improves our incident response time by enabling the retrieval of large data volumes. The platform offers impressive search speeds, and we don't need additional SQL commands to optimize response times.

We saw immediate benefits from the Splunk Cloud Platform. Being able to access and analyze logs provided valuable insights.

Splunk's impact on decision-making is significant. I have access to all the data I need, and it is always reliable.

What is most valuable?

Splunk Cloud Platform's search modes are a powerful feature. There are 3 main modes: Fast, Verbose, and Smart. These modes allow us to customize our search based on our needs, which can significantly improve our response time.

What needs improvement?

Splunk Cloud Platform's dashboard could benefit from some improvements. While it functions adequately, it appears very minimalistic. It's built using a simple XML format, and while newer dashboard options have been released, it still lacks the visual capabilities of tools like Power BI and Tableau. While I understand these are different platforms, having a more powerful dashboard option for the Splunk Cloud Platform would be valuable.

There is a lack of comprehensive learning materials offered by Splunk to prepare for their certifications.

Splunk uses SQL as its search language. One challenge I've encountered is with subsearches used in joins. These subsearches can only handle a maximum of 50,000 entries. If our data set is larger, we won't be able to join it using a subsearch. This limitation has been a significant obstacle for me. I've searched the Splunk community forums, and even reached out to my colleagues and seniors for a solution, but haven't found a definitive answer yet.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for 2 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is reliable. In my experience working with virtual machines, any search lags are likely due to the VMs themselves, not Splunk.

I would rate the stability 8 out of 10.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Cloud Platform is horizontal scaling. So it is easy to scale based on the data we are using.

I would rate the scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform 9 out of 10. 

How was the initial setup?

Deploying Splunk Cloud Platform requires knowledge of the Splunk architecture, the deployment server, and the components.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on investment.

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

The certifications are costly.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform 8 out of 10.

The maintenance required is minimal.

The resilience of Splunk is good.

I recommend the product.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a powerful tool for handling big data. To get the most out of it, understanding both the developer and administrator sides is beneficial. The platform offers broad compatibility with various technologies and allows for easy scaling to accommodate your needs.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Splunk Cloud Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: May 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Splunk Cloud Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.