Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

It is deployed to investigate, detect, respond, and prevent security incidents and threats by providing valuable context and visual insights to make faster and smarter security decisions.

• Splunk delivers a holistic view of an application (the big picture).
• Splunk provides immediate visibility into key business metrics and new business insights that deliver immediate value.
• Significant reduction in mean-time-to-investigate (MTTI) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) production incidents from days to hours.
• Splunk visualization capabilities help pinpoint problem areas, spikes, and anomalies easier and faster.
• Ability to monitor and resolve integration problems before they impact the business user area.
• Splunk is being used as part of the development life cycle, resulting in better quality and more efficient applications.
• Provides additional insights into a 360 degree view of the customer.

We usually have to follow up with technical support on our open cases. Otherwise, Splunk listens to customers and is constantly incorporating their feedback in future releases.

There are no software stability issues. The issues so far have been internal.

There are no scalability issues. If you are planning on using Splunk for security use cases, I would recommend you go with Linux for your OS.

We have the enterprise level of support. This is one area Splunk could improve upon, since we usually have to follow up with them on our open cases.

We did not have a previous solution.

There were no issues with the initial setup. We utilized Splunk’s partner zones for the initial setup. In retrospect, we should have utilized Splunk Professional Services.

Although Splunk is an expensive product, it is designed to be utilized across your organization in order to maximize your ROI and lower your TCO.

We contacted Gartner and other business associates to determine what others are paying for Splunk.

We started researching ELK (Elastic, Logstash, Kibana). But management was so impressed with Splunk that we ended this research.

Ensure you have an executive sponsors to fully deploy Splunk across your organization to maximize your ROI and lower your TCO.

Make use of Splunk Professional Services.

We are using it for logging and monitoring.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps with application events. It provides end-to-end visibility into our environment which is most important for us. It reduces the time to react to an event.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data. It can help identify and solve problems in real-time, but we have mainly utilized it for post-identification correction.

It provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. It is easier for developers to take action once an anomaly is detected. We have been leveraging Splunk dashboards for that.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations, but I do not have the metrics.

They are a good partner for Google Cloud. It provides great visibility, threat detection, and proactive mitigation of risks for our mutual consumers.

We have been selling Splunk Enterprise Security along with Google Cloud for about two years.

We had a very bespoke solution. It was a shared model. The scalability was good.

Their technical support has been good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We have not used any other solution previously.

Our customers have seen an ROI, but I do not have the metrics.

The variables and the flexibility that Splunk provides are helpful, especially in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

I would advise others to start early.

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

The project we are working on with Splunk is short as the customer has given us two months to implement. My company is a Splunk partner.

Splunk is quite flexible for our customers. Splunk does not filter from a specific lock, you can define it later.

I would like Splunk to add more integration. QRadar has many indications with more products than Splunk.

I have been working with Splunk for three months.

Splunk is quite good if you want to scale it.

My client has some pain points with QRadar and does not feel the kilogram function is accurate. Other features do not match with the customer behavior as well. They want to replace QRadar with Splunk because they are familiar with this solution.

The initial setup of Splunk is complex. It requires a lot of equipment and uploads.

My company provides the implementation and maintenance services to our customers.

Splunk licensing requires you to purchase licenses for any feature per user. For example, if you need UEBA, it is difficult to propose in the project. QRadar has a free upcharge for UEBA. Customers cannot calculate the additional costs based on gigabytes per day because they can not forecast the future.

Due to the cost of Splunk, I recommend it for larger companies. Splunk is powerful when sorting huge amounts of data. 

Implementation of Splunk takes preparation. It requires a lot of resources and needs the infrastructure to support the project.

I would rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

Typically, we use the solution for critical infrastructure companies. 

The speed is a very valuable aspect of the solution. 

The way Splunk handles low data and low-rate costs are great.

The level of robustness on offer is very good. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

We have found that the solution offers good integrations with other products.

Overall, the solution works very well.

The complexity could be worked on so that it's even easier and faster. However, I understand that, if some complexity was removed, there might be slightly more limitations.

Occasionally there are data sizing and data-related issues that need to be overcome.

I've been using the solution for a couple of years.

The performance is very good. It's something that customers are always looking for. The product offers good stability. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We have about five to ten partners that use Splunk.

I'm a fan of QRadar. I use them as well.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process. The deployment process doesn't take too long. You can manage it with fewer people and smaller teams. This is especially true if it isn't the critical infrastructure that you are working with. 

For deployment and maintenance, you only need two to three people. That can include one manager and two professionals. Since Splunk is easier to handle, more people can join in on the client-side.

We also use QRadar, and we make more money with QRadar than with Splunk as we can make bigger projects happen. However, we find that with Splunk, while we don't make as much money on each project, we can do more of them.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use Splunk primarily to provide our security and ops groups with important insights to more efficiently make decisions and take action.

My favorite example of improving of organization is saving a $60k/mo in payroll fraud and $10k/mo in wasted API credits by using simple searches and clear reports.

Splunk's schema on demand is incredibly useful. I do not have to worry about what my users will need when we onboard their data. They can make connections that we could not have foreseen. They dig deeper when they are searching.

Some of the terminology can be confusing, even for seasoned vets. Renaming components at this point would be a serious undertaking. However, it might be beneficial in the long run.

While Splunkbase (the app repository) has a lot of great content, some apps are terribly old and could stand to be updated or purged.

• Monitoring IT and other processes for a large university.
• Leveraging alerts and dashboards to detect and predict security breaches and other events.

Splunk has enabled us to detect, even predict potential security issues, before they become severe. It has enabled our operations and development teams to more efficiently monitor and troubleshoot their systems.

The search language is easy to understand and teach to new users. The SDK is comprehensive and has incredible levels of integration with the platform and data. 

• Certain sections of the developer documentation could use some updating and clarification.
• Search head clustering is often temperamental in its current state and should be improved, replaced by something better, or be reverted to search head pooling. 
• Some terminology is vague and confusing (examples: deployer versus deployment server or search head versus search peer).

Support is quick and competent.

IT service analytics: 

• Server machine data
• Monitoring data
• Alerting data
• ITSI KPIs
• Real-time reporting
• Month-over-month reporting.

It allows for transparency into IT metrics for insightful business analytics.

It brings together all sorts of data. It has the ability to correlate data, analyze and review it. This makes weekly ops reviews and monthly executive management reporting much easier by saving hours of collecting data. Report automation has been a life saver.

• Free-floating panels in the dashboards are like a glass table. 
• It needs more formatting control without having to be an admin.

Previously, only the service owner could see the data and he might have gone to several places to obtain it. Now, it is all in one place and easy to access. 

Central repository for log collection and analysis in a complex environment. We have used it for a variety of use cases involving SIEM and operational support.

Speeds up root cause analysis and can help identify issues that your organization never realized were occurring. It helps streamline troubleshooting and log analysis.

It has a low barrier to entry, but it is extremely extensible, allowing it to be tailored to highly specific use cases. It makes searching through a wider variety of logs much quicker and enables you to correlate events from one log to another.

It can be tough to determine if you are getting all of the value out of your investment at times. However, our sales seems to be flexible and will work on an organization to organization basis to negotiate license terms. 

On the technical side, it would be nice to see aspects of the recent acquisition of Phantom make it into the core Splunk Enterprise, not just become a part of the premium Enterprise Security.

Pricing can be a limiting factor. You have to continuously tune what you are bringing in and make sure what you bring in is of value.