Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

We are using it for information assurance, system alerting, and compliance. We are using its latest version.

It integrates into our VMware environment and provides infrastructure alerting and monitoring.

The ability to ingest different log types from many different products in our environment is most valuable.

It seems to have everything in terms of features. Every time I think of something, I go out to their site, and I can pretty much find it.

The biggest problem is data compression. Splunk is an outstanding product, but it is a resource hog. There should be better data compression for being able to maintain our data repositories. We end up having to buy lots of additional storage just to house our Splunk data. This is my only complaint about it.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

It is excellent in terms of performance and reliability.

Its scalability is excellent. Its users are mostly on the backside. I know there are a lot of opportunities to allow developers and engineers to access Splunk for doing different things, but we use it purely for information assurance and system monitoring. So, our engineers and IA professionals are the only ones who access Splunk. We have a couple of them, but it supports thousands of users.

We started with Splunk Light, and now, we're using Splunk Enterprise across most of our projects. It is being used extensively. It is our primary SIEM product. I'm sure its usage will increase, but that's managed at a much higher level. The company has an agreement with Splunk on how our licensing model is established.

Their support is great. I've talked to them many times.

We used InTrust. We switched to Splunk because of its flexibility and capability.

Its initial configuration is pretty straightforward. Their repository for information and help is really good, which makes it pretty straightforward. You can just go out to their site and do a search for any question. Usually, someone else would have experienced the same issue.

It took us hours. We obviously expanded it as we were building the environment because we did it from scratch, but it only took hours to get it up and running and configured to do ingestion. We then deployed more forwarders and tweaked it as we went along.

It was implemented in-house. Its maintenance is pretty lightweight, and I take care of it. I have a couple of other team members to help make changes. We have engineers who are available for adding capacity. We have a team of six or seven people to support our Splunk Enterprise.

It is expensive. I used to buy it early on, but then they combined it into a higher-up organization. They buy it for multiple systems now. Last time, I paid around 60K for it.

There is just the licensing fee. That's all.

I would advise making sure that you incorporate enough storage and processing in order to properly support the environment.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It is definitely the best tool I've ever used, but nothing is perfect. They could do a little bit better on data compression and system resource management, but outside of that, it is an excellent product.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring our infrastructure.

The models that we use are pretty mature at this point, which means we can be assured we are given the best use cases right out of the box.

We can just plug into the applications and everything is set up. There's very little configuration necessary.

The integrations that are offered with different tools are all very good. They offer integrations for all levels of security and have offerings from some of the other major solutions in the space.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Over the years, I know they've been doing what they can to continue to add integration capabilities to their solution. If they continue to do that, that would be ideal. However, beyond that, there really aren't any features that I find to be lacking in any part of the solution.

On-premises scaling of the solution is a bit more limited than it is on the cloud.

The pricing of the solution needs to be a bit lower.

It would be ideal if the hardware could meet more universal global regulatory requirements. It would be great it the solution better aligned with global standards.

I've been working with the solution for three to four years at this point.

In terms of the cloud, scalability is very straightforward. It's just about as expansive as we want to go. When it comes to an on-premise deployment, there might be some scalability limitations. We've found we just have to cut hard on the resources as it does a lot of processing. Whereas the cloud is easy and has very little limitation, I'd advise others that on-premise may have some difficulties. 

On-premises, it's definitely on the customer to ensure they have the right plates. If they're concerned and they need 100% scalability, it's best to be on the cloud.

Technical support is very good. They know their product and they are responsive to requests. We're satisfied with the level of service provided to us.

We didn't have any issues with the initial setup. It's not too complex. We found the process to be very straightforward and very simple.

While I do understand that it is a premium tool, they could work to make it a bit less in terms of cost. It's a bit expensive.

We use a mixture of public and private cloud deployments.

I would definitely recommend the solution, having seen it work for others so well. Its ease of usage and its man integrations make it a great product. The way you can access whatever you need on the solution is very similar to a Google bar where you can search for anything you need. It's just a super quick responsive, product.

Overall, I would rate it a perfect ten out of ten. We have no complaints.

I work in the HIPAA industry. I work at a healthcare company in Puerto Rico. HIPAA requires us to go over security risks. Our use case right now is to be compliant.

In our hierarchy, we have 1000 servers and 16,000 endpoints. We also have 100 entry points and 3000 VPN connections. It's huge.

Manually, it used to take us a whole day to do strong monitoring. Now, it takes a maximum of two hours because of this product.

It creates a single pane of glass. Plus, it gives us the liberty to do more in terms of use cases, especially since HIPAA wants use cases. We must monitor them. Therefore, we can also add our own correlations for all our use cases.

The dashboard centralizes the daily routine. We used to do this by hand. Now, we go through daily checklists, using the dashboard and setting up the alarms. It helps us to cut down the time on this routine. 

I am a cybersecurity director. I manage five different business lines. Every morning, we used to have to go to different tools to get our daily routines done. With Splunk, centralized as it is, we can see everything in one place. We use it not only for monitoring events, but in case we need to do a group call. We can see what's going on, viewing all of the offenses and security events which are happening in our infrastructure.

The Web Application Firewall will send you too much information because it's more dedicated to security than a normal firewall.

It was pretty straightforward. I even did a couple of logs myself. 

We implement through a vendor.

We were using QRadar as a POC. We were using for real at our cloud but also it was a POC for us because we were watching the product. But, QRadar needs a lot of fine tuning.

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for monitoring. We've been using it for monitoring our network. We've created some rules and use cases and we get alerts based on rules. 

It’s helpful in relation to the security perspective. With it, we can monitor all log sources and it helps us to reduce risks to our enterprise from a security perspective.

We can monitor all of our digital assets and reduce threats via constant monitoring. Using Splunk, we can mitigate malicious activities on the spot. 

The solution offers a variety of good features. It has a simple user interface where we can find various options easily. The search functionality is great.

Integrations can be done easily. It’s not complex like other solutions, like Radar or Azure. Everything is easy to manage, including the low sources.

The visibility is continuous. We have different web servers, databases, routers, endpoints, et cetera, and we gain visibility from a security perspective to all of them. We can generate different types of dashboards to visualize traffic from various resources.

We can see user behavior and have access to user behavior analytics. We also are able to have some custom rules that allow us to effectively continuously monitor the activities of our users. We use a third-party solution for that.

Splunk Enterprise Security is helpful for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. I can take various logs from log sources and centrally manage everything via custom rules. We have been satisfied with the capability to analyze malicious activities and detect breaches.

It helped us with faster detection of threats. If we compare it with other solutions, it is much faster. For big organizations that have their logs and terabytes, working with something like QRadar takes lots of time. Splunk is much faster.

Since the time of deployment, we've been able to use all of the features and integrate rules and use cases with threat intelligence. We've reduced false positives by 90%. Between the first and sixth months, we reduced our alert volume by 50% to 60%.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped speed up our security investigations. We now have an in-depth insight into endpoint usage. We've saved about 60% of our time if you compare Splunk to how we were operating before in terms of monitoring. 

We'd like to have the number of devices covered under the license to be increased. 

I've been using the solution for seven months.

I'd rate the ability eight out of ten. 

The solution is mostly scalable. The ability to scale is related to storage. If you want to expand storage, it can be quite difficult. 

At this point, we do not have plans to increase our usage.

I'm satisfied with the level of service technical support provides. 

Positive

Previously, I have used QRadar. My current company uses Splunk. 

I was not involved in the deployment of the solution. 

There is some maintenance required. Users need to do some administration around storage and monitoring. 

I'm not sure how much the solution costs, or how much my company pays for it. 

If a company needs something cheaper than Splunk, there are some open-source solutions available to them. 

The resilience of the solution is good. It's quite scalable, however, it does depend on the license. If you want more sources or logs you need to increase your license.  

I'd advise users to evaluate the solution to see if it meets their personal requirements.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case is for security but we also use it as a soft tool. It gives us an advantage over traditional SOC or security tools. We get to use the existing data in Splunk to make use of the security. 

It definitely does help with both auditing and as well as regular monitoring. SOC does more monitoring, but ES also gives you other features that are auditing-related. The dashboards are also beneficial. 

Our auditing team gets benefits from Splunk, not just ES but also from general Splunk Enterprise. It's cross-functional. 

Enterprise Security has helped us reduce our mean time to resolution by 50%. Without it, there are many manual steps. You have to go to different products to see specific things. With Splunk, you have the benefit of seeing them together in one place.

The notable events and the incident review features are the most valuable. It gives you an overall idea of what's going on in terms of security in the environment. 

I also like the automation. We write custom scripts and automate certain tasks. That's also interesting. This feature saves us time.

Splunk is capable of doing a lot in real-time with data coming in that is a terabyte in size, you can still do searches in real-time. We have correlation searches that do similar functions.

It has a lot of the features we're looking for. 

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for a year and a half.

It's quite stable. It's a mature product. 

We can make it as scalable as we want. We can scale it horizontally as much as we want on our cluster.

We get support when we need it. I would rate support an eight or nine out of ten. There's always learning and improvement to do. Sometimes the communication with support happens with multiple staff. They should reduce the time to resolution.

Positive

I would rate Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. Not a ten because everything has room for improvement. 

The biggest value of the Splunk conference is meeting people.

I work for a government agency and we use Splunk to monitor our Cisco equipment. I'm a senior network engineer and we are customers of Splunk. 

This is a very capable and flexible solution. It's based on Linux and even Windows installations use the Linux file structure. You can use it to gather syslog messages from anything; jet engines, fin-tech financial institutions, banking, regular enterprise, etc. You can gather the messages from network equipment, elevators, anything you can think of that generates syslog, and Splunk it. They also have a good API so you can write your own code to talk to it or interact with it. The solution has a lot of applications that people have written. It's the best solution on the market. 

It would be nice if they had a wizard to construct searches, including more complex searches that include math or statistics. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The product runs on Linux so it's very stable. It's important to have a well-run SAN environment to store the data. 

The solution can be scaled up to any size of enterprise or agency. I have heard of Splunk installations of over 100 terabytes of licensing.

We used Logrhythm previously but it was not a good fit for our environment. That is why we switched to Splunk.

The initial setup is fairly complex. There's a certain architecture that Splunk utilizes to handle its indexing and it also depends on the size of your deployment. If you have a relatively low amount of gigabytes per day, deployment is simple. And of course it scales to terabyte, so if you have a terabytes installation, there are a lot of additional services that need to be implemented such as licensing servers and clustering. We sometimes configure syslog NG servers to front end the date before it ends up at an indexer. If it's a large terabyte installation, you definitely want to use professional services.

This was implemented through a combination of in house and vendor developers.

n/a

Splunk charges on the basis of gigabytes of incoming log messages per day. Also I would recommend that funds be set aside for Splunk training and certification.

There is a large number of options for training and certification. The more training you have the more useful Splunk becomes. However, right out the gate you can do useful searches due to the search bar design.

I went to a cybersecurity boot camp through Penn University, and we went over this topic for a decent amount of time. It was more of a testing environment where they gave us different file formats that we had to go through. We would upload those files to Splunk, and it would give us good examples of what it would look like under different circumstances, such as when an organization is getting hacked, when there is a DDOS attack, and so on.

It is a good way of seeing the network traffic as a whole. With network traffic, there are a lot of things going on, especially in a big organization. It organizes the information and makes it more usable for average people. If you use Wireshark, you'll get a ton of information, and it is super easy to get lost in it. Even if you put Wireshark on for about 30 minutes, you can very easily get lost. Splunk simplifies the information, and it gives you charts and different means of seeing that information, making it easily understandable for people.

From my experience, the visual aid that it provides is most valuable. There are charts and other means to provide information.

Its user interface for everything other than the charts can be improved. Some parts of it can be simplified a bit, such as when importing documents that have the network traffic. When you're going through the information about the network traffic, you have to have the expertise, but even if a program is supposed to be for IT support, it is good to make it user-friendly because it gets easier to train people. When something goes wrong, the more difficult a program is in terms of UI, the harder it is to fix the issue.

I've been using this solution for a little while. 

In terms of stability, I really liked it. I didn't see any issues as far as stability was concerned. Whenever I needed it, it was there. It was available, and it worked. It was pretty good.

Its scalability seems pretty good. If you are working with a lot of information, it would be usable.

Its users would depend on the organization. Mostly network engineers, network analysts, and SOC analysts would be dealing with this. 

There were instructors who knew how to fix a lot of the issues. If there was an overarching issue, they would deal with it.

At the boot camp, we also used Kibana, which looked a little bit more friendly, but when we got into the details, I liked Splunk a little bit more. It was more intuitive, and it did a little bit more on its own rather than Kibana. With Kibana, it felt like I had to hold its hand all the way through the whole process. There were 20 people, and I know a number of people were leaning towards Kibana. It just came down to personal preference.

We saw some of the basics for deploying it within an environment, but it was very minimal. 

It isn't complex, but there is a little bit of a learning curve. Once you get the hang of it, it is very easy to get in and do things, but there is definitely a learning curve. I am not speaking just for myself; other 20 or more students that were in that class at the time also had a difficult time getting the hang of it, but once you get the hang of it, it is smooth sailing. You can fly through the program. Making it a little bit more simplified would help.

I remember Splunk being relatively affordable. Kibana was more reasonable, but you get more with Splunk. If I was suggesting something, I would probably suggest Splunk because it is better to pay a little bit more and get a lot more.

I would advise making sure that your staff is very aware of how the program works. After one or two classes, I got the hang of it, and it felt like I knew everything that was there to know about it, but when we went into the next class, I realized that there is a lot more. So, if you are going to use the program, I would advise making sure that everyone is trained and everyone really understands it. You should take your time to go into the nitty-gritty. You can very easily think that you know everything, but when you make mistakes in Splunk, at least from my experience, it can get messy quickly. So, you want to make sure that everyone has a very good understanding of what they're doing so that you can keep everything organized and accurate.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. When we're getting into the nuts and bolts and looking at the data, it is an eight, but when we are just navigating through the website, it is a seven. Only its UI needs improvement. It isn't bad, but there is room for improvement. They should make it a little bit more user-friendly.

As a software analyst, I utilize Splunk Enterprise Security for security purposes, including threat hunting on developed and customized applications for vulnerability management. I also use it to display dashboards, analyze data, and address alerts.

We implemented Splunk Enterprise Security to consolidate all our security data into a single platform. This has enhanced our visibility into our security posture and the potential threats we face.

Splunk Enterprise Security enables us to monitor multiple cloud environments, which is crucial for receiving real-time email alerts in the event of critical incidents. However, directing me to the source can be time-consuming compared to the verified swim methodology used by SIEMs. For my application, I have approximately ten million records. Directing me to the service code takes two minutes to instruct them to view the file using VLOOKUP. However, sending it to the capital takes about half an hour.

The ability to monitor multiple environments is excellent. We have customers who use Splunk Enterprise Security both on-premises and in the cloud. Both options have their merits, depending on the specific needs of the customer. If a customer has the required resources, the cloud is often the most suitable solution.

The robust threat detection capabilities of Splunk are essential for our project. However, it's crucial to manage user access carefully. While we need to grant access to certain users, we must not provide them with unrestricted capabilities. Splunk's granular access control feature empowers administrators to customize user permissions, ensuring that only authorized users have access to the necessary features.

Splunk's threat topology helps us identify the scope of an incident. This is crucial due to the high likelihood of unauthorized data being compromised, necessitating prompt incident detection.

Splunk Enterprise Security has facilitated the timely detection of threats, enabling us to swiftly customize it to identify a wider range of threats and potential risks. We can incorporate external scripts for enhanced threat intelligence and threat-hunting capabilities.

Before implementing Splunk Enterprise Security, we relied on a patchwork of other tools, each requiring manual implementation for data collection, rule definition, and threat identification. This approach was not optimized and occasionally resulted in delayed threat detection. Limiting our focus to device security alone proved insufficient, as it lacked the real-time threat actor intelligence and activity insights provided by Splunk Enterprise Security. Our reliance on licensed development restricted us to pre-built alerts or manually uploaded scripts for mitigation and response.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our alert volume.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigation time.

Three features stand out for me: the SDK for writing Python, the customizable and adaptable diagnostic dashboard, and the optimizer for collecting data.

The threat detection system has room for improvement. The critical aspect for an organization is the timely detection of incidents. If the rules are not defined correctly, threats may not be detected in real-time, resulting in incidents being detected months or even years after they occur.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for almost seven years.

I would rate the scalability of the solution eight out of ten.

I would rate the resilience an eight out of ten.

I contacted Splunk support once for a separate product.

Positive

The initial deployment was straightforward for me, likely due to my extensive experience using Splunk. When implementing the solution, we begin by defining customer needs and requirements to optimize Splunk. This involves identifying the systems necessary for daily use and ensuring the protection of the integrated licenses and external apps in the Splunk environment. This protection encompasses program security, cloud-based security, and data analysis for specific apps. Additionally, we configure personal authentication for private applications.

The deployment time is dependent on the specific requirements and can range from two to ten days.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Splunk Enterprise Security has delivered a return on investment through its effective threat detection and vulnerability response capabilities. We have successfully demonstrated this positive impact on our customers through comprehensive reports.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of ten.

While there may be cheaper solutions available, they lack the optimizer, dynamic dashboard, and security APIs that Splunk offers. These capabilities are not found in other solutions.

Maintenance is minimal for updates only.

When using Splunk Enterprise Security, ensure that optimization is performed correctly to minimize response times and resource consumption.