What is our primary use case?
I am working with Splunk Enterprise Platform, and I have worked with Enterprise and ITSI, both. Sometimes I have worked with ES also, Enterprise Security.
I use Splunk Enterprise Platform mostly for log monitoring. In our company and our projects, we are monitoring for log monitoring, we are using Splunk. After that, we have created some dashboards according to our requirement and alerts and reports. Sometimes for historical data, we have created summary indexing. We are managing our Splunk Enterprise Platform infrastructure like search head, indexers, deployment server, and license master. We have 1,000, you could say 10,000+ UF. Some of them we are using with apps like Splunk DB Connect. For Kafka, we are using different add-ons for sending our data to Splunk Enterprise Platform from different log paths and log sources. That is the main use for Splunk Enterprise Platform. Mostly we are using it for log monitoring.
What is most valuable?
When I talk about Splunk Enterprise Platform, I can say that Splunk Enterprise Platform is, whatever the tool I have worked from my last eight, nine years of experience in my overall corporate journey, a very powerful tool where I can customize everything as per my requirement. There is no hesitation and there is no limitation for my customization. Whatever I want, I can do that from Splunk Enterprise Platform. If I am talking about tools other than Splunk Enterprise Platform, they are not very vast, or not good enough to customize. Here I can customize. If I need to customize from backend side, I can do whatever using Python, Java. If I want to create some things, that is a different thing. In every project, the requirements differ. If I need JavaScript in my platform, in my dashboard, where I want to customize and play with the dashboard according to my requirement, I can use JavaScript. I send the data, I can use Python script to send the data to Splunk Enterprise Platform. There are very different things. Mostly the SPL, which I am using, has already covered most of the things. But for what is not covered, I can use some different things also.
In my opinion, the effectiveness of Splunk Enterprise Platform in detecting anomalies for preventing system outages is very good. It is improving day by day.
When I talk about the personalization dashboard in Splunk Enterprise Platform, I can easily customize my dashboard.
Even if people do not know about Splunk Enterprise Platform, they want to create the dashboard, they can just drag and drop. They can add a widget and choose some visualization like a bar chart. If they do not know about the XML or the backend of their dashboards, they can still do it from the UI only.
The Application Management feature in Splunk Enterprise Platform may help enhance the end-user experience, but I need to check that.
Advanced threat detection in Splunk Enterprise Platform is very good enough to detect anomalies and detect vulnerabilities. Splunk Enterprise Platform has a different product called Splunk ES, which is a very good product in cybersecurity. I can easily detect some problems, and it automatically sends alerts. The anomaly detection is very good for live production data. Whenever an anomaly comes in an application, it automatically resolves and just gives the notification. It creates incidents or whatever is needed, where I can integrate with different tools like PagerDuty, Moogsoft, or even send my data into Slack if I am not using ServiceNow.
What needs improvement?
For a potential area of improvement in Splunk Enterprise Platform, I can say to try to make it easy for the user and user-friendly.
Simplifying the UI would help, because not everybody has it in their knowledge. If you want to sell your product, you will go with the company CIO, Chief Information Technology Officer. I do not think he will be working on that project; he will be working on your tool. Their resources, their employees will be working on Splunk Enterprise Platform. If you will show them the UI where they can understand, even if they do not know about any coding, they can just play, drop, and drag. If you satisfy them, then anyone will work on their tool in their company. I just want to give you the business perspective, because if you talk to any CIO, they are looking first at the UI part. They will not look into the coding part; they will just check the UI. If the UI is user-friendly, it will attract every person.
There is very much improvement needed from Splunk vendor support side because they need to check what people are raising in the requests. They do not understand the concerns people are raising. I do not think Splunk is working on their application support, I believe they hire third-party people who do not know as much about Splunk Enterprise Platform.
Regarding deep knowledge of the product, I am talking about the technical aspects. If anyone says something is not working, it seems many cases I have raised where they do not reply to my request adequately. That is why I say there is a requirement for improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Splunk Enterprise Platform for the last six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
From one to ten, I would rate the stability for Splunk Enterprise Platform as a nine.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability as an eight.
How are customer service and support?
For technical support from Splunk, I can say it is a two only.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The setup process for Splunk Enterprise Platform is very simple.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
In my opinion, the main competitors for Splunk Enterprise Platform in the Enterprise Platform market are Dynatrace and DataDog. Recently, at a Dynatrace conference, they mentioned their goal to beat Splunk Enterprise Platform in the future.
DataDog is also relevant. For open-source options, ELK is available for those who need a more budget-friendly solution since Splunk Enterprise Platform is not open source and is quite costly.
What other advice do I have?
I am working with Splunk Enterprise Platform and Dynatrace, and my feedback was really valuable for us.
I am using Splunk Enterprise Platform, and I am combining it with a Cloud platform, AppDynamics, and SOAR.
I worked with Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit, but that is a different thing. I have not worked so much on the MLTK side, so I cannot say anything, I cannot give more of an idea or feedback on that.
The ability to manage applications through Splunk Enterprise Platform is something I need to check.
I am talking about Splunk Enterprise Platform, and there is a lot it provides to the end user. The first thing for Splunk Enterprise Platform is that I can organize my data, like the Common Information Model, CIM, where there are different departments in my company and different application owners. Accordingly, they can set their data, which they do not want, they can just skip that. Whenever they need, they just use the simple one, and that data will be present. In one umbrella, they can see different locations and different data. In any organization, I have to organize my data. If I do not organize my data, then it would be very difficult to find it.
Directly, if I just check my application, I can enter my application, like in Linux. I just enter index equal to Linux, and it gives me all the details. Even in the dashboard, I select Linux, and it shows all the data, including vulnerabilities, CPU usage, and memory usage.
This is a really good point. Because people are not working on their tool. If I tell any technical problem in Splunk Enterprise Platform to the CIO, I do not think he will understand. He has not worked on it; he does not know what I am talking about. But if you present to him that our UI is very helpful to everyone in your organization, no matter if they are on the leadership team, application team, development team, testing team, or application support team, they can all use our tool easily without any hesitation. Even if they need help, Splunk Enterprise Platform has introduced AI, which helps answer any questions regarding SPL.
I purchased Splunk Enterprise Platform directly from the vendor.
I rate the price for Splunk Enterprise Platform as a five because it is very high. If the price were lower, there would be no tools in the market capable of competing with Splunk Enterprise Platform. The only reason people think about moving from Splunk Enterprise Platform to another tool is the price. I would rate this Splunk Enterprise Platform solution with an overall rating of eight.