Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

My usual use cases for Splunk Enterprise Security include normal reporting.

Splunk Enterprise Security has positively impacted my organization by increasing security defense. It provides a good environment for defense.

The most valuable features of Splunk Enterprise Security are reporting capabilities. It is a good tool for checking systems and analyzing situations. I find it useful to check my systems and analyze situations.

The documentation and training resources available for knowledge and training can be expanded. We need to learn more about Splunk Enterprise Security and new security attacks.

I have been working with Splunk Enterprise Security during the last year.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten for stability. In security, nothing is 100%.

I would rate the scalability of Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten. I have not tried anything to scale up or scale out as it is a new setup, but I believe it will be easy for that.

I would rate the technical support of Splunk a seven out of ten. Sometimes there are delays. It is related to their giving a response after some time.

I used QRadar. The switch from QRadar to Splunk Enterprise Security was a management decision. We moved to Splunk Enterprise Security because of its benefits. Splunk's support is better, and its reporting is easier and better. There are also pricing advantages.

It is a normal process. It isn't complex, but it is a new setup with new interfaces and a new way of thinking. It is always a challenge to use new software, and it takes some time to get familiar with it.

I can install Splunk Enterprise Security myself, though some things require dealing with external assistance.

We have not calculated ROI in our environment. I have not received any assignment or recommendation to calculate ROI.

The pricing of Splunk Enterprise Security is somewhat high, but comparing it with its benefits, it's acceptable. It depends on the type of business.

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

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for various security use cases, including writing correlation searches. This has significantly improved both our use cases and correlation searches. We can leverage existing resources, making modifications as needed, rather than starting from scratch each time. Splunk Enterprise Security provides diverse use cases across different environments, including AWS, Azure, and multi-cloud setups, while also integrating with Microsoft Sentinel. Additionally, we can integrate Splunk's service orchestration product for further automation. Overall, this allows us to automate tasks that security analysts previously performed manually, such as reviewing incident dashboards. We can fine-tune alerts based on analyst feedback. Splunk's research team ensures that use cases are updated with the latest security content, enabling us to understand and implement necessary steps while customizing them to fit our company's needs. This is what makes Splunk Enterprise Security so popular; it streamlines processes compared to legacy security products that often rely on manual scripts. Clients, including government agencies and banks, are transitioning to Splunk Enterprise Security due to its reduced training requirements and comprehensive features. Everything is consolidated, simplifying training and certification. Additionally, integrating Splunk's service orchestration product further automates tasks and improves response times. The substantial investment in Splunk indicates its staying power; no other product on the market currently offers comparable capabilities. Cisco's acquisition of Splunk reinforces its potential for success, combining APM, data logging, and security portfolios. In one financial project involving 600,000 users, we were able to monitor all incoming traffic, identify security activities, and distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic, including phishing attacks and potential identity-based threats. Splunk enables tracking individual identities, crucial for detecting attacks where perpetrators hide behind compromised identities, often leading to data breaches and other security incidents.

We implemented Splunk Enterprise Security to assist with AWS security, which includes GuardDuty, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and Inspector. These AWS components generate compliance and security alerts, which we correlate and use to create dashboard reports and identify security events for various use cases. We then enable the out-of-the-box use cases and send notable events to the dashboard. The implementation is currently in its early stages.

Splunk Enterprise Security operates based on incoming data, making monitoring multiple cloud environments relatively simple due to data availability and integration capabilities. Data from cCloudRail, CloudWatch, Azure, and other diverse environments can be incorporated. While occasional patching might be necessary, most integrations are readily available, offering extensive coverage without customization. Specific customizations might still be required, but most functionalities are pre-built, leveraging code developed by Splunk. This efficient approach involves analyzing data from vendors like Palo Alto and applying add-ons to apply code and automate parsing.

Our visibility into various environments depends on how much data we incorporate; therefore, the more we scan, the better our visibility.

Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities act as a secondary approval and vetting process, helping our organization ensure there are no unauthorized users.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework allows us to identify criticality levels, helping us respond to incidents. We might integrate incident response with a REST API, where a notable event triggers the creation of a ServiceNow ticket. Information flows from ServiceNow back to Splunk, which then feeds other systems, enabling bidirectional incident management. These processes are largely out-of-the-box, as Splunk integrates well with ServiceNow, except for any customizations. We understand the data integration requirements and leverage Splunk's extensive integration capabilities.

Splunk Enterprise Security does a good job of analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. The amount of information the research and threat detection teams receive from Splunk enables faster threat detection of up to 60 percent, eliminating the need to consult numerous sources. This efficiency is a key benefit of Splunk, as its significant investment in security allows for expedited processes.

I have seen the older legacy product where they have this manual process to identify issues, run scripts, try to identify the output, and then go through ten systems to collect data. This could take days. Now, with Splunk, we have everything correlated with multiple use cases, and we have a correlation search between multiple systems, along with application data. Splunk Enterprise Security can stitch all this information together and show it in a single pane of glass, which makes decision-making faster and allows us to focus on the relevant issues instead of wasting time on non-relevant ones. They have done this well.

Splunk Enterprise Security significantly reduced our alert volume. The initial challenge was dealing with a legacy IBM system that generated a massive amount of unfiltered noise, making it difficult to identify relevant events to send to the incident dashboard. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, and the value of the system wasn't apparent. To address this, we fine-tuned both the SOAR system and Splunk by applying filters and conditions to focus on relevant data. Ultimately, Splunk reduced the alert noise from 1,000 events in two hours down to ten, which were then grouped into a single notable event. Despite potentially having hundreds of background events, Splunk condensed this information into a single, actionable item, allowing us to focus on investigating the most relevant issues.

Splunk Enterprise Security accelerates our security investigations by reducing noise, allowing us to focus on relevant use cases. Everything is categorized as high, medium, or low priority, and people immediately start investigating high-priority issues connected to PagerDuty. Sometimes, this leads to on-call situations, sometimes immediate action. Service orchestration and playbook scenarios enable automated responses, like instantly blocking unauthorized access to a system. The possibilities for security use cases with playbooks and service orchestration are vast, and I'm excited to explore them further in the coming days.

The dashboards and reporting capabilities help to aid our security analysis.

We have integrated Splunk Enterprise Security with various services to streamline our security operations. This integration allows us to leverage diverse data sources for creating lookups, data models, knowledge objects, and regular expressions. By automating the development of use cases and regular expressions, we can apply them to data more efficiently, enabling faster implementation and analysis. This approach enhances our ability to detect and respond to security threats effectively.

Splunk Enterprise Security has enhanced our organization's security posture by providing comprehensive security compliance dashboard reports.

I appreciate how Splunk Enterprise Security connects users to the research team and threat documentation, providing access to current events impacting other clients, security vulnerabilities, and relevant use cases. The platform's daily updates offer valuable insights for enhancing our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security allows us to create custom dashboards by changing fonts and modifying widgets. Those familiar with XML coding can further personalize dashboards to align with frameworks such as MITRE. Alternatively, we have the option to use the pre-built dashboards.

I've noticed that onboarding data from various multi-cloud sources and diverse products, such as security network devices, can be challenging. Although Splunk has simplified data onboarding with features like data managers, they need to improve their out-of-the-box parsing capabilities. While they've made significant progress, covering about 70 percent of common products, there's still a 30 percent gap where manual configuration is required. This forces us to spend time understanding and writing custom parsing rules instead of focusing on data analysis. With Splunk's recent acquisition by Cisco, I'm hopeful they will prioritize enhancing this functionality and increasing their coverage to 90 percent or more.

I want to see Splunk Enterprise Security dashboards incorporate more features, such as out-of-the-box AI and user behaviour analytics, which are accessible within a single dashboard.

The technical support response time has room for improvement.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for three years.

Splunk Enterprise Security has stability issues, especially with large data volumes, increased data intake, complex dashboards, custom models, and processing that significantly impact performance. Many customers experience this; even with demos using small datasets, performance degrades with millions of data points. This necessitates capacity planning, dedicated teams, and enforced best practices. These practices include restricting complex searches, blocking problematic users, and providing training to prevent performance degradation. Constant vigilance and proactive measures are crucial to maintaining a stable Splunk Enterprise Security environment. I would rate the stability of Splunk Enterprise Security five out of ten.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security's scalability six out of ten. We need to add more shared CPU memory and increase the capacity, and scaling requires a lot of planning and effort.

Splunk's support quality has declined in the past five years. Response times are now slower, and resolving an issue can take weeks. Submitting a ticket and connecting with the appropriate support agent often requires numerous emails and calls.

Neutral

To improve security coverage and user experience, we replaced our outdated legacy solution with Splunk Enterprise Security.

Our Splunk Enterprise Security cloud deployment utilizes a DevOps approach with a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. This automation has significantly improved our deployment speed, reducing the process from a week to a few minutes. Changes are made in the development environment and then automatically pushed to production after a click-through approval process. This streamlined workflow eliminates the previous manual process and associated delays, resulting in a faster and more efficient deployment cycle.

Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is based on data volume, which generally suits large enterprises.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten.

Splunk is widely used across larger organizations. While large organizations often have extensive teams dedicated to Splunk projects and upgrades, smaller organizations can also use Splunk, taking advantage of more affordable pricing options like the free tier for limited data. Cost isn't a significant concern for larger organizations, who prioritize Splunk's security features and are willing to invest in its capabilities.

Splunk Enterprise Security is deployed across all departments, processing millions of data points. Over 500 people manage this data: building dashboards and reports, working with Enterprise Security, discussing use cases, and creating custom data models. This represents a massive effort for any large organization where every department utilizes Splunk.

Government departments are transitioning to Splunk, with daily onboarding increasing the current user base of 5,000.

Because the deployment is cloud-based, the Splunk DevOps team handles maintenance.

Splunk offers a resilient SIEM solution with comprehensive capabilities for research and a wide range of use cases. It is constantly updated, ensuring it remains a valuable and comprehensive SIEM package.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise Security. It is an excellent tool widely used by many organizations, making it a valuable choice for security information and event management.

I use Splunk Enterprise Security to analyze logs and data. When it comes to hybrid or multi-cloud, Splunk Enterprise Security has helped me find events. I use event logging and event IDs, which has helped me.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps me detect threats faster depending on the type of log I'm using. If I have a current company's log, I can easily detect it faster. 

The ability of Splunk Enterprise Security to import data is simple. It is not hard; it is just an easy task that gives me what I want. 

The command line in Splunk Enterprise Security helps to search for specific queries, such as analyzing a security log to find login attempts and distinguish between failed and accepted passwords. 

End-to-end visibility in Splunk Enterprise Security is something that is appreciated. Splunk Enterprise Security is easy to use. 

The Threat Intelligence Management feature in Splunk Enterprise Security is applied and helps me to normalize the data. 

Splunk Enterprise Security is part of the SIEM tool, so it helps me tremendously to do my work.

The main improvement needed in Splunk Enterprise Security is its system visibility after installation. When you install Splunk, you cannot see it on the system as an application. If you are unfamiliar with Splunk and download and install it, you will not see it as an application on your system. You have to go back to your browsing history to get the link and start using it again. Additionally, Splunk Enterprise Security does not always provide an immediate response to alerts on threats.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for three years now.

Scalability in Splunk Enterprise Security is satisfactory.

I have not needed any help from the support team at Splunk before, so I have not required any assistance from them.

Positive

Splunk Enterprise Security was the first solution I learned, and it remains the only one I am using now.

I use a whole lot of tools at the moment aside from Slunk. I use Wireshark, I use Kali, I use Splunk Enterprise Security, and I use Metasploit.

Splunk Enterprise Security can make mistakes, so we do not solely rely on the out-of-the-box detections. It can also be part of a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. Everything depends on who teaches you Splunk Enterprise Security. Someone can teach you, and it becomes simple, or it can become complex. To me, it is not complex as I am experienced in using Splunk Enterprise Security.

I utilize Splunk Enterprise Security to analyze and conduct investigations as part of my job. There is minimal intrusion, so I receive few alerts regarding malicious threats. We do not have a partnership with them; we use it as a normal user through the internet.

Regarding sustainability, manufacturers must continually update their products, add new features, and optimize them. They need to optimize extensively because with threats and vulnerabilities, we always have to update to the latest features.

Overall, when it comes to performance and reliability, I rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

My main use cases for Splunk Enterprise Security are detections and security.

The feature I appreciate the most about Splunk Enterprise Security is Search Processing Language. These features have benefited my organization by making searching data a lot easier than other tools I've used.

Improvement for Splunk Enterprise Security is hard to address because I'm not on version 8 yet. The main thing was integrating all the different pages we have into one, which they have accomplished in version 8.1.2. I'm looking forward to using it.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Enterprise Security as having no issues so far.

Splunk Enterprise Security appears to scale with the growing needs of my organization. We haven't expanded usage at all yet.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as seven or eight out of ten. They're normally great. Sometimes talking through email isn't the most effective method, as they go through troubleshooting steps we've already taken, which requires additional back-and-forth communication.

Positive

I would imagine we have seen return on investment with Splunk Enterprise Security.

My advice to other organizations considering Splunk Enterprise Security is that it is definitely worth implementing, but it must be done properly. Make sure you have all preparations complete before getting the implementation package. I rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten.

I lead a team that does Splunk administration. We mainly worry about the platform itself, ensuring everything works, log sources are coming in, and assisting with searches. We have a dedicated security team that represents the user side, the consumers of that data. We try to get all the log sources in for them so they can create detections, alerts, dashboards, and their own custom app integrations. We support them as much as we can in the platform, and they do their security work based on that.

The biggest thing that Splunk is known for across all its platforms is aggregation. We have thousands of log sources coming in, and Splunk Enterprise Security does a great job of correlating that information and making it very searchable and usable for the end user. This is my most enjoyable feature. 

Splunk Enterprise Security is a huge value-add to us because I can confirm that our security team treats it as a normal component of their daily operations. They access Splunk Enterprise Security multiple times every single day doing their job. This proves substantial value given they need it that frequently, and considering the proportion of our contract.

Even though aggregation is one of the best features, they do poorly at integrating their own products with each other. There is Splunk Cloud, which handles searching, and there is Splunk Enterprise Security. In the backend, these are separate instances, even though the data comes from essentially the same database source. When I make changes on one platform, it may or may not affect the other side. This leaves me with uncertainty between what I'm doing in one, not knowing if it will affect the same thing on the other side. By extension, I sometimes make redundant changes already done on the other side. The discrepancy between the different search heads leaves me confused most of the time about these changes.

Their support also needs improvement.

I have been using this solution for about two years now.

For stability, I would give it an A grade. The platform generally runs exceptionally. It occasionally experiences brief interruptions, but their operations people who manage the cloud side typically have the system back up before I receive a response to my submitted ticket. They are very aware of their system's stability on the operational side.

For performance, I would give it a B grade. Some of the performance issues could be due to our own tuning that we could improve. However, Splunk is designed to handle vast amounts of data, and in my opinion, it should operate a bit faster, especially when initiating searches or processing smaller jobs. It would be helpful if these tasks could run more quickly because, once the search actually starts, it performs well. The initial parsing phase, when running a new search, can take quite a while, and I find it frustrating to have to wait during that part.

In terms of infrastructure, I cannot speak to it since it is cloud-based and operates as a black box regarding scaling. However, when it comes to handling increased data loads, Splunk Enterprise Security performs exceptionally. When we onboard new things, new log sources, or experience extra volume from heavy firewall activity, Splunk Enterprise Security processes all the data efficiently. From the time a log is generated on a system to when it reaches Splunk Enterprise Security is extremely fast. Though search time might be slightly slower than preferred, ingestion time for logs to hit the cloud is fantastic.

Both quality and speed are lacking. Quality-wise, tickets sometimes go in circles, with unnecessary complications and escalations requiring repeated explanations.

Speed is particularly problematic. I submitted a high-priority ticket for a broken login configuration to Splunk Enterprise Security, called twice, and received no response from Friday until the following Monday. After escalating to our sales team requesting immediate response for our security team's broken access, we finally received assistance, and we were able to get back on track, but I was really unhappy with the situation. It was a critical priority issue that they were not addressing appropriately. We have paid for Splunk support, and we’re not on the free tier hoping for assistance; we are a significant customer and invest a lot in this service. Given our active contract, we expect to receive better support. This area definitely needs improvement.

Neutral

I previously used AlienVault, an open source solution, but was not as deeply involved with it as I am with Splunk Enterprise Security.

The initial setup precedes my time with the company. When I started using it, it was a bit of a challenge. Splunk Enterprise Security is extensive and complex. The setup was not necessarily more difficult than regular Splunk Core since they are integrated, but the learning curve was quite steep. It took approximately six months to feel comfortable administering the full system independently.

The solution requires significant maintenance. It is very stable, but to keep things moving forward, we must do considerable work. Apps or add-ons we install require our own updates if they are not default ones offered by Splunk Enterprise Security. The baseline configuration gets upgraded automatically, which I appreciate. However, maintaining all other add-ons falls to us, which requires substantial work, especially as Splunk Enterprise Security is aggressive with their updates and minor versions. We must constantly do compatibility checks or create technical debt by staying behind versions sometimes, not knowing what features we might miss.

The pricing is very reasonable for what it offers us. Out of our entire contract, Splunk Enterprise Security represents approximately 15% of our total Splunk expenditure. Splunk Enterprise Security is a huge value add to us because our security team treats it very much as a normal component of their daily operations. They go into Splunk Enterprise Security multiple times every single day doing their job. That means that it proves a lot of value to where they need it that frequently. Given the proportion of our contract, there is a lot of value right there.

Splunk Enterprise Security has approximately seven different AI capabilities. These include natural language processing for search query assistance, machine learning for alerts and data processing, and plugins such as Tensor for external AI processing. However, I remain cautious about enabling all AI features without understanding their performance impact. 

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten.

We have customized use cases for Splunk Enterprise Security as per our environment, due to our infrastructure related to cloud, virtualization, and a few application servers, along with Active Directory management, where we look for user interface and access management. We receive alerts related to any password breaches or unauthorized user access, or if any applications stop running. 

Consequently, we created multiple customized use cases, and accordingly, we receive alerts on Splunk Enterprise Security. It integrates with other tools for threat intelligence and anomaly detection. We are enjoying a good experience so far, and our admins ensure that the use cases are well-maintained. Additionally, they perform fine-tuning as needed. 

We have some database servers integrated for alerting us about unused services. We communicate with our database admins regarding incidents related to data management issues. We suggest actions to the database admins based on these alerts for better data management.

Splunk Enterprise Security is highly customizable, which is an excellent feature. We are continually fine-tuning it to meet our requirements, and everything has been smooth thus far. We also have well-designed dashboards that allow us to visualize data from various use cases in comprehensive graphs, which is beneficial for management reviews, especially during inspections, to display the status of our environment.

We monitor multiple environments, and those environments are integrated with Splunk Enterprise Security, functioning effectively.

In terms of visibility, it offers insights into integrated devices such as firewalls, cloud infrastructure, and virtual machines. The extent of visibility corresponds to the number of devices we integrate with Splunk Enterprise Security. We have access management servers and Threat Intelligence integrated, enhancing visibility across various elements in our environments.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides good visibility into our environments.

Splunk Enterprise Security aids us in detecting threats faster. Over time, it has incorporated enhanced AI support that enables self-analysis and offers valuable feedback. It operates as an intelligent tool, parsing and generating relevant incidents effectively.

Splunk Enterprise Security significantly improves our organization's business resilience. Since my introduction to Splunk Enterprise Security in 2022, I have observed an increase in its intelligence levels, and I look forward to integrating more infrastructure with it. Our reliance is shifting more towards Splunk Enterprise Security for providing solid decision-making capabilities and easy integrations with multiple cybersecurity and IT infrastructure controls.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our alert volume to a good extent. It goes beyond mere incident handling by providing feedback to IT infrastructure personnel and database administrators. The incident responses have enabled us to make several environmental corrections, reducing flaws and incidents over time. For instance, alerts related to unnecessary service account logins have prompted us to give feedback to admins, which reduces their workload. False positives are a notable aspect we address to minimize unnecessary alerts, while true positives associated with malware or MITRE framework indicators prompt effective management action.

Splunk Enterprise Security accelerates security investigations. The tool contains extensive data, and the key lies in how to extract that information, depending on the analyst's capability. Our company emphasizes obtaining Splunk Core admin and user certifications to enhance our understanding of the Splunk Enterprise Security product.

I find it beneficial that Splunk Enterprise Security easily integrates with other tools. Due to its excellent API capabilities, it facilitates connections with various cybersecurity tools. We utilize different controls, such as Anomaly and Threat Intelligence, and also integrate it with Data Diode, which assists in one-way communication for infrastructure. Splunk Enterprise Security can seamlessly receive logs from various infrastructures, including Data Diode and firewalls.

We utilize Threat Topology and MITRE ATT&CK features, as these aspects fall under the MITRE ATT&CK framework. They provide coverage for continuous user activities and password issues. The MITRE ATT&CK framework is beneficial for detection and outbound traffic, and it offers a good number of default use cases that we have implemented in our environment.

In terms of recommendations for improvement, when performance degradation occurs, we need to do a root cause analysis. The repeated tendency to inform us about memory utilization complaints encourages us to consider adjusting our query needs. Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power. When we execute heavy, resource-intensive queries over long periods, the performance dips. Our admin quickly intervenes to correct resource bottlenecks, allowing everything to function properly again.

I have been working with Splunk Enterprise Security for approximately two years now.

I find it easy to scale Splunk Enterprise Security for our environment, and I would rate its scalability an eight.

I have sought assistance from Splunk Enterprise Security support in the past, particularly during deployment, and they provide friendly and effective help.

Having experienced using QRadar from IBM, I find Splunk Enterprise Security more intelligent and supportive.

The deployment of Splunk Enterprise Security is straightforward, and integration with other security controls is quite easy after the initial setup.

Initially, we required the assistance of Splunk Enterprise Security consultants for the deployment process.

I have noticed a return on investment with Splunk Enterprise Security, as it delivers substantial value for money. This is why we are keen on expanding our infrastructure under Splunk Enterprise Security rather than other SIEM options.

We are currently using Splunk Enterprise Security for our SOC in our office, and as long as the office continues its use, we will still be using it.

I haven't faced any other difficulties apart from the CPU resource issues. I find Splunk Enterprise Security to be very customizable and user-friendly. The only consideration is that if we want to increase the volume of logs processed, we need to buy more licenses.

Maintaining Splunk Enterprise Security requires personnel, especially due to the existence of different search heads and various forwarders in our robust setup, supporting a centralized logging environment.

I find it easy to scale Splunk Enterprise Security for our environment, and I would recommend that potential users consider their capacity to invest financially based on the criticality of their infrastructure, as adoption comes with licensing costs.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

We use Splunk Enterprise Security to track threats and errors and receive alerts and notifications.

We implemented Splunk Enterprise Security to improve our troubleshooting, mean time to detect and resolve issues, and our alerting system.

Monitoring multiple cloud environments with Splunk Enterprise Security is not difficult as long as we have data ingestion in place.

Operationally, having end-to-end visibility into our environment is critical. We need to know what is happening in our environment, and Splunk Enterprise Security can provide this.

Splunk Enterprise Security is good for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats faster. We are not dependent on a person to review the data. We have alerts, dashboards, and pattern definitions.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our mean time to detect issues.

Since implementing Splunk Enterprise Security, we have seen reduced incidents and the time it takes to resolve them. We saw these benefits within a month of deployment.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps reduce our alert volume, eliminating the need for manual triage of numerous alerts.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our mean time to resolve issues. We went from three hours down to 20 minutes.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped us consolidate many of our tools.

The search engine and indexes are fast and optimized, and the report generation dashboard is user-friendly.

I want Splunk Enterprise Security to release more AI and machine learning features in the future.

We use Dynatrace for our monitoring and Splunk for log management. I want to centralize everything within Splunk.

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

Splunk Enterprise Security is a stable platform available for many years.

We have a good relationship with the technical support team; they are responsive.

Positive

We previously used Elastic, but Splunk Enterprise Security is a superior product. It offers extensive usability and a vast customer base. The active customer forums are incredibly helpful, allowing me to quickly find the information I need.

The initial deployment was complex due to the presence of both vendor-based and in-house applications. The implementation relied almost exclusively on a Jenkins CI/CD pipeline.

We realized a total return on our investment in Splunk Enterprise Security within the first two years of implementation.

The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is reasonable, falling somewhere in the middle range.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten.

Splunk Enterprise Security is easy to maintain and doesn't require much time due to its full automation.

Splunk is a good solution if you haven't automated your log management, as manual log reviews are no longer efficient or practical.

We deploy Splunk for law enforcement agencies facing attacks from threat actors in China, Iran, and Pakistan. It helps plug the gaps because Splunk can easily identify malicious traffic.

In this instance, Splunk was only deployed for a specific department, not the entire ministry. However, this department has multiple cloud clusters for their operations, storage, and computing. Splunk is monitoring all of these clusters. It started as an on-premise solution, but then the department decided to go for cloud-based services that require a connector. Now, it's more of a hybrid solution.

 We face a lot of government-backed threats from India's neighbors, so threat intelligence can provide us with the information to take preemptive steps to stop the attacks. We were able to configure our network and the gateway firewalls. So that helped us overall.

We use the threat topology and MITRE ATT&CK features to compile our quarterly reports, but the leaders of the government departments are hardly concerned with these things.  They only respond to certain keywords if you highlight them. However, if you explain that something is an IOC according to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, they won't understand the jargon. They don't have the technical knowledge to comprehend MITRE ATT&CK. A private organization might have that capability. Government agencies may go for a full-fledged enterprise solution, but there are many features they don't understand or want to use. 

We still need to use manual techniques to investigate threats. Once, we had to look for devices that were infected, and we manually located the threat because the attacker had used a particular telecom handle to steal the data. In that sense, we did it manually but used Splunk to find the threat actor and the credentials used in the attack. The investigations were also quicker because we had the necessary information on hand. 

Resilience is essential, but it's something that can't fall entirely on a solution. Information security is the responsibility of every employee. While a cloud system doesn't go down easily, on-prem environments are more vulnerable.

Splunk has an excellent threat intel feed, so we can get the latest IOCs. The threat intel service enhances the threat detection capabilities because the solution is purely based on threat intel. They gather each threat intel from the dark web and the other areas of the internet. Once the integration is done, it's much more helpful than the traditional Splunk features, which may yield limited visibility. Splunk isn't purely a threat intelligence solution, but it may not have feeds at that frequency.

The threat detection capabilities are excellent, but it depends a lot on the configuration. If we can't configure the indicators of compromise correctly, then it becomes difficult for Splunk to evaluate a threat. For example, let's say a user is accelerating some data through the email gateway, and the gateway isn't being monitored. Splunk can't do anything about that because it requires a gateway monitoring system to be installed. Splunk is only aggregating the events coming in, and it cannot find the exact DLP agent. The DLP logs need to be forwarded to this Splunk connector.

The ingestion happens quickly, so you can run up the data costs if you use the default settings. It isn't a problem for government agencies in the Saudi market, but many of the corporations in India are small or medium-sized enterprises that cannot afford that kind of ingestion system.  

Splunk needs to be tweaked in JSON so you can limit what is coming from the endpoints, especially the events. One needs to filter that out so that only certain events are ingested, like login failures, Active Directory changes, password reset requests, privilege modifications, etc. Each Windows machine generates about 310 KB of information per event, but we can tweak that down to about 50 KB.

I have been using Splunk for five years. 

Splunk is stable. We haven't had any downtime or performance issues. 

I rate Splunk support 10 out of 10. Splunk has lots of training materials online where our engineers can learn at their own pace. The courses are easy to understand and use simple language. You don't need to learn Java queries. The main reason we rejected QRadar was the fact that it is such a closed solution. If you want to learn something, you have to contact IBM support and request the materials. 

Positive

I have worked with ArcSight, and Palo Alto has a good SIEM solution. ArcSight's UI has some drawbacks, whereas Splunk is easier to integrate and implement. ArcSight's interface didn't impress me. I didn't like the way you have to write queries. It was a tedious solution to use, and it was not pleasing to the eyes. The charts and reporting were not visually appealing. 

ArcSight was also a costly solution, but the main reason I wanted to switch to Splunk was that it was easier to integrate. It has a drag-and-drop interface, so you don't need to know SQL or Java to construct a query on Splunk. The resolution time is about the same, but it took longer to discover the issue with ArcSight. Our previous solution took about an hour or more, but Splunk can do it within a few minutes or an hour at most. 

Splunk can be an expensive solution. It all depends on how we configure the alerts and the events from the endpoints. You can save some money if you do that correctly. If not, it becomes an expensive solution.

If you don't have the money, you can go for an open-source solution like RedELK, which is based on Elasticsearch. It's cheaper, but you have a lot of support issues. There are no security upgrades. Those are not well supported. If somebody has a basic understanding of the technology and the necessary budget, I would say stick with Splunk. Its ease of use is attractive to an engineer.

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of 10. There's always room for improvement. 

I am currently using Splunk Enterprise Security to gather various infrastructure metrics. This includes data from SQL databases, Oracle databases, applications, and APIs. All of this data is collected and sent to a Kafka stream, using a connector to feed it into Splunk. My responsibility is to analyze this data to meet observability requirements. For example, I need to visualize the data from Oracle databases and other applications to identify issues. Depending on the metrics, I aim to pinpoint servers that may be experiencing problems, such as high CPU usage, disk issues, or memory overload. By analyzing the Splunk dashboard, I can quickly identify the problematic server.

I am focused on creating a Splunk dashboard that allows users to easily identify issues at a glance. This will enable users or operations teams to promptly address any server problems. My work also involves using Excel queries and other tools to enhance this process.

I am also working on anomaly detection for one of the services we have, but that is just beginning. We have just started with the anomaly detection part where machine learning can be utilized, but it is still in POC work.

The best feature I've seen is the ability to easily change the query based on the dashboard or based on the chart we have to create, allowing any value or metric we want to add to that particular chart while keeping the rest of the dashboard settings intact. However, it's worth noting that Splunk Enterprise Security does not accommodate data from various products as Tableau does because Splunk Enterprise Security is primarily focused on infrastructure and application metrics.

Last week, while I was creating a dashboard, I encountered a feature known as cascading filters. This feature allows one filter's input to depend on another filter. For example, if you select two filters, such as Asia and Europe, the country filter should update to include the countries from both continents. However, achieving this in the dashboard was not directly possible due to certain limitations of Splunk XML, particularly in the simple dashboard I'm using. While cascading filters can be implemented in the advanced Splunk Dashboard Studio, the XML option has its constraints. I found some online resources suggesting the use of advanced JavaScript or lookup files to work around these limitations. However, relying on advanced JavaScript may not be feasible for users without experience in that area, and utilizing lookup files isn't practical at this stage of the project.

The optimization of filters, which is easily achievable in software like Tableau, is not as straightforward in Splunk XML. The client expressed a requirement for this functionality, and unfortunately, we currently need to either use lookup files, delve into advanced JavaScript or XML, or create a new dashboard using the Dashboard Studio, which is the advanced version of Splunk.

I have been working with Splunk Enterprise Security for three months since I recently joined the Wipro organization and got enrolled in this project where they utilize Splunk Enterprise Security. 

Splunk Enterprise Security was already implemented when I started working at my current company. I got onboarded to the project where they wanted data analysis skills, and they selected me because I had previous skills in Tableau for visualization purposes, and they needed someone who could visualize infrastructure metrics. They brought me into their project as a Splunk Enterprise Security observability analyst.

Splunk Enterprise Security is quite stable, and I have never experienced a breakdown with it. Sometimes, I only need to refresh the dashboard or refresh the URL from the browser, and everything resets. In terms of stability, everything we update in UAT or development reflects quickly, and I haven't encountered significant issues with the stability of Splunk Enterprise Security.

I can rate Splunk Enterprise Security a seven out of ten in terms of scalability because it is purposefully designed for logs and metrics.

I haven't had discussions with technical support for Splunk Enterprise Security as I've never needed to escalate issues. There is a separate team for Splunk Enterprise Security administration on the project, but I've had very little direct interaction with them.

I referred to documents and guides that were included in the project guidelines. Additionally, for creating dashboards, I primarily used YouTube videos as reference.

Neutral

I was a data analyst in my previous organization where I utilized Tableau, so I am familiar with its benefits and can differentiate between the capabilities of both UIs. Splunk Enterprise Security is limited to metrics, traces, and logs data, whereas Tableau can handle any kind of data. This leads to a similar brainstorming process for various visualization needs. When it comes to Tableau and the healthcare industry, we encounter different kinds of data related to aspects such as insurance, patient information, and diseases. If we look at cloud products, we find that there are various offerings associated with the cloud. The dashboards created for these products are designed based on cloud data. For example, in the automotive industry, we observe a different approach. In Splunk Enterprise Security, we tend to focus on a single type of data. In contrast, Tableau, Power BI, and other tools allow us to utilize various types of data to address different types of problems more effectively.

Splunk Enterprise Security is much more feasible as it is directly connected within the cloud servers, and whatever charts or dashboards we have to create can be easily tracked and created compared to Tableau. Some useful features from Tableau, such as cascading filters, are not available in the Splunk XML dashboards. In Splunk Enterprise Security, we use two types of dashboards: Dashboard Studio and simple XML Studio, with some limitations in the simple XML dashboard.

My team has used the risk-based alerting feature of Splunk Enterprise Security. We recently discussed the alerting system concerning particular servers that can be triggered after assessing the risk, so that particular email or any generated data, charts, or everything associated, could be directly sent to the respective POCs. It will help in prioritizing security incidents for my team because there is another team utilizing this feature, allowing people to recognize which data or server is experiencing problematic issues, which helps enhance server inspection without always referencing the dashboard. Every morning, at a selected time based on the time zone, individuals can identify which server has a problem.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a six out of ten.

The use cases depend on how you want detections to be set up. For example, you can have specific use cases for Office 365 alerts, Carbon Black, or more extensively towards MITRE ATT&CK framework. You can enable different analysis stories and alerts based on these use cases. You can individually go ahead and enable them. 

It is really important that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment because there are multiple levels of hierarchy within an organization. 

We need easy visibility starting from L0 analysts to the SOC manager and director. So, if it is easily visible, it makes the operations easy to teach the basic analyst or also to show the upper management what we have in the current scenario or how an investigation is going on. Visibility is very important.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data. We have different teams approaching us to use Splunk, ingest their logs, and aggregate their logs.

The system helped us reduce our alert volume mostly because a lot of false positives had been fine-tuned. That was my last two months of work consolidated. I had to go in, check on all the alerts, see what was using a huge spike in alerts, and make sure the false positives were reduced and the alerts had come down. 

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. It makes investigations much easier. With more information and the right applications, I break down the investigation in such a way that I can build a timeline. Once I have a timeline, I can build a story around it and make a report around it. Splunk definitely has helped a lot.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped reduce our mean time to resolve. Using the identity investigator and asset investigator applications definitely reduces the meantime for an investigation. I can see all the authentication logs, changes made, and threat IDs by simply inputting a username or asset name. It reduces investigation time by about 60 to 75%.

We currently use it for our security team. The next step is to pitch it to different teams and get it integrated for them as well.

The most valuable features include the incident review and Dashboard Studio. My job involves building dashboards, so it's easy to visualize and explain the environment using Dashboard Studio. 

Incident review with my SOC job helps me check all the incidents and alerts coming in.

Having analysts put their notes directly within the investigation feature in the incident review would be beneficial. To make notes. 

We have to go to multiple tabs for each dashboard, for each incident, or each application within Splunk, so if there is a way to consolidate all the tabs or everything into one app for that particular organization where an analyst could just click on that and everything is there. That would be a really good feature.  

I've been using Splunk for about five years now. I started at my previous job right after my master's. I was working for Santander Bank, where I used Splunk extensively for three years. I was a SOC analyst there.

Now at the current company, I've been here for about a year, so I've been using it here as well.

Cisco being Cisco, just bought Splunk. I would give it some more time to see how things go. 

Prior to Splunk's acquisition by Cisco, Splunk was really good. 

Overall, the customer service and support were very good. At times, we had difficulties reaching out for your questions but most of the time, they were answered. Due to the time constraints, we had just 100 hours working with the consultant. So some things kind of took some time with that.

Positive

When I joined this current company, they had Rapid7. It was horrendous and horrible. It was not easy to use. I'm kind of partial to Splunk because I started off with Splunk, so, we switched. 

I joined last July and asked my manager about the current solutions. He was not happy with how Rapid7 was working either. We evaluated different vendors, including Microsoft Defender and Sentinel. My preference for Splunk played a role in our decision.

We had a consultant for the integration process. They were very helpful. We had a consultant named Sayed who guided us through the process. They provided step-by-step instructions (kinda baby steps), walked us through analytics and restoring, and different aspects of Splunk. It was a really helpful experience.

It's only been about two and a half to three months. It's still fairly new to our environment. I would give it three to four more months before assessing ROI.

We evaluated Sentinel, Palo Alto, and Splunk, along with Rapid7, which was already in the environment. So, we evaluated these four options. 

Splunk gave us the opportunity to take in or put in the logs whatever we wanted and plug in different applications, whichever we wanted to have the visibility. 

We didn't have that flexibility with Palo Alto and Sentinel. We didn't have the investigation ease with the others; the investigation ease within Splunk is very easy. 

I could build an SQL query within a minute, or I could just open up different documents to have it right there. But if I go to Palo Alto, it's not there. 

Defender was quite a good competition. Like Sentinel, it was a good competition, but Splunk stopped where the investigation time was considerably less compared to Sentinel.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten because we haven't integrated a lot of applications like SOAR and stuff. Once we have everything in place, it might be a ten. But right now, I would go with a nine.