Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

We typically use it for centralized log management and SIEM functionality.

I am using the most recent version of it.

As per government requirements, a lot of government sites have to have the active monitoring of logs. So, we use their security appliance add-on that essentially combs through the log. It pre-filters and brings out the critical events so that you can focus on those instead of having to create your own searches and whatnot. It helps simplify the process of monitoring security events in the logs for people.

The flexibility of the search capability is most valuable. You can use it for more than just a basic log aggregator. It is powerful in that regard.

It is a good product, but the Achilles heel for a lot of organizations is the cost model for it because it gets expensive. That's because the model is based on how much data it processes a day, which can be prohibitive, especially if you have a lot of data. A lot of customers may not be ready for the sticker shock on how to fully leverage the product. I realized that the reason for that is that when it was originally designed, it was kind of like a big data modeling application. If they want to have a bigger customer base, they can come out with subsets of their product that are focused on specific things and have different pricing models. It may help with the cost.

To actively use the interface, you have to be able to speak their language. You really need to have Splunk training to use the tool. Integrations are not that bad, but once you get into that developer mindset and you understand the programming query language, then you're pretty flexible in making it work with other products. It could be daunting if you don't have the training. It is akin to being thrown and asked to go write a Python script when you don't know any of the Python language or PowerShell. If you don't know how to form the queries, the words, or the syntax, it can be a hurdle if you're looking everything up.

I have been using Splunk for about seven years.

It has been very stable. It is pretty rock solid.

It is as scalable as you can afford. We have a pretty small user base of 75 users, and it is mostly data center administration staff, application administrators, and security people. It is more of an in-house solution than a customer-facing solution.

Our usage is moderate. We're okay right now. We primarily use it as a SIEM and log aggregator. We could use it for other things, but the cost is what is preventing us from that at this point.

We've had a few calls, and they're very responsive.

We were using an assist log backend with Rsync and Kiwi prior to that. It was more of a co-solution than a cobbled-together solution. Splunk was a big improvement. The main reason for going for it was just the rate at which we were growing. We needed to have something that was more scalable than what we had before.

It was pretty straightforward as compared to most applications. It had the ability to auto-deploy agents to end devices. Splunk infrastructure itself wasn't difficult to deploy or set up. They package that process, and it is pretty well-rounded. They even offer a jumpstart install service to help get it off the ground when you buy in, and those components work really well together.

It was all done within a day. Some of the endpoints took a little bit longer, but the basic install was done in the day.

We used packaged professional services from a partner of Splunk. Our experience with them was very good.

In terms of maintenance, it is pretty simple. There are fewer patches than there would be for supporting a Windows device. There is not much labor to maintain it.

It can be cost-prohibitive when you start to scale and have terabytes of data. Its cost model is based on how much data it processes a day. If they're able to create scaled-down niche or custom package offerings, it may help with the cost. Instead of the full-blown features, if they can narrow the scope where it can only be used for a specific purpose, it would kind of create that market for the product, and it may help with the costing. When you start using it as a central aggregator and you're pumping tons of logs at it, pretty soon, you'll start hitting your cap on what it can process a day. Once you've got that, you're kind of defeating the purpose because you're going to have to scale back.

They're kind of pushing everybody away from perpetual licensing into subscription-based models, which a lot of companies are doing too, but in most environments that I've been in, they prefer to go the perpetual license and then just pay maintenance on top of it. That's because it's easier for them to forecast the big expense up front.

I would advise definitely taking advantage of their professional services and making sure that the administrators and whoever is going to be using the tool go through the training. The cost for the training, which depends on if you're commercial or government, is not that much, and there is a definite value there because if you're trying to learn it on your own with a book, it is going to take forever.

I would rate Splunk a seven out of 10. 

It's the mainstay of our monitoring solutions that we have for auto-logging, et cetera, for our enterprise solution.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to capture the different data streams. We also appreciate the reporting in that aspect of Splunk. If we can grow now, with any security arena, it's going to be proactive, not reactive. It allows us to digest the information, the data, the different data streams, so we can make decisions based upon information that we receive, and it is pretty robust.

The configuration could be better.

We would like to see improved pricing, however, I'm kind of out of that arena. I make suggestions based upon the flexibility with which we serve our customer base, which is millions of our veterans. I would say that if someone was not familiar with it, one of the things that I've heard is that it's kind of hard for them to understand the whole thing. Splunk is just one piece to the puzzle. It's not the whole puzzle. It's kind of not the solution's fault, in that sense. That said, if it could be more accessible to people with different skillsets, that would be ideal.

We'd like to see reporting where there's a way that we can get a higher description without being too technical, for example, where it's kind of more of an executive-level of technical.

I've personally been using the solution for over ten years. At this point, it's been more than a decade. I've used it for a while now. 

We're partners and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Splunk.

We use the latest version. I'm not hands-on. I'm called the architect, however, we do use the latest version as that's a part of our configuration management framework, that all of our applications - especially in security - are up-to-date with the latest and greatest updates, bells, and whistles. We use both public and private clouds.

In terms of creating the solution, for what we do from an enterprise standpoint, everything from monitoring to data capture to reporting, we would rate it at a nine out of ten.

Since we have an IT services company, we have been using Splunk for the deployment to the customer locations as well. Sometimes the customer will come back to us and say that we need to have a SIEM tool, and when we do the benchmarking, we'll do a couple of deployments on the Splunk side and at the customer's locations as well.

As an example use case, we deployed Splunk to a banking institution a few years ago. There the use case was basically this: the customer wanted to set up a security operation center, and they wanted to have a pretty large deployment in terms of the number of endpoints and number of switches and routers. There were many regional branch offices and they have data centers and therefore, many assets in terms of endpoints. They had 30% of their assets are running on the cloud and they needed a complete solution from an incident monitoring and management perspective. That's why we deployed Splunk. 

They wanted to reduce the MTTR, and meantime resolution, and maintain detection. They didn't want to add more SOC analysts into their SOC as the organization scaled up. They have a plan to scale from 5,000 endpoints into 15-20,000 endpoints. They're very particular about deploying the SOC operation center.

Splunk has since acquired Phantom as a SOAR platform. Therefore, we have tried to manage the security automation using Phantom with the help of Splunk deployments. It helps us meet the customer's requirements.

In terms of support, we're able to get the right support at the right time. If there's a break or an appliance issue, they're are on top of it.

This is very important during large-scale deployments. It's not easy to address product-related issues or appliance-related issues, and the number of collectors or number of logs that come into the collector, and managing the collectors across the branch offices, across the corporate offices, etc. It is a cumbersome process for us. That's why it's integral that we get the right support at the right time - and they make this happen.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the dashboard. It's very intuitive. 

The reporting is excellent. The team and the SOC analyst are able to easily track the alerts and the correlation is very good compared to other SIEM tools. 

There are a lot of competitive products that are doing better than what Splunk is doing on the analytics side.

The automation could be better. Typically, the issue that we face is that it has to go to the analytics engine, then goes to the automation engine, basically. Therefore, if there are no proper analytics, the SOAR module is going to be overloaded, and we are not able to get the expected result out from the SOAR module. If they improve the analytics, I think they'll be able to solve these issues very quickly.

The playbooks which they create and provide to premium users can improve a lot. They have to create a common platform wherein the end-customers like us can choose the playbooks, and automation playbooks readily available.

In terms of integration with the third-party tools, what we are seeing is that it's very limited compared to the competitive products. Competitive products have a lot of connectors and APIs that they have developed, and that's where the cloud integration, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud integration comes in. There are a lot of limitations to this product compared to other products.

In terms of Splunk, I've been working on it for more than three years in the current company. Prior to that, I worked with it at another company as well. In total, I have been using Splunk for close to six or seven years.

The solution is stable, however, sometimes in some of the collectors, we are facing a lot of issues. That said, overall, if you rate it from one to five, I would say in terms of stability, it will stand at a three. 

The scalability is perfectly fine. It's very awesome compared to all the other tools, as easily we can integrate with the log forwarding modules and the collector management appliances or modules. That aspect won't be a problem. 

If you look at the SIEM as a market today, Splunk is expensive compared to other competitive products. I'm also into the SIEM evaluation in my current role. I've seen that there are many tools are coming up in the last one and half years. I have also seen many other mature tools that are available now. If you compare next-gen SIEM tools compared to the Splunk, it's expensive. Therefore, it's possible we may not use this in the future or expand on current usage.

In terms of technical support, we don't have any issues, as the professional services which they have extended to us are very, very good. We're able to manage many of the critical issues with their support. I'd say we are definitely satisfied with the level of service provided.

In terms of deployment, it's not so complex compared to the competitive products, however, we will be able to manage that deployment. We don't feel there's any problem on the deployment side. In that sense, I don't think deployment is a complex one when somebody going for Splunk as a tool.

How long it takes to deploy the solution depends on the size of the deployment, basically. Even a large deployment won't take more than a week. When I say deployment, I'm considering all the log collection, log management, and the curation of the incidents, and how incidents are created and routed properly according to prioritization. 

In terms of ROI, for example, if you look at one of our customers today, they are managing close to 100 million events per day. If you look at a traditional SIEM with 100 million events, they need to manage this environment with at least 25 to 30 people. That's 30 security analysts that have to be there. However, when Splunk was deployed, a lot of automation was added on top of it, and today we are managing the same environment with Splunk with close to 15 people. In that sense, if you look at it that way, the ROI is between 30-40%.

In terms of a comparison with the rest of the competition, the licensing cost would be, I would say, 30% higher than most.

Before choosing Splunk, we have evaluated QRadar and LogRhythm. QRadar is much more expensive. LogRhythm lacked reporting.

We ended up choosing Splunk due to the pricing and the reporting features. It also had the kind of scalability that was required. We felt it would help us in terms of positioning from both a cost perspective and an incident alert perspective.

We're partners. We have a business relationship with Splunk.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I'd advise potential new users to ensure they do proper sizing before deploying the product. If it's a very large deployment, the number of endpoints will be quite sizeable. You need to figure out the correct number of endpoints as well as endpoint devices, switches, routers, etc.

It's also a good idea to look at use cases. Splunk is very strong in some use cases. It's important to look into deployment scenarios and check out the use cases before deploying anything.

My biggest takeaway after working with the solution is that the environment is very important. You need to be clear about the problem you are addressing and it takes a lot of planning at the outset.

When configuring our use cases and describing the overall purpose of Splunk Enterprise Security, I would focus on the main use cases that I encountered with this tool.

The ease of use and building queries, specifically SQL queries, is notably beneficial as it is easy to build, and the data model itself is very simple. The advanced correlation capabilities are very useful for identifying patterns or malicious activity of users.

I have worked with Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

I have contacted the Splunk Enterprise Security support team once, but mainly the other team responsible for onboarding contacted them.

I am preparing my master's degree and conducting this review for completing it at KFUPM University, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, located in Saudi Arabia, to prepare for my defense. I have experience with blue team tools, specifically Splunk Enterprise Security and some other solutions.

The company name is Cyberani Solutions, and my email is first name dot last name at cyberanisolutions.com. PeerSpot will create an account and email the login credentials, and my feedback will be published and possibly shared with third parties if I choose to not remain anonymous.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight.

I'm a technical support engineer for Cortex XDR at the moment and in my company, we are selling the Cortex XDR solution to other companies. 

I also have experience with Splunk Enterprise Security and CrowdStrike too; we are using those products in my company. For Splunk Enterprise Security, I am using the Enterprise Security module and base Splunk for developing rules.

The deployment server is very good and is one of the best features of Splunk Enterprise Security for me; you can use that deployment server even for distributing any agents, upgrading automatically, and universal forwarders. Its search is very flexible, allowing you to search anything by typing a sentence.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a wonderful solution, however, the background configuration process could be better as the administration process is very complicated. As an analyst rather than a Splunk engineer, some background configurations might be easier.

I'm working with Splunk Enterprise Security for six months, however, I have been using Splunk for one year.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a very stable product; I have never been in trouble with any stability problems if you set it up correctly.

I would give support a seven out of ten as Splunk Enterprise Security's advanced support is very skillful, however, to reach that advanced support, first they send you some beginner-level support that mostly does not solve problems for me. That said, when they escalate it, it completely finds a solution.

Before Splunk Enterprise Security, I didn't use any other solution.

I did not set up the Splunk Enterprise Security; my admin colleagues from another department set it up for me.

I'm just using and revising the rules. I'm a Cortex admin, so I'm involved in the process for Cortex, not for Splunk Enterprise Security.

My company is a partner with Splunk Enterprise Security. As an engineer and layer two security analyst, I'm solving problems with Splunk Enterprise Security, editing rules on customers, reviewing alerts, and developing rules.

I'm not aware of the price of the tool. My company and other departments arange the licensing. 

On Splunk Enterprise Security, we imported from the content library, specifically from the content management page that contains many rules; we are importing rules from there, enabling rules, and editing them. I'm not a deep down administrator of Splunk Enterprise Security, so I'm not arranging the data models. I'm mostly editing the rules.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

My customers subscribe to many different tools, like CrowdStrike. They ingest all that into Splunk and use it as an aggregator to launch their investigations into any threats detected.

The solution has improved our organization by providing a centralized place to start investigations. It allows us to consolidate everything into one place that kicks everything off so we can map it back to at least that Splunk instance.

The solution's most valuable feature is its data modeling. Splunk has data from so many different vendors. Moving all that or normalizing that to the data models allows us to look at one place holistically across all the different inputs.

The one problem Splunk has is writing correlation searches. My analysts are intimidated to write queries to create correlation searches. It would be good if the solution had some kind of copilot to automate or help write correlation searches. Splunk Enterprise Security should include more automation, AI, and machine learning capabilities.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for three to four months.

We haven’t faced any issues with the solution’s stability.

We haven’t faced any scalability issues with Splunk Enterprise Security.

The end-to-end visibility the tool provides is not that big of a deal. They have so many tools that can do that kind of part. Splunk doesn't have to be the one place for total visibility, but at least for visibility when it consolidates on threats.

Splunk has helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data. The tool pretty much consumes everything that we have. Everything from dozens of different vendor products gets ingested into Splunk. Splunk Enterprise Security is just that one central place where everything goes.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations. Something that requires someone to work on it at the beginning of the day would not take more than 15 minutes with Splunk Enterprise Security.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Splunk just acts as an extra presentation layer, and we tried it because of the plugins they have to try and get more logs into the environment.

Splunk would be my choice for the presentation layer because it comes with inbuilt reports and a dashboard that you can customize.

Aside from the 5GB limit on the community version, I believe it is the same as ELK. It's a useful tool, and nothing comes to mind right now.

I haven't found a way for me to create my own plugins and integrate them into Splunk, but this isn't necessarily a limitation; it could simply be a lack of knowledge on my part.

Splunk is a stable solution. I am very happy with the stability of Splunk.

Splunk can be scaled to any environment. The way it's designed, it's cloud-ready, and it has a lot of performance, in-built indexing, and performance tuning options. Splunk is easily scalable.

I am happy to report that I've never needed to contact technical support. The README tutorials and the existing forums provide me with practically everything I need. So far, I haven't had to do so. This should be a testament to the solution.

We broaden the scope of IT governance and IT security.

We look at everything from SIEM to network management to endpoint protection, server protection, database protection, and anything else that can aid in visibility, policy enforcement, and monitoring.

Our organization is using a combination of Splunk and Elasticsearch. We get most of what we need from the ELK suite. ELK Stack is usually the primary focus.

ELK has the same inbuilt reports and dashboards that you can customize, but ELK is better for central logging and log aggregation. Once they've all been aggregated, you'll be able to run any kind of queries and APIs to query the logs on ELK and then use Splunk as a presentation layer for the consumers to use.

Security tools, in my opinion, are business tools and should be used by businesses rather than security engineers. I'm experimenting with a hybrid of the two, in which ELK serves as the engine for central logging and Splunk handles the presentation layer and aggregation of additional third-party logs from tools that might be difficult to integrate into ELK.

I would rate Elasticsearch a ten out of ten.

It's a cloud-ready package. It has the same characteristics as ELK. From a deployment standpoint, I don't have any issues with it. The material is freely accessible to anyone who wishes to use it. There is a virtual machine option. You can get a virtual machine by downloading it. The deployment options are simply numerous, and it is up to the implementer.

It wasn't that difficult for me. There are no complaints from me. The material is present, and there are numerous options for deployment. It's relatively simple to go from zero to viewing data with Splunk. ELK is the same way. It is now up to the implementers and their environment to provide you with more data about it.

They could improve their discounts. I think it's a good solution, and it's gaining a lot of traction, maybe they are recouping their R&D costs, Further reductions would be fantastic, and I believe that more and more people would flock to it.

We provide IT consulting services. Our customers occasionally ask us to assist them in locating specific solutions.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using this solution.

I would say the forums and READMEs provide more than enough information about Splunk. Most people struggle because they move too quickly through the implementation process. As long as you follow the guidelines, particularly the specifications for environment requirements and implementation methodology, these solutions should work out of the box.

Splunk is a very good solution, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

I use Splunk for testing purposes. It is used for school research and to learn how to use Splunk. 

Splunk is mainly used for collecting logs and dashboards.

Splunk provides a free version so you can test it before purchasing.  It's better than IBM, in my opinion, because it's an independent entity. IBM, for example, if you want to use EDR, and other features, you must use the features of other companies, such as ServiceNow and Jira.

I am still exploring the features provided in Splunk. As I have not used it for a long time, I don't have a clear vision of it.

As a student, I'd like to see more labs and things for students to test in order to learn.

Having a trial version or more training on Splunk would be helpful.

There is a free version, but it is insufficient for training and learning because it is a little bit difficult to work with, especially if you are a beginner. It's difficult to improve when you're just starting out with logs and SOC. As a result, we require a longer free version.

Splunk is not used in my company. During my internship, I am being taught how to use it at school.

I have been using Splunk for one month.

I did not have any issues with the stability of Splunk. It was quite stable.

There was technical assistance available. When you require assistance, they provide it, they will respond.

We integrate Jira with QRadar which is helpful.

The initial setup was simple because there is available support and tutorials.

I completed the installation with the help of some friends, in the IT department.

I'm only using the free version for the time being.

The cost is reasonable.

Splunk's costing is a little more difficult. The pricing method is complicated, and the way that costing is calculated in Splunk is a little more difficult.

When compared to QRadar, QRadar, it's simple to pay. 

I did some research for a school project. I needed to compare it to Splunk and a few other tools. As a result, I'm not particularly interested in purchasing them.

I would rate Splunk an eight out of ten.