Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

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.

We use the solution in our SOC to support SOAR. We use its alerting capabilities and integrate them with our SOAR platform. Additionally, we tie it in with cyber threat intelligence, cyber threat hunting, and adversary emulation tools to identify gaps in our environment and alert us to notable events.

The tool drastically reduces SOC overhead. Its integration with our tool suite is great and helps us correlate events. The solution is also a lot faster than our standalone instances. 

Splunk Enterprise Security helps address our customers' missions. We want to ensure that our environment is secure and safe and detects anomalies and threat actors as soon as possible. 

The solution helps my organization's ability to ingest and normalize data. It has also improved resilience.  

Enterprise Security is expensive. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

Splunk Enterprise Security is very stable. 

The tool is very scalable. We can deploy agents seamlessly and get reports. 

We have had good success with customer support. We haven't had any issues contacting them and getting problems resolved. 

Splunk Enterprise Security's deployment is hit or miss. Recently, we got UBA. We were able to spin up an environment easily with Terraform. However, the recent upgrade caused many hiccups and slowdowns. We are working with support to resolve them. Some legacy code is choking the system and slowing us. 

We do market evaluation and continuous research every year to check for alternatives to our security tools. 

It seems like the tool is improving. It incorporates AI into the platform to streamline event identification processes. 

Splunk Enterprise Security does a good job. However, we need many analysts to correlate searches and populate data models, and some overheads are needed in any SOC environment. 

We have a lot of data to process from different sources. However, we have only limited data analysts. It takes time to find malicious threats or what we seek. 

No specific metrics are tracked, but we report this to our leadership weekly, focusing on continuous improvement. Regarding reducing the mean time to resolve, especially with our SOAR integration, we can swiftly address major issues by leveraging alerts to initiate tickets. This allows us to notify the teams and address issues immediately. 

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten. I don't think there is another alternative with similar capabilities. 

We use the product to analyze security anomalies and research specific threats that we get on our network.

The solution has made us more secure. It has given us the ability to address threats faster, with greater accuracy.

The availability of the data and the fact that we're able to collect a large amount of data into the system and analyze it is valuable to us. The product’s speed and availability make it really useful for us. I'm excited about the additional enhancements to the machine learning toolkit. To be able to use it more is exciting to me.

My organization needs more people to learn how to use the solution effectively. It takes time to train people.

I have been using the solution for six years.

I have never seen any issues with the tool’s stability.

Considering how much we have in place, I would assume that the solution’s scalability is pretty strong.

I haven't had to go to Splunk directly for many things. Communicating with our success managers has been very positive.

Positive

We need to improve our implementation. We're a pretty large customer of Splunk, so I think we do have a lot of resources available. Splunk has really good courses and availability. We need to get more people to be more familiar with the tool. The solution has helped us reduce our mean time to resolve. It really works well for us, and it helps us to look at our data more effectively.

Splunk has helped improve our organization’s business resilience. It's not just used for security. We have big use for it. It has definitely helped us prevent problems from occurring and identify them when they do. Splunk’s ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real time is very strong. It works as well as we use it. There's a lot of value within the tool. It can be very powerful if used properly and if people are knowledgeable about it.

Splunk has a strong ability to provide business resiliency by empowering staff. I've been using it for as long as I've been with this organization. Compared to other solutions, Splunk is really strong.

I have seen time to value using this solution. I love using it. It’s a great tool. I cannot compare Splunk to other tools because I've been using it for as long as I've been with my current organization. In my previous organization, we didn't have big data, so we really didn't need the product. I am a consumer of the solution from a security perspective.

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

Our primary use case is for cyber security, tracking logs, and incident response.

I haven't had the chance to properly sink my teeth into Enterprise Security but so far I like that they added the MITRE ATT&CK features. 

This feature helps us know how to plan when we have an incident, know where to look, what to look for, and aspects like that. 

The MITRE ATT&CK planning is valuable. When we see those incidents and those logs, having the information right there speeds up the process a bit.

We did not have a SIEM at the time, so we added Enterprise Security as our SIEM. We're hoping to learn more about it and grow as we progress.

They wanted us to do basic training, which was offered to our organization for free. That was great. However, ours is a cybersecurity focus. The training was mostly sales-focused, like how to monitor your sales. It was hard to then come back from doing the training and try to switch it to a cybersecurity focus because all the training we did was sales oriented. The basic training didn't really touch on any kind of cybersecurity use cases or anything like that. That would have been great to see in the training.

We upgraded to Enterprise Security a year ago but have been using general Splunk for longer. 

Stability-wise, despite these issues, it's been solid. I haven't had any issues with access to it or anything like that. The only issue we did have was with the engineer. After informing him of those issues, he went back and tweaked them, and then everything worked fine. 

It seems pretty scalable. Our network isn't extremely large, so I don't think scalability will be an issue in our case, but I definitely see the opportunity to scale if needed.

We have around 8,000 devices, so it's a fairly small network. It's across several different networks.

I have not used support yet mainly because I haven't delved into it as much because of the issues with our initial integration with our engineer not being so trained. 

We have different contractors and they have other solutions. Some of those solutions included Elastic. We want to use Splunk and our contractors want to use Elastic. We're hoping .conf23 will broaden our imagination, so we'll have more to bring back and push towards just using Splunk only.

I have not used Elastic myself. It does sound like it does a lot. There's a lot that Splunk offers that we haven't actually used. I want to play with Mission Control. We only use Enterprise Security but I do want Mission Control where everything is in one centralized application where you don't have to jump to different applications. 

I would love to get Mission Control.

My engineer had a little bit of an issue with it but it was because of his own lack of training. We were pushed to hurry up and get a SIEM. He did the best he could. I let him know what wasn't working, and then he would try to fix what he could on the backend so it could work. He was in talks with Splunk to fix those issues. The results are coming back a bit better, but I think that there is still room for improvement.

I was not involved with the setup. I came in afterward. One of our guys here was the one that was in the initial integration of Splunk. We ended up with Splunk as our main SIEM. I've never had any issues with it and I enjoyed it. 

We will see cost efficiencies mainly just from saving time and the shortened time and response to those incidents that we see. The fact that everything's organized in one application, we should see a bit of an increase in efficiency.

I do see the possibility and the opportunity to increase the meantime to resolution by a lot. We use several different applications to monitor logs. We have the vision. 

I've seen some of the updates and changes like Splunk AI and Splunk Vision Control that look nice. I didn't manage to get on some of the hands-on, which would have been lovely. I would like to get more ideas on how we can integrate Splunk into our networks. 

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. I see the opportunity and I'm hoping with our engineer that we can get to where we can make the best use of Splunk. It really seems great. A lot of our staff here were all ready to use it. We're just hoping our engineer can get to the place where we can actually make use of it. 

The biggest value I get from attending a Splunk conference is being able to see the updates, changes, the features they're adding, the Splunk AI, and Splunk Vision Control. That's been nice. I am looking forward to some of the sessions. I want to get more ideas on how we can integrate Splunk into our networks and things like that, especially focusing on cybersecurity. I would also like to see some of the stock sessions because it's a brand new stock. We're trying to stand it up. Seeing how they're using it for stocks would be great.

Enterprise Security has reduced our mean time to detection to results. It used to take 25 to 30 minutes and now it's down to less than ten minutes. 

Our customer has been far more satisfied with our incident response and remediation since we adopted Splunk several years ago.

Our time to value was within a few weeks to a month.

The most valuable feature is the incident dashboard, and the extensive use of correlation searches, which isn't available with a standard Splunk search package. This feature is important to me because it enables SOC analysts to do their job more efficiently and be able to investigate or mediate incidents at a faster pace.

Another benefit is the expansion of the use of ITSI, SOAR, and now Mission Control being able to holistically monitor an environment with one tool. Also with Mission Control, we have the ability to have one interface.

It's very easy to monitor a single cloud with ES solutions. I've worked with several other SIEM tools before and Splunk does it better.

Splunk's ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real time is good. They do it better than other tools.

I am looking forward to their expansion of the use of AI. Using AI in the user interface will go a long way because one of the challenges in my organization is getting other people to use Splunk. A lot of people are averse to using new tools so if they make it even more user-friendly than it already is, I think that could go a long way.

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

Stability is excellent. It is the most stable SIEM solution I've worked with.

Scalability is excellent. If you need to add more capacity, you can add more indexes, and more search heads as you need. The environment stays stable as you're doing it if you do it the right way. 

My environment is about nine indexes, four search heads, and about 800 GBs a day.

Their support is excellent. Every case I ever had to put in has been handled and resolved in a matter that I would hope for many support tickets.

I would rate them a ten out of ten because they are much more responsive than a lot of other vendors I've worked with.

Positive

There are mostly pros when comparing Splunk to its competitors because it collects data and analyzes it. It analyzes data better and in a more detailed, documented, and organized fashion than any other SIEM that I've worked with.

I have worked with Microsoft Sentinel and ArcSight.

I was involved in the initial setup with the help of their professional services. It was complex at first because my colleagues and I did not know the application that well. There was definitely a learning curve but once we started to understand how to design it the proper way and how to manage it the proper way which made things a lot easier.

It's more expensive than the other tools but it's worth it. Every penny is worth it. They do analytics better. They do security investigations better. They do everything better.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a ten out of ten. I have worked with other SIEM solutions before and Splunk is the best one.

The biggest value I get out of attending a Splunk conference is getting to network with other people within my same account under my same account manager. I appreciate the ability to go to sessions about different support products that my organization doesn't use and try to help myself understand how some of these tools are used and how I could encourage my organization to use them.

Our primary use case is for security audit log collection correlation. We wanted something that the security team could focus on versus going directly into our enterprise. We had some initial use cases to supplement our IT ops security into one product. We had a SIEM but not one that was as customizable as Splunk Enterprise Security.

The out-of-the-box capabilities that Enterprise Security offers were very helpful. We're not using it anymore because it was almost overkill. We have shifted to go back to just the core functionality. We were inundated with the amount of alerts and alarms that we could get out of it. It is also a resource hog and we didn't have the resources to support it on-prem so we're taking it offline now.

We saw the granularity that we could get from Splunk far exceeded what we already had. We had the ability to have our security team really focus on the platform and stay within the platform, but they could correlate with a variety of other stakeholders, and our stakeholders were growing. So we tried to get ahead of that and filter it in to create customizable KPIs for those user groups versus having a one-size-fits-all approach. That unique was very helpful for us to expand upon. The driving force is resources, and we were lacking those.

We use it to monitor multiple clouds. We weren't leveraging it for all of our clouds, but we have a presence in GCP, AWS, and Azure. The unity and uniformity across all of it would have been great but at that stage, we were only using it for on-prem coverage. We would like to go ahead and understand how we can implement it as a cloud solution as we are increasing our daily footprint too. We weren't really prepared to understand the workflows we already had in the CSPs or the new integrations of data lakes at a warehouse that were and are still being built out to get Enterprise Security to function off of that too. We hadn't gotten to that stage.

A lot of what we were doing was done manually in terms of vulnerability and remediation and is still being done manually now. Evolving to a stage where the alerts weren't inundating our customers and getting familiar with the product would have helped us perhaps get a bit more functionality and usability out of it. We are seeing some value out of Enterprise Security and think we can get similar results elsewhere. I think that down the road, as our understanding gets better of how we want framework requirements, Enterprise Security could come back into the picture.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for around twelve months.

Stability had its drawbacks because of how much it consumes. We had to justify whether or not it was worth keeping it up. The decision was to not keep up with it.

We are only on-prem so we do manual scaling. We don't have the elasticity that we would have in the cloud which limited us. Justifiably, in order to scale up the platform, we would have to go through procurements and more hardware, which was not an option. So we were limited, and we knew that. We had done pilots and buildout but a hardware refresh cycle was coming up, we had to justify whether or not it was in the cards.

I've been working with Splunk for several years now, and I've always found them very responsive and supportive in a variety of technologies around core functionality like Enterprise Security and ITSI. 

I would rate them an eight out of ten. They have a strong team through and through from the pre-presales all the way through architectural changes and shifts that we need to do to address the customer.

Positive

We've had numerous implementations of SIEM solutions over the years. Splunk offered a lot of capabilities on top of some of our old antiquated Sentinel and Azure. We had many other products before we pursued Enterprise Security. But we weren't in a position to really go down the Enterprise Security route because we hadn't quite fleshed out what our end goal was.

We're still in the evaluation stages. Looking at Enterprise Security, given the fact that we already have an investment in Splunk, it makes sense. We would like to see it grow beyond just Enterprise Security to more of not just observability, but pro actions to utilize the source of that nature. 

We had great success potentially going into a SOAR from Enterprise Security. We hadn't quite evolved to that point yet. At this stage, it's just not really in our pipeline to pursue Enterprise Security until we get a better understanding of our requirements.

Refining those playbooks and so forth also is going to take time. We have customers who have categorically unique requirements. From a security standpoint, one group's security requirements are going to be different from some of the other teams that we have. We are trying to find that uniformity across the board. We may have to entertain multiple security solutions to meet their needs.

My role was to support a lot of the backend and the configuration of the platform as it was being established.

The level of difficulty was on par with the Splunk Enterprise core. My team was involved with a lot of the provisioning from the virtual environment and on-prem to support it. It wasn't overly complicated. Once it was up it took a lot of resources. Evaluating and seeing whether or not we could actually move it to the cloud when the core functionality still existed on-prem, we weren't willing to split them at this stage.

We would almost always have Splunk support through the deployment and configuration stages of it. It was always solid. Once we had the platform up and running, we had to consider general operations and maintenance. While the Splunk team was great and the resources are available, there is a finite amount of resources on-site.

Splunk is not cheap. That's definitely a consideration as we look at other products.

We haven't seen much time to value using the solution system but it wasn't necessarily a fault of the product. It was the cycles to maintain it and support it, to make sure it's growing correctly. We hadn't gotten to that stage. Our ROI and TCO, given the fact that its footprint is being looked at because of what it takes to maintain it in terms of resources. We have the core platform, and then we have a growing license. We're looking at how we can efficiently use Enterprise Security. It's just not there at this point.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten. I think the rating has the potential to be higher. If we had time to flesh it out and vet some of the core capabilities of Enterprise Security and how it could benefit us over the core. Getting to that stage requires a lot more customer engagement on our side that we weren't really prepared to do because of budgetary constraints, hardware refresh cycles, and so forth. Overall, we dropped the product not necessarily because of a lack of capability, it was more along the lines that the timing wasn't appropriate for our security teams.

The biggest value I get from attending a Splunk conference is knowledge transfer. I work in the public so it's valuable having a lot of conversations with fellow colleagues who are in the public sector and hearing their hurdles. We don't want to reinvent the wheel every time, and we don't want to hit obstacles that could have been lessons learned. The conference is a really good opportunity to see what's new, what's out there, and how it can blend in with our current architecture and designs. It also helps to understand what's not going to work to be able to get ahead of it before questions come up. We can properly equip our customers and answer their questions. The Splunk conference is a good brain dump.

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.

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.