Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

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.

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.

We will have clients that generate events through our platform and wish to export those events as data points to Splunk.

The solution improves our customers' integrations. They really want insights into what their users are doing. They want to be alerted to anomalies, general pain points, or popular areas in the integration to understand what's working and what's not.

The metrics and trends that Splunk Enterprise Security generates using all the data points we send allow customers to understand better what their users are doing.

Splunk Enterprise Security should provide a better and richer integration. It has a regimented integration, where we had to build a Python library. It was a very tough way to integrate officially and get into the marketplace. We'd like to see more options so that we can better send data over to the Splunk platform.

The requirements of building the integration had to be a very specific and certain way to get onto your marketplace. Once it's there, it's fine, but it took a little effort to get it exactly that way. That's not as maintainable as we like, so we'd rather that be a more robust integration.

We've had an integration available for the better part of three or four years.

The solution provides good stability.

We haven’t seen any issues with the solution’s scalability.

We mostly interacted with the marketplace community. Although our support experience was not great, the issue was straightforward.

Our customers have seen a return on investment with the solution. We have seen customer satisfaction as it was a highly sought-after integration, and they're happy now that it exists.

The end-to-end visibility that the solution provides into our environment is incredibly important to our organization. We like to see it as the total answer. Any data point can be picked up, and you can really build anything you need from the integration. It's incredibly valuable with the data that it's generating. What the tool provides once integrated is highly valuable and sufficient for us.

Finding any security event across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments with Splunk Enterprise Security has been incredibly easy. Using the rest of the Splunk platform, you can trigger whatever you need off the data coming in through the integration.

The solution has helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data. It also generates more customer activities so that there's a stickier relationship.

The Splunk integration triggers the necessary events so that downstream alerting isn't necessary.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations. It's a great direct integration so that our customers can react quickly when necessary.

In principle, the solution has helped reduce our mean time to resolve, but not necessarily data points that we see as the integrator.

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

We employed Splunk Enterprise Security for one of our projects. Integrating it into our environment involved opening network ports and making necessary connections.

We had the opportunity to assess visibility in various environments, including on-premises. On-premises visibility has proven to be both satisfactory and advantageous.

We use the threat intelligence management feature. 

We have been considering implementing certain frameworks, such as MITRE ATT&CK or threat topology features.

It contributes value by enhancing resilience, crucial for adopting a Security Information and Event Management solution. Site resilience is imperative for our organization, meeting a key security requirement.

I have been working with it for three years.

It provides good scalability capabilities.

The technical support is among the best in the market. While we didn't have extensive interactions with the support team, we are satisfied with it. It offers support services locally in my country. I would rate it ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward.

The integration and initial setup of Splunk were managed with the assistance of local support.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

The features are fine; they aren't exceptional in any way.

We are using Microsoft 365 and we're using the Exchange Mail Service. It's good for monitoring that in particular. 

The visibility we get has been good. 

Inside threat detection capabilities are good. 

It's helped us to reduce our alert volume a little. I haven't properly calculated it fully so it's hard to lay out a percentage. 

We'd like to have customer service in Hong Kong. I tend to wait a while for their response. We'd like to have more best-practice rules and instructions on how to create a dashboard.

I've only been using Splunk for two years. I make use of it to incorporate other solutions. I need to spend more time mastering Splunk. Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to use. I'd like to get more certificates, et cetera, and have spoken to their main office about that. It's got a high learning curve.

It hasn't helped us speed up security investigations. 

I've been using the solution for about two years. 

I've never had any issues with Splunk's stability.

The solution does not lack scalability. 

I haven't had any communication with Splunk's technical team.

I did not previously use a different solution. 

The setup time is quite long. To this point, I haven't deployed it to all servers and devices. I'm still in the process of deploying. 

I have not evaluated other options. 

We are Splunk customers. 

We do not use it in multiple environments. We just use it on-premises. 

I'm not yet using the threat intelligence features. 

We do not use the mission control feature. 

I have not created any customized dashboards as of now. At some point, I will create one for, for example, Windows Security.

I'm still in the process of mastering threat detection and XDR. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I haven't used it for such a long time, so it's hard to give comprehensive details about the solution. 

I used Splunk ES when I worked for a retail company. I worked mainly in the security operations center. I have also worked in healthcare and federal spaces.

Splunk ES provided the organization with overall visibility.

Incident Review and correlation search are valuable features. These features help us create correlations and have good actions afterward. The product provides visibility and enables us to correlate data and generate alerts.

The product could be cheaper.

I have been using the solution since 2014.

The tool is very stable. Once we set it up properly, it's reliable.

The solution's scalability is good. When we started, we had two servers and two indexers. By the time I left, it was up to 11 or more. It's not very hard to add additional components.

The support team is usually very receptive and answers quickly.

Positive

The initial setup was easy because I had done it many times before.

I used the solution until December last year. It was not very hard to monitor multiple cloud environments using the product because getting data into Splunk is not very hard. It also provides add-ons that we can use to pull data from other places.

Splunk was the brain of the whole process in our organization's security operations center. Without Splunk, we wouldn't have had any way of seeing what was going on. The tool helped reduce our mean time to resolve. We got alerts faster and responded to them faster.

The biggest value of the conference is the community. The conferences help me interact with people, get insights and up-to-date information, and also get opportunities to present my work. There's always room for change.

Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.