Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

Our SOC uses the solution to monitor our corporate and franchise environments.

Risk-based alerting is the most valuable feature. It really allows me to drive down the alert count and the alert fatigue for my analysts to make the alerts they see more valuable and actionable. The way that alerts are handled is better in Splunk. SPL is easier in Splunk. The UI of Splunk makes it easier for our analysts to move around and see what they need to see.

There are a lot of areas that are currently being improved that I want to be improved. Features related to content management must be improved. The product is adding more drill-downs.

When the tool was originally set up, things were not configured properly due to the rapid deadlines for installing everything. Now, we have to go back and recover a lot of things that aren't properly configured.

I have been using the solution for approximately four years.

I haven't seen any issues with stability. Most of the stability issues I've seen have actually been on the on-prem hardware.

We have no issues at all with scalability. The tool has high scalability and usability. The size of our environment is relatively large since it is an enterprise solution. We have around 5000 users and a franchise base.

I have never had an issue with Splunk’s support team. Every time I ask a question, I usually receive really quick responses. We are in the middle of a migration, and the engineers helping us migrate to Splunk Cloud have been fantastic every step of the way. They provide really rapid and complete answers when we ask questions.

I use LogRhythm a lot. I worked for an MSSP, so I have seen several products. So far, Splunk has been my favorite.

We have definitely seen an ROI on the solution. Any security tool has a fantastic ROI. A lot of companies don't like to budget for security until there's an incident or something goes terribly, terribly wrong. Just having that SIEM and having eyes on potential security issues is an ROI.

We are behind a few versions. So I hope that as we upgrade, I get more ideas for what I'd like to improve. We're still in the process of moving to the cloud.

The product has improved our organization's business resilience. The right tools are available to our analysts within the product, and we use them daily. It has drastically driven down our time to remediate, which is huge for us. It's huge for any company. We don't want four hours to find out that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Finding such issues before they turn into full-blown security incidents has been our biggest impact.

Splunk Enterprise Security empowers our staff. It is so user-friendly. It allows our analysts at every level to learn the tool and learn more about security through the tool. I progressed from level one. Now, I'm a content developer for enterprise security. The usability of Splunk is the best on the market. The solution has helped reduce our mean time to resolve.

As we add new features and applications into Splunk, time to value is pretty quick on most things. As long as we have someone that's willing to go through the effort to configure, the time to value is rapid. Adding applications to Splunk is a seamless experience. The UI of Splunk makes life so much easier. Some of my experience is based on technical debt in the organizations I worked with. I would probably rate the tool a ten if we didn't have so much technical debt.

By attending Splunk conferences, I get to learn about all the new tools and how to implement them. I use it for RBA and Machine Learning Toolkit. I develop content for our company. I am here to learn how to implement RBA and Machine Learning Toolkit better to reduce alert fatigue for my analysts.

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

Being in an air-gapped environment, we pretty much look for insider threats and other notables related to improper configurations and against security best practices.

We are 100% on-prem and in an air-gapped environment, so there is no Internet connection.

There have been some improvements, especially related to centering. We added user behavioral analytics, so it imports everything. Any threat generated inside of that goes into Enterprise Security. I wish anomalies would go in there, but I can understand why they don't, as it generates so many anomalies. However, it would be nice if I could select certain anomalies that would be helpful with notables. This way, I can track down security events before they become threats.

I believe Splunk Enterprise Security has reduced our mean time to resolve, but we do not have any definitive timing metrics.

Splunk has helped improve our organization’s business resilience because it is a central location where correlation searches populate. We can easily track down and figure out where issues lie, which minimizes the time of my SOC team. It probably saves them a couple of hours considering it is colocating everything in one location. It would be nice if there were better ways to search for the data. We can take a look at the raw logs, but we should be able to find the actual event that caused the problem and see all the logs associated with it in a standard log format as opposed to just a text file with all the events added in.

We are a small environment, so we do not get a lot of alerts. We work on the issues as we get them and I am sure it saves a couple of hours.

In terms of its ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time, it works really well when you are connected to the Internet. The predictive analysis is more cloud-based. Trying to find ways to do it on-prem in an air-gapped environment with no Internet connection can be a pain. There are some ways to do risk-based analysis, but we are still hamstrung because we do not have the Internet connection and the larger data sets that they have.

Internal tracking is helpful because we do not like to deal with multiple ticketing systems, and I am not a fan of ServiceNow. We are able to keep everything internal and utilize Enterprise Security. Internal ticketing is helpful because we can bring in all the data and have it all available. That way, we can go back and take a look at it if we find another situation. We do not have to utilize other ticketing systems for cybersecurity.

Its interface and usability can always be improved. We are running on the last version, so I have not checked out how the newest one looks. Currently, we have to track down and remember where things are located. We have new guys on the team, and sometimes they have to click around and figure out where things are.

We have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for about five years.

The solution is not going anywhere. As long as they continue to support and develop it, and not make it a cloud solution, we will continue to purchase it.

We have a total of 500 devices, and we ingest around 150 gigs a day.

The scalability is pretty easy. They recently enabled it to be able to go into a search head cluster. Previously, the only way to install this was on its own dedicated search and it could not be connected to a cluster. Over the last four or five years, they have been pushing harder and harder for clustering everything up for shared resources. Enterprise Security is one of the few apps where you were not allowed to do that. Having scalability with the search head cluster is nice, and it is one thing I am looking at implementing in the future.

Splunk's support is pretty good. I contacted Splunk's support a couple of times. In total, they are helpful, and we are able to get the support where we need it, but unfortunately, it is self-inflicted because we are air-gapped. It takes me anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour and a half to get the logs required. I need to get them sanitized, approved, and transferred over so that I can get them to Splunk. I would rate them a nine out of ten because a couple of times, I found the answer before they did.

They have the best documentation in all of the tech sector, and it is not behind a paywall where you cannot find information. There is certain information in Splunk Knowledge Base under the support page that I believe should be searchable through Google.

Positive

The return on investment is very good because, with ELA, we purchased the products at a reasonable price. We did not have to pay significantly more for licensing than we could possibly use. We were able to combine and get it at a much lower cost point.

In terms of the time to value, it took us a couple of months to get used to the interface and get people trained. Unfortunately, we had some turnover during that time, so we had to constantly retrain or train new people. The newer versions of Enterprise Security that came along made things a little bit easier. Luckily, we had some free training provided to us because we have an enterprise license agreement.

Luckily, we come under a large federal agency, and before the pandemic, they signed a large enterprise license agreement. It worked out great and to our advantage because we are a small organization. We got a 300 gig license, and we just did not have the buying power to be able to get products cheaply. Because we all partnered together under the agency umbrella, we were able to get Splunk Enterprise Security, UBA, and ITSI for cheap. This was good considering the fact that some of these premium apps require a minimum number of users, and we do not have the number of people needed to even justify buying it.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a seven out of ten. There is definitely some room for improvement. I have not installed the newer version. Once I get into it, I will see what new capabilities there are, but there is a decent lift that is needed for the setup. Professional services help with that, but the customer generally does not like paying for that more than once.

Because of the ELA, I am able to come to Splunk conferences for free instead of having to pay my own dime. That helps tremendously, especially considering the fact that education is included. I believe that is because of the enterprise license agreement with the government contract. That helps out a lot. I have been coming to conferences since 2017. There are a lot of good people and a great community. 

Our customers utilize Splunk Enterprise Security for either their cybersecurity program or their data warehouse program.

Splunk Enterprise Security's threat detection capabilities are effective in assisting organizations to uncover unknown threats and identify anonymous user behavior. However, this effectiveness is dependent on using the UBA modules and having the proper infrastructure in place.

MITRE ATT&CK is the framework that we use to detect and track well-known threats. When there are well-known threats, we can utilize the MITRE ATT&CK to identify any anomalies.

Splunk Enterprise Security has its own routine and process defined for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. Mainly, we baseline the client's business process and day-to-day activity and then use it to detect malicious activity through various scenarios.

Splunk Enterprise Security assists us in detecting threats more quickly. We have an abundance of unrelated and meaningless data from the raw logs, and the solution aids us in organizing and correlating this data so that we can extract meaningful events and take appropriate action. This is the primary objective for the majority of our clients. 

In most cases, we provide monitoring and intelligence to our customers based on how they use the solution. This allows other technical teams, such as PC, system support, and other tech units, to take appropriate actions. Our main role is to provide them with alerts and use case scenarios, while the detection and actions are primarily related to other aspects.

When we initially implement Splunk Enterprise Security, there are many alerts and false positives. However, with time, we are able to align our configuration with the client's requirements and do more baselining, reducing such issues.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps to expedite security investigations. Without a security solution, our security team is unable to identify threats because the log and auditing data are unrelated and uncategorized. Consequently, we cannot access them promptly. Therefore, having a solution like Splunk Enterprise Security is crucial for our cybersecurity program. For certain clients' needs, we prefer using open-source applications like ELK and ESK. However, if they opt for an enterprise and commercial product, Splunk is among the top three choices.

The most valuable feature is the DSS, also known as SPL, because it allows users to script advanced queries with limited knowledge.

The CIM model is the method Splunk uses to normalize data and categorize its important parts, but it is quite complex. Simplifying this process would assist security officers in assessing threats and using the system more efficiently.

I would appreciate it if Splunk could add the feature of importing and exporting from web servers and third-party devices during project and process development. This addition would greatly enhance the value of the solution making the maintenance for the security officer easier. 

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for six years.

I rate the stability of Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

Splunk Enterprise Security can be easily scaled once it has been installed and deployed.

Cyber threat levels are increasing every day, especially during the pandemic when most employees needed remote access to their business services. As a result, many organizations experienced a surge in attacks and required a resilient SIEM and cybersecurity solution.

I have used ELK, ESK, QRadar, Graylog, and LogRhythm in the past. One of Splunk's strengths over its competitors is its dedicated DSS called SPL.

The drawback of Splunk Enterprise Security is that upon initial installation, we need to do a lot of customization in order to have an effective cybersecurity program and deliver quality service to the client.

The initial setup is straightforward, but we need to make some configurations afterward that can be a bit complex. The deployment time depends on the size, but it usually takes several months to ensure stability and requires two SIEM engineers.

Splunk Enterprise Security is hardly affordable for most of our clients, causing many of them to resort to using open source solutions instead.

In addition to the licensing fee, there is also a support and maintenance charge.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten due to its high total cost of ownership, difficulties in maintenance, and the complexity of configuration immediately after deployment. 

Splunk Enterprise Security may not be cost-effective for small and even some medium-sized companies. While each organization has different requirements, we do recommend Splunk for medium and large organizations.

Organizations should take into account the complexity of their environment. For instance, if they have a purely vendor-based environment for their network security appliance, it may be easier for them to handle security, fabric, and architecture requirements. However, if they operate in a multi-vendor and mixed environment, they need to conduct more research on how to integrate various components. Often, they rush into negotiating their cybersecurity program without sufficient research, leading to potential problems for clients.

The primary use case is security and data analytics. In general, we manage and maintain it for our customers.

Application-wise, it's good. Searching and reporting of data analytics is also fine. The dashboard presentations are also a good feature. Overall, its functionality is great and that's why we use it.

I would like additional support for custom add-ons, as well as cloud integration. Right now we have concerns because we have to customize applications for direct integration. But on-prem, it is all functional. We have to build it on our own. Previously, they developed custom connectors or add-ons for a lot of applications. But that number can be upgraded still. There are a lot of applications in the world that are not supported.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for over two years. I received Splunk certification six years ago.

The stability of the functionality is good, but there are still bugs that keep hindering things. I am waiting but they are there and that is quite common. I think they have not yet been resolved from the older versions. The stability is a seven-plus out of 10.

It's scalable for all environments. Splunk Cloud can be scaled to a small or medium company, depending on their inputs or log resources. Businesses at the high end of medium-sized, and large companies, can go with the on-prem solution.

The technical support is good. 

However, there is a lot of delay nowadays. The last time we raised a case, it took quite a long for them to come back with their first response. That's not for a P1 or P2, but if it is a P3, they don't respond at the earliest. When they respond, it is quite late and we have to ask again. The first response is never an answer. It's always a query.

Still, the people I have worked with there are all an eight-plus out of 10.

Positive

It can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud. With the latter, it is Splunk's own cloud. 

The deployment of the solution is straightforward, but there is a lot of engineering activity involved in designing the architecture. Architecture-wise, it is fine, and bringing things together is not that tough, but maintaining and managing it is a tough job because we don't work in a normal environment. We work on something that is very defined to the network. That means we have to build everything from scratch and deploy it.

The implementation strategy depends on how the customer wants things done. But in general, I go through research and then develop and design. I ask the client what sort of environment is flexible or cost-effective for them. It's done in stages. It's a matter of understanding the infrastructure and then implementing,  or designing and handing it over to them.

If there are 1,000 log sources, it takes six months to a year to deploy, depending on how the customer is supporting the process.

Every on-prem solution involves maintenance, including keeping things upgraded, whereas Splunk Cloud is managed by the vendor. The number of people involved in on-prem maintenance depends on the size of the environment and how long our update window is. For example, if we have a green zone at midnight for three hours, and we want to upgrade at least 20 to 30 servers, it will take eight to 10 people working in parallel. But for a very small environment of 10 servers, it will take four people to manage it, or if we have a large window, even three people can do it.

We do it ourselves.

The pricing depends on the bandwidth of an organization and is good compared to some SIEM tools. IBM, for example, is quite costly. But Microsoft Sentinel is notably cheaper. I have seen a lot of organizations running on Sentinel.

IBM is for quite large organizations that don't want to have their data on the cloud. Splunk has both on-prem and cloud modules and, cost-wise, Splunk is better. Internally, we cannot push everything to the cloud. That would become too expensive for us. So we have it sitting in our data center and that is good.

I have worked with a number of other solutions including RSA enVision, IBM QRadar, as well as Microsoft, McAfee, and LogRhythm. 

If we want to build an add-on feature in Splunk, we have to build an application and then integrate it. But in other applications, there is a direct integration that only requires partial development and it will start functioning.

Also, there is something called correlation in a lot of other tools. Splunk also has it but it consumes a lot of memory. If we tag all the data, it is better, but tagging consumes storage and it makes it a little tough for us to run a search. 

If we want to work towards SOAR, if there were a little bit more integration so that our customers could taste SOAR, they could then move to Splunk Phantom or other tools. Right now, people are not using automation. Everything is done manually. Hopefully, that's the next goal. Security operations will surely use SOAR and, once they start tasting it, they'll get to know how it works. They can design playbooks and start using it. That's an additional feature I would like Splunk to bring in. 

Splunk's advantage is its search capability. Its search is notably faster. With Splunk, I can search easily on keywords. That is great. It also has something called "stats" and it runs much faster. Within minutes, it gives the data from a very large set. Spunk's dashboards are also a very good thing. No other application or tool is as versatile in presenting the dashboard. It all comes down to presentation. It may take a little bit of engineering work to develop and customize, to parse the fields and fetch the data, but the presentation is good.

We implement Splunk Enterprise Security for our clients. It's a security tool that centralizes data in one location, so we can gain some insights from it. We can also use it to create alerts. For example, let's say we want to find an incident in real-time, but we can't sit in a single place and stare at the screen. We can create alerts that send us an email notification or automate a response. 

Splunk helped us reduce our alert volume because we could optimize our risk-based user analytics. I estimate that we decreased alerts by around 20 percent. Splunk Enterprise Security speeds up security investigations.  

Splunk's strongest suit is its user interface. We can integrate multiple solutions and adjust settings in the Splunk interface. It's easy to manage multi-cloud environments because we can use rules to segregate the data and restrict our clients from seeing each other's data. Splunk has a lot of plugins and add-ons that provide a lot of information about our cloud and on-prem environments.

Splunk's MITRE ATT&CK framework is excellent, but I haven't used it for investigation. I'm primarily involved in implementation and development. Splunk Enterprise Security is solid detection-wise and faster than many other SIEM solutions. 

We already have an antivirus solution in our environment, so Splunk detects viruses based on that. Once the antivirus detects something, it generates an incident in Splunk that we can investigate. The detection time depends on a few factors, but we can detect a threat in two to five minutes under ideal conditions. 

Splunk could improve its default machine-learning models. Also, Splunk Enterprise's native threat intelligence isn't that good. I prefer a custom threat intelligence model. 

We have used Splunk Enterprise Security for more than three years.

Splunk Enterprise Security has gone through multiple versions, so the product is mature and stable. It's currently on version 9. 

We can scale Splunk Enterprise Security horizontally or vertically. It isn't a problem. 

I rate Splunk support 10 out of 10. Splunk has better support than other vendors I've worked with. It's better than IBM support. 

Positive

We previously partnered with IBM and used QRadar as our SIEM. Splunk is faster, and I like the look and feel better. If you are looking for the cheapest solution, some free open-source SIEM solutions exist. They can do many of the same things that Splunk can do but maybe not at the same scale. 

One person can deploy Splunk Enterprise Security in 15 to 20 days, depending on the architecture. It takes less time to deploy on the cloud. The solution requires some maintenance. We need someone there to monitor it in case there are issues. Three people are responsible for maintaining Splunk. 

Splunk costs a little more than other SIEM solutions. It would be nice if they could bring the price down a little. 

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of 10.

We use it to provide both operational and security dashboards based on our clients' equipment. We use it for infra monitoring and threat analysis.

We have multiple rules for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. We get the notable events from the logs and from there we drill down into the cause. We correlate that with the framework and get a score. Based on that, we proceed to the investigation.

It gives us a complete correlation between data processes and security threats. It has threat analysis and the MITRE ATT&CK framework. From a SOC perspective, it uses multiple components or frameworks and, in that way, is very useful, providing us with a lot of information for our clients. They don't want multiple teams dealing with security and malware, et cetera. Splunk Enterprise Security gives us everything in one place.

We get all the real-time logs and, based on the configuration, it's pretty easy to use to find threats. It has helped to speed up our security investigations. Before we went with Splunk Enterprise Security we had limited information but now we have threat intelligence to enhance things.

We are now handling multiple customers globally. We are able to build custom rules based on customer requirements and the applications and data they are using. It is enhancing the security of each customer's infrastructure. We are able to provide weekly and monthly reports and, based on that, our customers are honing their firewalls and other security infrastructure. Splunk Enterprise Security is very helpful in improving the security of our clients.

It gives us good visibility into multiple environments, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid; irrespective of platform.

The UI is also very friendly. You don't have to work very hard to find things.

One issue is that we are getting a lot of false positives. We are trying to reduce them by customizing the default rules, changing thresholds, and using white-listing and black-listing. It's getting better and better as a result. But they need to build components that would reduce the false positives. 

Also, we have a lot of security feed providers. If there was some kind of management tool for that, it would be a great tool to have.

I have been working with Splunk for about four and a half years.

I started working with Splunk Enterprise Security at version 6 and now we are up to 9 and it needs more resources. But it's okay because we have a lot of functionality now. It's better than it was earlier. I would rate the stability at nine out of 10.

Splunk on the cloud is scalable, a 10 out of 10.

If someone is doing the deployment for the first time, it will be a little complex. The installation is straightforward, but for the configuration, you need to follow the documentation and understand it. That is a little difficult the first time if you are doing it on your own. If you have anyone with experience who can explain the configuration, the second time it will be straightforward.

The solution requires maintenance but not much, mostly when there are upgrades 

Most of the companies we work with are keen on budgeting. They can't spend much on security. Their problem is with the cost. They would like to have it but the problem is the budget. If they got a taste of Splunk Enterprise Security and its benefits, they might be able to cope better. A 15-day trial doesn't give them much hands-on or benefit from the tool. From a security perspective, they would need to have it for six months or a year to get a sense of it.

We try to explain, to someone who is concerned about the cost, the functionality and how powerful the application is. Security people know it's better to have a better solution, but management has to look at the budget.

We tried some other solutions, but they didn't work like Splunk. We found that Splunk is the best one.

We work on multiple cloud environments including AWS, Azure, GCP, and most of the popular clouds. We have built our own combined app to monitor most of the cloud service providers. We have our own solution for cloud security monitoring.

My advice is that for big firms, because it has better detection and security, Splunk Enterprise Security is a very good tool. For big companies, good security is important, especially if they have a global market.

I don't see any other software having as much functionality and different ways to investigate security.

We use Splunk Enterprise Security as our primary security event manager. We collect data from various log sources into our Splunk SIEM to build context around what is happening in our environment. We then use the capabilities of Splunk Enterprise Security and other tools to enrich this data and help us manage the data, events, and detections.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us focus on security. It provides us with data and a number of pre-built learnings that allow us to view the content in very useful ways. We can apply filters to the data to get more value out of it. This is the primary use case for Splunk Enterprise Security: to help us analyze and leverage the content we have.

Monitoring multiple cloud environments can be relatively easy, but it depends on the vendors. There can be challenges, such as ensuring that all of the data is ingested and aligned correctly. This is because vendors, especially in the cloud, can change their log formats at any time. Additionally, some vendors may not provide the same log feeds in the cloud as they do with on-premises solutions. As a result, it is important to be aware of these potential challenges and to take steps to mitigate them.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides reasonable visibility into multiple environments by harnessing the power of Splunk and the data it ingests to unify and provide a consistent view.

Splunk Enterprise Security's threat detection can help our organization find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior. We are early adopters of the user behavior piece, so we are still working to normalize our data. Splunk is working with developers to ensure that they can intake our data. We use Windows Log Forwarding for a lot of our host-based logs. We are leveraging this with an on-premises GPO. The gathering mechanism is a little bit different than what Splunk has seen, but it is still within the realm of acceptable. We are working through this issue.

We have a few different STIX and TAXII feeds that are being processed by the Threat Intelligence Management feature. We are members of a few different organizations that provide these feeds, and we use them as needed. The feeds also feed into some of our security products.

Actionable intelligence provided by Threat Intelligence Management is valuable, but it is important to be aware of its limitations. Threat intelligence can help organizations to correlate and build context around security events, but it is important to remember that the information provided is often brittle and can change quickly. For example, an IP address that is associated with a threat actor today may be used by a legitimate user tomorrow. Additionally, some threat intelligence feeds may be contaminated with false positives, which can lead to false alarms. It is important to carefully evaluate the quality and reliability of the threat intelligence before taking any action. Organizations should also have a process in place to verify and validate any threat intelligence before using it to make security decisions.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a valuable tool for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. I am glad we added it to our security stack. Previously, we ran for a year or so without it, and while we had some capabilities, we were truly missing out on some things by not having Enterprise Security. It definitely added value for us, and I would not go back to not having it. I think it has been a solid addition to our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats faster, but the lion's share of the work is still in the process of customizing it to our needs. Taking enterprise security and modifying it to apply to our needs is where we see the biggest bang for the buck. From that perspective, it is probably better for us.

A lot of the prebuilt capabilities in Splunk Enterprise Security are extremely beneficial because they cover all the use cases. I think another important aspect is the consistency of their approach and how methodical they are. This is very helpful because it sets a structure for how we view our data and what we can leverage from it. This page clearly drives us to what is happening and what we need to do, and it has a workflow associated with it. This also helps to reinforce the process. When we deal with security issues, this can always be a challenge. We are dealing with a fire drill, and we need to be able to react. We don't want to make mistakes, and it is easy to do so if we are trying to wing it. However, the structure of this approach helps to reinforce that. I think this is another area that is beneficial in terms of the workflow and how it approaches what it does.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us reduce the volume of alerts we receive. However, we still have to take action on a number of items. Splunk Enterprise Security helped us to do this by ensuring that our input data is accurate and reliable. We are still evolving and maturing in our use of Splunk Enterprise Security, and we believe that it will continue to help us to reduce the volume of alerts we receive and improve our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps speed up our security investigations to a degree. The workflow is improved, and when we encounter an incident, we can take ownership of it, manage it, dive into individual facets of it, run queries, and expand on them. It makes some items easier to access or understand.

The varied prebuilt feature is the most valuable because it ensures that we have complete coverage over all of the key questions. By seeing how others analyzed the data, we can develop new dashboards and approaches. It is always helpful to see how someone else used a tool to spark ideas about how we can enrich our items based on our specific needs. This feature covers a lot of our core general questions and is helpful, but it also allows us to see what someone who is really focused on this area has done and how we can tune and tweak it to our needs.

It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk. This includes making sure that the log feeds are aligned correctly so that when we look at data and alarms, everything makes sense. Sometimes, I see alarms that are caused by data sources that have snuck in. For example, if my firewall says something about AV, it might get mapped into antivirus. This can happen because firewalls are multipurpose devices, and they can end up in models that aren't really applicable. Part of the problem is the infrastructure within Enterprise Security with how they group data types. For example, authentication data, firewall data, network data, and user-based data are all gathered in different ways. This can lead to confusion, especially when multifunction devices are involved. For example, if a firewall says that antivirus is not enabled, it might still detect something as if it was antivirus-related. This can blur the incidents and the information we have. It is important to identify items that creep in or issues that need to be cleaned. This will help us identify problem areas and their root causes more effectively and quickly. We can then clean up the data model, make sure the lines are correct, and get higher-quality alarms.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for over a year. We have used Splunk as a security SIEM for at least three to four years.

We previously used free Splunk apps.

I believe that Splunk Enterprise Security is worth the price, but it is expensive. I am always trying to balance the need for security with the need to be cost-conscious.

I give Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

Using a SIEM is not cheap, no matter how you slice it. So, the first question I would ask is, what are we trying to do with our SIEM? In my opinion, Splunk, including ES shines when we are willing to invest in learning and modifying our SIEM, our solution, and our environment to align it with what we do and how we do it. If we are willing to make that investment to contextualize the security and visibility, then Splunk is a tool that can help us do that. If we are looking for a turnkey solution, where we can just throw logs at something and then pull the arm of the slot machine and get things out, then Splunk is not necessarily the right tool for us. We can get there, but it will be a pricey slot machine. I think we will get the most value out of Splunk if we want to get things that are more contextual to us. We may need to enhance or build off of the Splunk dashboards that ES includes, and that will help us to create dashboards that are extremely relevant to our environment. If we are comfortable with creating Splunk queries, then we will have a lot of power at our fingertips.

To those looking into the solution, I would ask: What are they looking for? What are they willing to invest in? Do they want to understand queries? Do they want to build the knowledge around how to structure them? Are they willing to put in the effort to get the real power out of it, or are they expecting something to tell them what is going on? They need to realize that it is never going to be built for them at that point. So they are going to be getting something generic. They have to consider their specific situation, such as how many people they have on their team, etc. They should also probably take a good stock of what they are trying to log and how long they have to retain it. I have been very happy with our Splunk Cloud instances. They have been very reliable. I think it has been incredibly powerful for us. I think that is also another aspect of whether they are going to have their SIEM in their environment or outside of their environment. They need to think about some of these items. Obviously, Splunk can go either way. They have to make their decisions there. We have been very happy with our Splunk Cloud instance. So that's what's been really good for us. And, also, it takes some of the administrative aspects and puts them on somebody else. That's valuable for us too.

Our technical teams are demoing various enterprise tools to develop experience and knowledge so we can better serve our clients. In addition to Splunk, we are evaluating IBM QRadar and one other solution. One of our customers is asking about the Splunk MSP model.

Splunk allows us to customize processing and dashboards, which helps us take care of our customers' needs. Splunk is costly, but it's better than other products. It speeds up security investigations. It helps us detect threats faster. Everything is faster. The only part that's lagging is the management. Otherwise, Splunk is good. It took about a month to realize the solution's benefits. 

We get few alerts except for the other solutions we have integrated with Splunk. We'll monitor those alerts and support their customers, but we don't have any other mechanisms for databases or something outside of the infrastructure. 

Splunk enables us to customize dashboards and queries, and we can add multiple admin users. We only use the essential parts, including the MITRE ATT&CK framework capabilities. Organizations share threat information under the MITRE ATT&CK framework. We do threat hunting and marketing based on that.

We do manual threat hunting. We get all the IP addresses and check the threat databases to determine if it's malicious. 

The algorithms and alerts could be improved. I would also like to pre-build use cases. We need to create the algorithm based on our use cases. 

The threat management part is still lagging. There are some gaps in threat management. Other vendors have built-in threat management systems, but Splunk lacks the threat management component in its portal. The UEBA and everything else is perfect, but it lacks a unified threat intelligence and management feature. 

We've also had problems integrating the solution. We get multiple errors, like search log errors, UI errors, etc., and performance issues. It's fine with basic content, but if we're dealing with multiple data sources and 30 GB of data, it cannot handle the load. Our customer is indexing around 10 GB of data daily, and I can't search the log without getting errors. 

Splunk Enterprise is stable. 

Splunk Enterprise is highly scalable. 

We haven't had to contact Splunk support because we can find all the answers we need online. 

We also use IBM QRadar.

Deploying Splunk is straightforward. We had no issues. 

Splunk is more expensive than most solutions, but it offers lots of value. If a customer wants the cheapest solution, we'll use that.

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten. I would give it a ten if it had built-in threat management. 

We are using Splunk in the standard information security use case. We're also using it for various application use cases around identity management, windows active directory, and those types of use cases.

Splunk has provided a venue for us to determine student engagement during COVID, for which we didn't really have any other way except by looking at data that we captured off of our student systems and our authentication servers to see who's logging in, and who's logging out, and for how long they've been logged in.

The feature that I have found most valuable with Splunk is the ability to sift through a bunch of data very quickly.

We have about a 500 gig license with Splunk, so it's not like petabytes of data, but even 500 gigs is kind of hard to sift through sometimes.

Splunk has been improving consistently over the last couple of revs. I still think there are some administrative features that they could improve on and make them less kludgy, but from a user perspective, it has gotten very clean and very sexy looking over the last few builds. So the users seem to like it.

By less kludgy, I mean that in the version I'm running, I still have to go into the command line and modify files and then go into the GUI and validate that they got modified. So it's not all in the GUI, but it has been moving slowly to the GUI over the last several versions. It would be nice if they could move all of the administrative features into a GUI platform so that when you're in the Splunk distributed environment management platform, you then don't have to go into the command line to add new applications or new packages that you then want to be able to push out to your forwarders. Their forwarder management is still kind of split that way.

I don't really have any feature requests in Splunk's space. They seem to be doing a good job of keeping it contemporary from that perspective. 

Splunk's mission is to move everyone to the cloud and charge us a bunch more money. Their goal is to cloud source everything, and quite honestly, the price of cloud sourcing the product, even at smaller 500 gigs a day (which isn't a lot of data by Splunk standards) in the cloud for that is ludicrous. The cost for me to buy equipment every three years and own licensing and run it local to my prem, is significantly less from a three or five year license. I'm going to spend X amount of money on hardware every X years, and I'm going to have to pay licensing costs on software of X over that same period versus that amount that I'd amortize over five years is what I would be paying every year in the cloud.

That is the point with the product. It seems like they are so focused on forcing everyone into the cloud that they seem to be not understanding that there are people that don't have those really deep pockets. It's one thing for a Fortune 50 company to spend a million dollars a year in the cloud. It's another thing when you're a nonprofit educational institute to spend that kind of money in the cloud. Even though we do get some discounts in most of the cloud space providers, it is still not on par with the big public businesses.

I have been using Splunk for probably 10 years.

At least in our environment, it is super stable. When you think about how much time you spend working with other applications, just Windows Server requires more feeding than Splunk does, you see that Splunk is a very low maintenance care and feeding product.

We have probably 150 users in the environment and their roles vary from being application management folks to application engineering folks to the executive suite, so lots of different use cases. The executive suite tend to prefer more curated content and the application owners have a mix of curated content and dynamic search functions they can perform. Then the engineering tier basically gets some curated content and some free reign to do whatever they want for the most part. I'm the guy that supports this instance. So there's one person.

I support not only Splunk, but I am also the campus security engineer and I'm also the dude that runs or is responsible for all of our campus monitoring infrastructure. So that tells you how little maintenance is required.

We are adding new use cases on a fairly regular basis and we are adding more licensing to our indexing license. I don't see Splunk going away. There's nothing else that I think provides the ability to do this much data analytics from just the numbers of equipment that you need to run it. Also, the number of people that you need to actually make sure that it's functioning well. In higher ed., everybody always says we should do open source. And I respond that what I do in Splunk with 20 systems, I would need three racks of equipment to do on an open source platform. I have basically 70 - 75% of the racks now and I'd need three times that or more to run this as an open source product. And it wouldn't be as cute and it wouldn't be as beautiful or as flexible.

I know other folks in the higher ed. space that are running petabyte size instances with Splunk. So I would have to say it scales very well just from talking to the folks in my market silo.

Their technical support sucks.

My engagement with their technical support was for a product which they basically took over from an open source product and they just seemed to not be able to figure out why it's not doing what it's supposed to do. The number of times I've had to engage with Splunk for solutions has been for a couple of use cases. And in every one of those use cases, support was very painful. It took a very long time and it seemed like they were more interested in burning their queue volume than actually satisfying me as a customer.

I work in higher ed. Here in higher ed., it costs us a lot of money to run it. The support from the company that you spend a lot of money with is pretty poor. I get most of my support through the Splunk sales folks because they seem to know more and they're more incentivized to keep me as a customer. When I call in to open a ticket with Splunk support, they really don't know, and this is going to sound terrible, they don't really care whether I have a 50 Meg license or a 50 petabyte license. If it's not on their workflow, their pre-programmed triage, they can't do it.

Splunk came into being at Case Western when we were looking for a better log product than Check Point was providing at that point in time. My entire investment in Splunk, in hardware and software and integration cost, was cheaper than what Check Point was going to provide, or what the Check Point solution path was for just looking at firewall data. We knew we needed to be able to do more analytics than what we were currently getting out of our firewall products and Splunk was brought in to do that. It can do this and a whole lot more.

Splunk is a complex critter to put in and it's a more complex critter to keep running. We have 10 search heads and four indexers and universal and a heavy forwarding cluster. We have clustered indexers and clustered search heads. This is definitely not a drag and drop product.

We engaged a third party Splunk integrator to help us do our Splunk deployment and they did our initial deployment. We used a different integrator to do some of our upgrades, which we probably won't use again. Our implementation strategy was we really just wanted to look at the classic security use case when we put this in 10 years ago. Then after that came in, and everybody was happy with what it was doing, we added some other use cases and universal forwarding and so on and so forth.

We used an integrator.

The integrator we used to do our initial deployment was excellent. The integrator we used to do our last round of upgrades was less than excellent.

When I hire an integrator to do an upgrade in an environment, I expect them to come back and say "all of your application layer apps are upgradeable, but your OS's need to be upgraded. Do you want me to do that? Or should you do that?" I now have different versions of OS's under Splunk running in my Linux world and it would've been nice to upgrade the system OS and then upgrade Splunk, even if it was more disruptive. I guess I have to read the statement of work more closely in the future.

The TCO and ROI are really great if you're in the private, non-public sector and you're in a more standard business sector. The return on investment in total cost of ownership on Splunk is from somebody who doesn't fit into that neat silo. Do we calculate that stuff? So our return on investment is by being able to solve problems that we never knew we could solve. My answer to it is the flexibility to be able to figure out student engagement when COVID hit. This was the only platform we could do it on.

I can comment on price in this way - in education in Ohio, we're part of the Ohio supercomputer consortium, and they act as a collective bargaining agent. So we get our licensing as a piece of the State of Ohio's Splunk license. So my pricing is very much not list or even reduced list because of the volume that the state buys.

We generally spend about $20,000 a year in third party integrator costs to get us past some of the rough edges that we get with Splunk support.

We briefly looked at the open source product and we obviously looked at a Check Point product. When we looked at Splunk it seemed like they had a smaller cost to procure it, and a much smaller cost to maintain it than all of those other solutions. So it was kind of why we went with Splunk. This is very non-intuitive since everybody says they love Splunk but it costs too much.

My advice to anyone considering Splunk is to understand exactly how much data you want to look at and you want to bring in on a daily basis. Then create a rational strategy to bring the data in, in reasonably sized chunks, that fulfill a use case at a time.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Splunk a really good nine.

I'd rate it a really good nine because it's really versatile. You can do a lot of things with it. It allows you to do a lot of analytics in the platform without needing a bunch of other third partyware to help you figure it out.

I use Splunk Enterprise Security for threat hunting.

The end-to-end visibility provided in the dashboards is great for our needs.

Splunk Enterprise Security allows monitoring across multi-cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.

Splunk does a good job of ingesting and correlating data.

Splunk provides real-time monitoring.

 The framework's features, such as the MITRE ATT&CK framework, are great.

Our MTTR has improved with Splunk. It has improved our investigation time.

The most valuable features of Splunk Enterprise Security are the enterprise search bar and the dashboards.

The threat intelligence management feature would benefit from a broader range of APIs for enhanced integration. This would facilitate seamless connection with various threat intelligence platforms, as some currently are missing APIs, making integration difficult.

The high cost of Splunk Enterprise Security prevented us from using its full capabilities. 

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for one year.

Splunk Enterprise Security has been largely stable, experiencing only a few brief periods of downtime.

We use Splunk and Sentinel for different purposes mainly due to cost factors not because one is better. For example, we use Splunk more for network traffic.

The price of Splunk Enterprise Security fluctuates based on the customer, but I believe it's quite costly, especially for our clientele. Furthermore, to access the full range of features, it's exceedingly expensive to have comprehensive log data.

When evaluating SIM tools and considering the cheapest option, Splunk Enterprise Security might be worth considering, especially for larger organizations. While cost is a factor, Splunk offers significant value, and I recommend it over focusing solely on price.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security seven out of ten.