Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

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.

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.

There is a lot that we monitor with it. We monitor outbound URLs. We monitor unusual traffic, unusual user logins, and excessive user logins. We monitor whether or not users are logging in from VPN or not, what IPs they are accessing, or whether a user is signing in from multiple IP addresses minus the VPN. 

My organization was already using Splunk Enterprise Security when I was brought in, so I cannot say how it has improved the organization, but I can see that if they did not have Splunk Enterprise Security, there would be a significantly more workload. They would definitely need more manpower. Splunk Enterprise Security definitely helps with a lot of the prebuilt dashboards and other things that come with it out of the box.

Splunk Enterprise Security has reduced our mean time to resolve by 50% to 75%.

Being able to track impossible travel logins and things of that nature is valuable. We can track user logins from various IPs, various countries, and at various times to see if everything adds up. We can check to see if it makes sense that someone logged in from China and in the US within an hour.

There is machine learning with Splunk Enterprise Security, and based on the keynotes at the Splunk conference, there is going to be some AI involved as well. My biggest struggle with Splunk, in general, is memorizing all the commands. If I want to know which users have logged in between certain hours, I cannot write that query out. It would be helpful to have AI so that I can explain in simple terms what I want and then the search gives that back to me. I am waiting for that. That is going to be my bread and butter because my big thing is that I just cannot remember all those commands.

If you have a dashboard that is too large with too many searches, it tends to get bogged down. If you create various different dashboards, you can bypass the issue of not having enough resources to load all the things you need to load.

I was brought onto the team recently. They have been using it for about two years, so I am just catching up in learning as I go. All in all, my experience with Splunk and AWS is about ten months to a year.

It is very scalable.

I have not had to interact with Splunk support. Most of the issues that I ran into can be solved by reaching out to a team member.

I have not used any other similar solution previously. Prior to working with Splunk, it was just basic IT administration work involving monitoring with different tools, such as Trellix FireEye. I am not sure how to compare them with Splunk.

My organization had Splunk Enterprise Security before I got in.

I have not seen an ROI because I am not at level two, but I am sure my bosses have seen an ROI.

We have definitely seen a time to value in terms of being able to take what Splunk Enterprise gives us and view it. It gives us more information in an easier way versus us doing everything ourselves. That alone saves time. If we save one second a day over a year, we are going to save minutes, so these little bits of time add up.

The price can always be lower, but it is fair at the moment.

The cost efficiencies depend on the licensing and how much data we are bringing in. We have a fairly large footprint, so it is cost-effective.

Being at the Splunk conference and seeing all the ways in which Splunk can be used versus the way that I use Splunk is mind-blowing. It is a Pandora's box of tools. One of the things I saw today was manufacturing and the types of data that manufacturers can receive from Splunk within the technologies that they have. It is mind-blowing. Splunk is awesome.

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

Our primary use case is for security but we also use it as a soft tool. It gives us an advantage over traditional SOC or security tools. We get to use the existing data in Splunk to make use of the security. 

It definitely does help with both auditing and as well as regular monitoring. SOC does more monitoring, but ES also gives you other features that are auditing-related. The dashboards are also beneficial. 

Our auditing team gets benefits from Splunk, not just ES but also from general Splunk Enterprise. It's cross-functional. 

Enterprise Security has helped us reduce our mean time to resolution by 50%. Without it, there are many manual steps. You have to go to different products to see specific things. With Splunk, you have the benefit of seeing them together in one place.

The notable events and the incident review features are the most valuable. It gives you an overall idea of what's going on in terms of security in the environment. 

I also like the automation. We write custom scripts and automate certain tasks. That's also interesting. This feature saves us time.

Splunk is capable of doing a lot in real-time with data coming in that is a terabyte in size, you can still do searches in real-time. We have correlation searches that do similar functions.

It has a lot of the features we're looking for. 

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

It's quite stable. It's a mature product. 

We can make it as scalable as we want. We can scale it horizontally as much as we want on our cluster.

We get support when we need it. I would rate support an eight or nine out of ten. There's always learning and improvement to do. Sometimes the communication with support happens with multiple staff. They should reduce the time to resolution.

Positive

I would rate Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. Not a ten because everything has room for improvement. 

The biggest value of the Splunk conference is meeting people.

Splunk helps us to be proactive and it integrates with many devices. It offers visibility from many different levels, areas, zones, and devices rather than from a single system. We can use this intelligence to create correlations, system solutions, etc. Splunk reduces the risk factors and helps us in many ways beyond just collecting logs. Though Splunk is costly, it has many features like threat intelligence which is very useful. It helps us be proactive about reducing risks.

Splunk incorporates a lot of elements that help to reduce security risks. For it to reach certain compliance, we need to have some security insight. Splunk is a very good SIEM, it’s a top solution, but the best feature is its cost of visibility. We have all the most important features to detect vulnerabilities or risks.

Customers cannot manage or maintain the servers on the cloud since they are all deployed. Since there are platforms, they can become a little bit hectic. One of my other observations is that the applications that are available on the store are not updated as much as those available on on-prem.

Moreover, I have had issues with the Splunk store. I believe that the developers in the Splunk store are external and I can see that the level of maturity of these developers ranges between low and medium. I have never seen the maturity go up higher. The applications are not maintained regularly and it can cause issues in the visibility dashboard. I would suggest to Splunk's tech team to keep the store private, so that Splunk creates its own applications without the interference of external developers.

I have concerns about the architecture as well since I can see it is not very well defined. However, this is not the case with on-prem. We were able to manage and do whatever we wanted on the server level without opening a case or anything else. Moreover, the applications are updated every six months.

Splunk is a stable solution.

Splunk is a scalable solution. I am also impressed with the integrity of the solution. It is very good at collecting logs.

To resolve issues in the Splunk platform, you need to wait in a queue and then open a ticket with the support team. I find it a bit time-consuming since it takes time to call tech support and get what you need.

I have used Wazuh. From my point of view, Wazuh is a simple and basic SIEM solution compared to Splunk in terms of features. I don’t see Wazuh as a competitor to Splunk. Wazuh relies greatly on human tactics. It is best suited for cloud environments and maybe smaller ones. I have issues with Wazuh’s stability as well because I have found scenarios where it was working for one instance and not for another. These issues might be because it is open-source.

Wazuh is not actively working on their platform. I opine that they need to integrate many components and have many aspects automated so that the solution does not depend on its users. I have found issues with the language of Wazuh as well. It requires a lot of resources and time to learn the language. These issues make me think that Splunk is better than Wazuh.

The initial setup process for Splunk was simple. The language used in Splunk is very easy to pick up and you can rely on any person using it to be able to learn it quickly. The language and picking up logs are easier with Splunk.

I implemented Splunk through a POC.

Splunk is costly but it’s worth it due to the high-end features.

I have worked with Wazuh and ManageEngine Endpoint Central.

I would rate Splunk Cloud a 6.5 out of 10, but plugged on time, I would give it 8.8 out of 10. The maintenance of Splunk is a bit difficult due to the time-consuming tech support.

I would recommend Splunk. I cannot compare Splunk with any other SIEM solution because I have worked with many different solutions and logarithms, like the ManageEngine Endpoint Central, and Wazuh. I have used Splunk for two years and I can see Splunk as really the best SIEM solution that can be used for work. I totally recommend it even though I gave some negative feedback, it's because I am coming from a product perspective. We have to also take into consideration the security perspective. I am not talking about only visibility in which they should take a lot of care, but the way the solution is handling and even manipulating the data. This is the most valuable thing.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring, intrusion detection, and prevention. It is mostly a lot of security and network and server monitoring.

It automated the way we look at intrusion detection and prevention. It automatically picks up intrusion attempts within our environment.

The monitoring and the security functionality are the most valuable aspects of the solution.

It is easy to set up.

It is very scalable. 

You can basically make it do whatever you want, from log management and monitoring security, intrusion detection, prevention, and linking to your antivirus to report to it. Having kind of a single point where everything feeds in and create dashboards however you like is useful and works with how many ever systems you want in that dashboard.

I've not come across any areas that need improvement.

I'd like to see more integration with more antivirus systems.

We've used the solution for roughly, one year and a half years.

The solution is highly scalable.

We have four people that use the solution and they were split between infrastructure and security.

We don't have a plan to increase usage as we're almost at capacity with our servers, for our purposes. I don't think we're going to scale it as we're using everything we can from anything we need. However, it's intensely used for security purposes.

Technical support is perfect.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. It was done by Splunk entirely. After that, the configuration took a bit of time, however, we bought professional service days from them to help us build the configuration.

The full deployment took about five months due to the fact that we have quite a lot of servers.

I'd rate the experience a five out of five in terms of ease of execution. 

The amount of people you require for deployment and maintenance depends on the complexity of the environment. It can be run and managed by a single person if the environment is not highly complex. If you're talking about probably less than 200 servers, and a couple of network endpoints, one person can manage it easily after it's been configured. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to say. In more complex environments where you've got several geographical locations, several data centers in geographical locations, and so on, you'd probably need more than one.

Splunk handled the implementation. It was a joint effort between them bringing the knowledge and us doing the actual work.

It's a great investment, especially if you want to strengthen your security stance.

It's yearly a yearly license on a three-year contract. On a three-year contract, you get a discount basically - rather than putting it on a rolling yearly contract.

On pricing, if I base it on the functionality of the system out of the box, I would rate it five out of five.

They have several prepackaged modules you can purchase. For example, for the security type, they have Security Enterprise, with the default products getting security essentials. With Infrastructure, the same. We've got an ITOps enterprise, which again, is payable on top of the standard license. 

It's pretty much how much you can actually build in-house. The difference between AT&T, LogRhythm, and Splunk, while AT&T and LogRhythm are pretty out of the box (it's click and configure), Splunk is highly configurable. 

You can make it do whatever you want to, as long as you know how to edit the configuration files. What ITOps and Security Enterprise do, instead of you having to build all that from the ground up, so the dashboards, the logic behind it, the configuration files, and so on, become prepackaged and pre-installed.

We did test AT&T and LogRhythm as well. We chose this solution as a balance between cost and functionality.

AT&T was a great security tool, however, it lacked a lot of the infrastructure things that Splunk does, in terms of server monitoring and network monitoring. LogRhythm did have a dose, however, at a very prohibitive price. It was almost twice the cost of Splunk.

We've got a version of Splunk Cloud. I'm not sure of which version.

I'd advise users to get more professional service days. You get five professional service days with the product, when you buy the license, usually. Definitely get at least ten more.

You need to have some strategy before. You definitely need a strategy. Before you do your PS days, definitely have a look at your strategy and make sure you've arranged your questions rather diligently. Based on how you think you're going to use the system, where you are where you want to be, just box them into separate parts - security, infrastructure, and monitoring. It's going to make life a lot easier when you talk to consultants as the consultants are very, very knowledgeable. However, you need to ask the right questions.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

It is a very well-organized solution. I find it more user-friendly than ArcSight and QRadar. I can search, and I can do whatever I need in terms of dashboards, reports, etc.

It is the best tool if you have a complex environment or if data ingestion is too huge.

The cluster environment should be improved. We have a cluster. In the Splunk cluster environment, in the case of heavy searches and heavy load, the Splunk cluster goes down, and we have to put it in the maintenance mode to get it back. We are not able to find the actual culprit for this issue. I know that cluster has RF and SF, but it has been down so many times. There should be something in Splunk to help users to find the reason and the solution for such issues.

I would also like to be able to see all the data for internal logs. When we search for internal logs, sometimes, we are not able to find some of the data. For example, when Splunk crashes or something happens, we don't get to know what happened. We tried looking into the internal logs, but we could never figure out the reason from the logs. The information is limited, and it should be improved.

We have been using Splunk for more than four years.

Its scalability is very good. Companies nowadays are totally dependent on tools like Splunk. It is widely used in our organization. We have a huge team that uses it on a daily basis. For onboarding, we have another team, and we also have a team for Splunk monitoring. We have a large amount of data ingestion per day, so our team has more than 25 people in it.

In my current company, I have seen the tickets getting resolved soon. In my previous company, which was a startup, a P1 ticket generally took 24 hours or less. They called us back and resolved it as soon as possible, but if it was a P2 or P3, I have seen them taking a month or more.

We worked with QRadar for some time, but after that, we just came to Splunk.

It is straightforward. The deployment duration totally depends on how you are working.

We have it on-premises as well as on the cloud.

We have an unlimited one, and we pay yearly, but I don't know how much it costs. Previously, I worked for a startup, and when they started building it up, it was complicated for them because they didn't have the budget for that many licenses. It was very costly for them. So, startups might find it a little bit problematic because of the licensing, but for bigger companies, there is no issue.

If it is a complex environment and data ingestion is huge where you want to ingest Syslogs or networking devices logs, you should go with Splunk. It is better than QRadar. Nowadays, the usage of AWS is growing, and that should be taken into consideration when deciding about on-premises or cloud deployment.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. I find it great. I'm very eager to do the Splunk certifications as well.

We use Splunk to monitor our private cloud, data center, and other applications.

I don't like Splunk very much and find that it does not have many useful features.

Splunk works based on parsing log files.

I don't like the pipeline-organized programming interface.

I find the graphical options really limited and you don't have enough control over how to display the data that you want to see.

I find that the performance really varies. Sometimes, the platform doesn't respond in time. It takes a really long time to produce any results. For example, if you want to display a graph and put information out, it can become unresponsive. Perhaps you have a website and you want to show the data, there's a template for that, or it has a configuration to display your graphics, and sometimes it just doesn't show any data. This is because the system is unresponsive. There may be too much data that it has to look through. Sometimes, it responds with the fact that there is too much data to parse, and then it just doesn't give you anything. The basic problem is that every time you do a refresh, it tries to redo all of the queries for the full dataset.

Fixing Splunk would require a redesign. The basic way the present the graphs is pipeline-based parsing of log files, and it's more of a problem than it is helpful. Sometimes, you have to perform a lot of tricks to get the data in a format that you can parse.

You cannot really use global variables and you can't easily define a constant to use later. These things make it not as easy to use.

I have been using Splunk for approximately one year.

I use Splunk at least a couple of times a week.

I'm not sure about scalability but to my thinking, it's not very scalable. I know that it's probably expensive because it relies a lot on importing log files from all of the systems. One of the issues with respect to scalability is that there's never enough storage. Also, the more storage you have, the more systems you need to manage all the log files.

Splunk is open for all of the users in the company. We might have 1,000 IT personnel that could access it, although I'm not sure how many people actually use it. I estimate that there are perhaps 200 active users.

I have not been in contact with technical support from Splunk.

In this company, we did not previously use a different monitoring solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We have a DevOps team that is implementing Splunk and they are responsible for it. For example, they take care of the licensing of the product.

We have a team at the company that completed the setup and deployment.

The other product that I've seen is Elastic, and I think that it would be a better choice than Splunk. This is something that I'm basing on performance, as well as the other features.

My understanding is that as a company, we are migrating to Azure. When this happens, Splunk will be decommissioned.

Overall, I don't think that this is a very good product and I don't recommend it.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

I work for a government agency and we use Splunk to monitor our Cisco equipment. I'm a senior network engineer and we are customers of Splunk. 

This is a very capable and flexible solution. It's based on Linux and even Windows installations use the Linux file structure. You can use it to gather syslog messages from anything; jet engines, fin-tech financial institutions, banking, regular enterprise, etc. You can gather the messages from network equipment, elevators, anything you can think of that generates syslog, and Splunk it. They also have a good API so you can write your own code to talk to it or interact with it. The solution has a lot of applications that people have written. It's the best solution on the market. 

It would be nice if they had a wizard to construct searches, including more complex searches that include math or statistics. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The product runs on Linux so it's very stable. It's important to have a well-run SAN environment to store the data. 

The solution can be scaled up to any size of enterprise or agency. I have heard of Splunk installations of over 100 terabytes of licensing.

We used Logrhythm previously but it was not a good fit for our environment. That is why we switched to Splunk.

The initial setup is fairly complex. There's a certain architecture that Splunk utilizes to handle its indexing and it also depends on the size of your deployment. If you have a relatively low amount of gigabytes per day, deployment is simple. And of course it scales to terabyte, so if you have a terabytes installation, there are a lot of additional services that need to be implemented such as licensing servers and clustering. We sometimes configure syslog NG servers to front end the date before it ends up at an indexer. If it's a large terabyte installation, you definitely want to use professional services.

This was implemented through a combination of in house and vendor developers.

n/a

Splunk charges on the basis of gigabytes of incoming log messages per day. Also I would recommend that funds be set aside for Splunk training and certification.

There is a large number of options for training and certification. The more training you have the more useful Splunk becomes. However, right out the gate you can do useful searches due to the search bar design.