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MANISH CHOUDHARY. - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
We can easily identify users and devices, but the plugins have room for improvement
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk Enterprise Security comes with 300 pre-deployed use cases that can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of our organization, without the need to purchase additional tools."
  • "Splunk can improve its third-party device application plugins."

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Enterprise Security to analyze log data for log monitoring, creating use cases, onboarding, and incident response.

We wanted a single security tool that could immediately identify notable events that could be reported as security breaches, and then enable us to take intelligent action without having to purchase additional security tools.

We have two customers with hybrid cloud solutions. Neither customer is fully cloud-based. Our implementation is based on the customer's requirements, such as compliance, data ownership, and administration. We plan the implementation of Splunk cloud or hybrid models based on these requirements. We discuss the benefits and solutions with the customer to ensure that we are not breaching any compliance policies and that we are selecting the right model for their needs. Because we have multiple customers, we must also consider how to manage this process effectively.

How has it helped my organization?

We use multiple cloud environments for our clients, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and private cloud. We can easily integrate Splunk Enterprise Security and segregate the logs based on the type of index we create for each customer. When we create different indexes, we can segregate the types of logs based on the device type. This makes it easy to separate logs from different universal providers, different machines, and specific types of indexes dedicated to particular customers or groups.

We use threat topology and MITRE ATT&CK to create and integrate use cases for network framework detection and visualization in Splunk. Splunk helps us segregate and integrate use cases based on different threat detections and provides a complete dashboard view of how use cases match with detected threats.

When discussing MITRE ATT&CK and topology, we sometimes encounter use cases where we must ensure the logic is properly implemented to detect the threat and trigger the alert. This is because log access may involve specific teams and their associated MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques. We must be very specific about the information we are observing in order to derive the correct information and framework topology.

Splunk is one of the easiest solutions for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. It is flexible enough to work with small teams, and it provides a broad view of the data, allowing us to segregate and fine-tune the analysis based on the customer's requirements.

Splunk Enterprise Security can help us detect threats faster when it is properly configured. We have implemented over 400 use cases for specific types of malware and other threat detection. In over 70 percent of environments, Splunk is able to detect threats faster than other solutions.

It has helped our organization improve by integrating with cloud providers. Splunk enables us to blacklist specific data types and ranges to reduce our losses, based on our requirements.

We have reduced our alert volume by around 50 percent with Splunk. When we first started creating and using Splunk use cases, we received around 700 alerts. Splunk can merge different sources of use cases into one to identify false positives, which has been very helpful for us.

Splunk has helped speed up our security investigations by almost 70 percent. We have a dedicated incident response team. They use the Splunk incident reports to help with their investigations. 

What is most valuable?

Splunk Enterprise Security comes with 300 pre-deployed use cases that can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of our organization, without the need to purchase additional tools.

We can easily identify the number of security devices and users that are authenticated on the network and present the information to the executive team.

What needs improvement?

Splunk can improve its third-party device application plugins.

Buyer's Guide
Splunk Enterprise Security
April 2025
Learn what your peers think about Splunk Enterprise Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

The Splunk technical support is good but their call times differ.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I previously used IBM Security QRadar, Azure Sentinel, and McAfee Network Security Platform. Splunk Enterprise Security is designed for multiple platforms and is easier to implement.

Splunk is much faster when used correctly and has many tools. With the exception of Sentinel, the other solutions do not have many tools. With Sentinel, we have to define the indexes and all those things, such as the aggregation of logs. It is easy to do searches in Splunk, even in a large environment. I find Splunk to be more efficient than the other solutions I have used in the past.

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment is straightforward. We install the solution and define the roles of each server and the data it will store. The deployment in our test environment took 13 hours.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on our investment in Splunk. The variety of options that Splunk provides is a great selling point for our customers.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

While Splunk is more expensive than other solutions, we would still choose it because of its capabilities. Splunk is a leader in the field and provides a wider range of data and security features than other SIEM solutions.

I would recommend Splunk over any of the less expensive SIEM products. I recommend the license-based solution over the user-based solution that Splunk offers. If I had to recommend any other SIEM other than Splunk, it would be Microsoft Sentinel.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security seven out of ten.

The threat detection capabilities that we get by default are very basic. However, if we want to implement the most effective threat protection on the internet, we need to purchase a relevant solution for intelligent threat protection. This will provide us with more feeds for enterprise security and help us to integrate data by matching the data to the target and to the security with our Splunk.

We have 60 percent of our customers using Splunk Enterprise Security in their environments.

Splunk maintenance is required for updates. 

Splunk provides a centralized monitoring platform, eliminating the need to switch between different platforms to monitor security. Splunk provides a clear view of different security losses and incidents, and we can onboard any number of devices as needed. We can monitor our entire environment from one place, requiring only one team to monitor it. Splunk adds a lot of value currently.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
reviewer2506578 - PeerSpot reviewer
Splunk & Python Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Improves our ability to handle data from applications
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk's strength lies in its single-page view."
  • "Due to its high licensing cost, Splunk is out of reach for many organizations."

What is our primary use case?

As a Splunk engineer, I collect data from various sources, including Universal Forwarder, Heavy Forwarder, DB Connect, and Syslog to monitor application logs. This data is used to create dashboards that visualize application health and identify potential security incidents. Additionally, I configure alerts to notify teams via Slack or email when CPU or memory usage reaches critical thresholds, allowing for prompt resolution. Furthermore, I use Splunk to create KPIs and NDDs for various aspects of the organization, including a custom ITSI service for Microsoft 365. This service monitors child entities like Teams, Outlook, and Edge within a parent application, tracking metrics like team member logins and meetings, CPU usage, and memory usage. All this information is consolidated into a three-page ITSI report.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect malicious activity, such as failed login attempts by unauthorized users. These attempts, whether brute-force attacks or phishing attempts, trigger alerts with detailed information about the incident mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This allows our security team to investigate and take appropriate action quickly.

How has it helped my organization?

We managed Splunk's large clustered environments, I oversaw data collection from roughly 750 applications via universal deployment clients. This experience, coupled with my nearly six years of Splunk expertise, made monitoring application logs and creating Splunk knowledge bases straightforward tasks. While processing task cut-off tickets from the application team could be time-consuming, the actual monitoring itself was easy to manage.

The end-to-end visibility provided by Splunk is important because our company uses applications like K-Connect and Splunk to monitor user activity across different sectors. Having previously worked in both healthcare and finance, I'm familiar with how this process works. We access user information including personal data to track their activity from start to finish within our systems. Splunk allows us to mark specific user data points for further analysis, ensuring we have a full view of user or patient activity within each organization we serve.

Splunk helps me find security events across multi-cloud and on-prem platforms. I would identify missing data by checking the last hour's timeframe (span=1h). If on-prem or cloud data was missing, I'd investigate which logs weren't being ingested, whether an indexer was down, or if a forwarder wasn't sending data. Additionally, I'd check if the application or event log volume was overwhelming the universal forwarder, requiring a queue to process the data effectively.

Splunk improves our ability to handle data from applications. This data is often unstructured or unavailable in a usable format. To make it usable, we used to normalize the logs manually through back-end commands and edit various Splunk consoles and platforms. This process transformed the data into a structured, human-readable event format, allowing us to extract the information we needed.

We can identify potential malicious activity through Splunk by analyzing database logs with SQL queries. For instance, a high number of failed login attempts within a short timeframe could indicate unauthorized access attempts. Additionally, with multi-factor authentication systems like Duo, a user logging in from two geographically distant countries within a short period might be suspicious. To address this, I've developed SQL queries that check for logins within a one-hour timeframe across different countries. These queries trigger alerts on a dashboard, allowing IT to investigate the user's IP address and determine if the login is legitimate.

Splunk has significantly improved our business resilience by providing a single pane of view for all our data. This visualization allows us to monitor for anomalies, including unusual application activity, unauthorized executables, and suspicious shell scripts running on both Linux and Windows servers. By triggering alerts for these events, Splunk empowers our organization to proactively identify and address potential threats, ultimately improving overall stability.

Splunk allows us to easily check the data for malicious activity. It also helps reduce the alert volume by allowing us to set thresholds for alerts. For example, we only receive an alert when the CPU usage exceeds 90 percent or the number of failed logs is more than 15.

Splunk helps us investigate by providing relevant context from system logs. We can search the Splunk logs for specific applications and timeframes, and then examine all the data fields for suspicious activity, failed login attempts, or any other anomalies.

It helps security teams investigate threats faster by providing a central platform to collect and analyze data from various security applications. This focus on enterprise security allows teams to identify and respond to threats across the organization, leveraging frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to match attacker techniques and tactics.

What is most valuable?

Splunk's strength lies in its single-page view. This interface allows us to explore all our data, build dashboards with alerts, and visualize real-time information through various charts like column, bar, and pie formats, providing a full user experience.

What needs improvement?

Due to its high licensing cost, Splunk is out of reach for many organizations. Making their licensing more affordable would open up Splunk's solution to a wider range of users.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security has excellent scalability.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The deployment is complicated  because our organization works with on-prem servers. All the data needs to be duplicated and all the searches and indexes need to happen properly.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The Splunk licensing is high.

While more affordable, alternative SIEM solutions lack the flexibility and in-depth visualization capabilities offered by Splunk.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of ten.

While Splunk Enterprise Security offers a user-friendly interface, its true power lies in its ability to create highly customized dashboards that streamline investigations and reporting.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Enterprise Security
April 2025
Learn what your peers think about Splunk Enterprise Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer2239824 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Cybersecurity Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Correlation searches are very helpful, and it has amazing stability and fantastic documentation
Pros and Cons
  • "The correlation searches are most valuable just because we are able to do things like RBA."
  • "The UI could be better. This is applicable to Splunk in general. I know that a lot of people who get their hands on Splunk are hesitant to use it just because they find it overwhelming. There are a lot of options."

What is our primary use case?

We essentially use Splunk for our Security Operations Center (SOC). All of the notables that we create for the SOC are done in Splunk Enterprise Security. It is our SIEM.

How has it helped my organization?

I cannot put a value on it, but it has been pretty good. Previously, we used to use ArcSight. I used to do incident response when I first joined the SOC, and there were times when I used to sit down and run a search right at the start of my shift, which is at 7 AM, and I used to hope that it would be run by the end of the shift at 7 PM. I used to hope that it would run in 12 hours and not time out. When we got Splunk, it was a game changer. It took seconds to a minute depending on how intense the search was.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. It is easy to ingest data in Splunk. Based on what I hear from our customer success manager, he has customers who have issues ingesting logs, but for me, it is one of the easiest things ever. Their documentation is fantastic.

Splunk Enterprise Security has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environments. It is very important for us. When we first got cloud, it was like the Wild West. Anyone could spin up their own cloud infrastructure, and we would not know about it. It was public. We did not know what they were doing with it. Now, we have a better grasp and understanding of what is out there, so Splunk makes it easy for us to keep track of our endpoints that are public-facing.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our mean time to resolve. As compared to ArcSight, it has saved at least three to four hours per incident. We utilize a SOAR platform. We do not use Splunk SOAR. We use a different SOAR platform, but with the combination of Splunk Enterprise Security and our SOAR platform, we are able to cut down our mean time to resolve. The time saved varies depending on the case. A normal case would probably take less than ten minutes per investigation. A critical P1 case would take more time, but a normal day-to-day case would take less than ten minutes for our analysts to do their work. A normal case is where a user clicks on a phishing link in an email, or your EDR solution says something happened and there is a threat actor in your environment moving laterally trying to access data.

What is most valuable?

The correlation searches are most valuable just because we are able to do things like RBA. One of the things that we started pretty recently is our insider threat program, and it has been pretty good, especially using RBAs as our framework for the insider threat.

What needs improvement?

The UI could be better. This is applicable to Splunk in general. I know that a lot of people who get their hands on Splunk are hesitant to use it just because they find it overwhelming. There are a lot of options. If you open Google.com, you just have a search bar. You just search and hit "go," but when people look at Splunk, they are just overwhelmed. I see that with our analysts. Even after training, if they do not use it every day, which they should be doing, they kind of lose it.

Its learning curve is a bit steep. It is hard for users to use it. For individuals who know how to use it, it is fantastic. It is great. For example, if you are a Splunk Cloud customer, and you had an outage or there is a maintenance window, those individuals who are power users would know immediately when it happens or they would know that there is a maintenance window coming up because they are the experts. They are the SMEs on their teams, and they are the ones creating value using Splunk. Individuals who do not know how to use it are intimidated.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Splunk Enterprise Security since 2017. It has been about six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Its stability is amazing. It is always up. It is fantastic.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is awesome. When we first purchased Splunk Cloud, our ingest rate was about one terabyte or one and a half terabyte. We moved from the ingest-based license to the workload-based license three or four years ago, and now, we ingest about 10 to 12 terabytes. It is handling that just fine as if nothing has changed.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate their support a six out of ten because there are times when someone picks up a support case, but they do not know what they are doing. I have to guide them. It is like, "I have already done the research. This is what needs to be done. There you go. Do it." I expect a little bit more from support in terms of having the knowledge upfront.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We had on-premises ArcSight. We had one guy run it for our enterprise. Our enterprise has roughly over 130,000 people. We are a global company, and we had one guy run the entire infrastructure. We could tell when he took days off because it would not work. When we moved to Splunk, we went to Splunk Cloud immediately. We were one of the first Splunk Cloud customers or one of the bigger ones. That is what I was told when we made the switch.

I do not know whether we have seen any cost efficiencies by switching to Splunk Enterprise Security because I was not there during the ArcSight days per se. I was there at the very tail end, but I would assume that we have seen cost efficiencies just because ArcSight was only used by the security team, whereas Splunk is used enterprise-wide, not just by the security team. It should be cheaper for us. The value is there. It is cross-functional.

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in its deployment.

What was our ROI?

Its time to value was about a year. It took us about a year because back in 2017, we were making that conversion from an on-premise ArcSight deployment to a Splunk Cloud deployment. We had to make sure that everything that was being sent to ArcSight was sent correctly to Splunk. We had to make sure that everything was in a common information model format and that we could rebuild the content.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Splunk Enterprise Security is cheaper than competitors, but I do not know whether it is just our contract. 

Everyone says that Splunk, in general, is expensive. I have talked to many peers within our industry, and I know a lot of individuals who are moving away from Splunk just because of the price. That is one of the reasons why we are looking at other competitors to see if anyone is doing something better than Splunk and has a cheaper rate.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I have looked at other competitors. We recently looked at CrowdStrike's LogScale solution. It feels like Splunk to me. I cannot say how we would reproduce what we have done in Splunk on the infrastructure side or backend. Our environment is uniquely different. Technically, I am the only person who runs Splunk for our entire organization, similar to the way the previous person ran ArcSight for the organization. If I were to compare apples to apples, Splunk to me is still number one in that category.

Splunk's community is the biggest benefit. It is so easy to go to Slack and hit someone up. There is a good chance that you will find someone out there who has run into the exact same issue that you are having. Their documentation is fantastic. Because I am the only one who runs it for our organization, it is easy for me just to Google it, find the document, and just follow it. It is as simple as that. It gets a little dicey with XDR and all the other things that are happening in the market, such as using a data lake. Instead of putting our eggs in one basket or using Splunk, we might use something like Snowflake.

What other advice do I have?

I get introduced to new ideas by attending the Splunk Conference. In the year before last, someone did a talk about business email compromises. Within our company, we did something similar, and we did it about nine to ten months before the talk. I listened to the talk to see if we were doing anything different from what they were doing. I found out that we were doing the exact same thing essentially. I thought, "We could have done a talk like this too." These talks are very helpful. For example, they showcased the attack analyzer, and currently, we are looking for an automated online sandbox, just like the attack analyzer. We have been looking at cloud-based sandboxes that are out there. Being able to see it hands-on and how it interacts with Splunk makes it much easier for us to make that decision.

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

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
CEO at Securis360 inc.
Reseller
Used for compliance, logging, log storage, and root cause analysis
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk Enterprise Security is a standard solution providing good customer service and partnership."
  • "Splunk should have more regional data centers in the Middle East."

What is our primary use case?

We mostly use the solution for compliance, logging, log storage, and root cause analysis. In 2015, we had AIG as a client, and they only had Splunk. Splunk Enterprise Security is one of the oldest solutions that did the logging and storage.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk has fantastic brand value, which helps us sell it as resellers. The solution's pricing is quite competitive. The solution meets all the requirements. As a compliance person, I know that log storage is very important for data privacy compliance guidelines like ISO or CCPA. Splunk provides all of those compliances and checkmarks.

What is most valuable?

I like that the tool is light and the agent doesn't slow down the machine. Splunk Enterprise Security is a standard solution providing good customer service and partnership.

What needs improvement?

The solution should improve regional knowledge of the new regulations coming out of the Middle East. As a consulting firm, we are currently targeting many Middle Eastern markets, including Saudi Arabia and Dubai. They don't have a local server support cloud center there, which is a big issue because they don't want their data to go out of the region. Splunk should have more regional data centers in the Middle East.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security provides good stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution's scalability is fantastic. Even 10,000 to 50,000 endpoints don't slow anything down. The servers, log storage, and ingestion work smoothly, irrespective of whether there are 5,000 or 50,000 endpoints.

How are customer service and support?

The solution’s technical support is very good.

What was our ROI?

Our customers using Splunk Enterprise Security don't have any compliance issues, and they don't get fined by the regulators, which saves them money.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is pretty competitive.

What other advice do I have?

I'm a consultant who uses Splunk for other clients. It's important for the clients that it can communicate with all kinds of devices, like firewalls, WAFs, servers, endpoints, switches, and routers. All of that is figured out over time, which is useful.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a good tool for finding security events across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments.

Splunk has helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data. It can also identify and solve P1 or high-critical-priority problems in real-time.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped us reduce our alert volume by around 50%.

The solution provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations, and this context information has impacted our investigation process. Having all the data in a single place does help with post-incident response and forensic root cause analysis.

Splunk Enterprise Security has significantly helped speed up our security investigations. I save 60% to 70% of my time because it's easier to find what I want to find through the tool's user interface.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our mean time to resolve by around 50%.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
PeerSpot user
Manu Subbaiah - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Cyber Security Strategy, Implementations & Operations at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Offers users the ability to onboard data easily with minimal connectors
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution's most valuable features are its ability to transact in the cloud and its ability to onboard data easily with minimum connectors."
  • "The product's price may be an area of concern where improvements are required."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution in my company to deal with certain migrations from a legacy SIEM solution to a new product like Splunk Enterprise Security or from on-prem to cloud migrations. Another use case involves implementing a new SIEM solution like Splunk Enterprise Security from scratch.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are its ability to transact in the cloud and its ability to onboard data easily with minimal connectors. Some of the new players in the market need to build new connectors to bring data into the SIEM solution. With Splunk Enterprise Security, you get built-in connectors, as it is a major platform.

What needs improvement?

The product's price may be an area of concern where improvements are required.

The metrics that I or my company's clients see in terms of the improvements from the use of Splunk stem from the fact that some of the metrics that the tool provides for senior leadership, specifically in the area of visibility when it comes to organizational split, considering that there are multiple lines of business. It would be a good feature in the tool if it could provide dashboarding for different lines of business in the product's next release.

One of the key areas where Splunk Enterprise Security can do better is if it integrates with AI solutions.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Our company's clients who use the solution like the fact that they can rely on Splunk Enterprise Security as a product, especially since it is not a new entrant in the market. Though the tool has moved from on-prem to the cloud, I feel that the fundamentals of Splunk Enterprise Security are strong. The support structure available for Splunk is good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is of paramount importance to a lot of clients. Some of the clients value the scalability feature of the product, and they are also willing to pay more to use such features. There are some pharmaceutical clients my company deals with who like the scalability feature but do not like the increase in the price attached to the scalability part.

How are customer service and support?

To be very fair, I have not been directly exposed to Splunk's support team since I deal with our company's clients. I have not heard any major complaint from our company's client regarding Splunk's support team, so I assume that it is pretty good.

How was the initial setup?

Deployment of the product is easier than migration. It is always better to write on a clean board than write on a board where someone has already written something. If you migrate from one solution to another, you also have to migrate some of the use cases, and you need to fine-tune them. If you are deploying a product from scratch, it is easier. My company also recently dealt with one of the clients, and we had to onboard 28 log sources in ten weeks with no issues. We also had to deal with heavy forwarders, syslog, universal forwarders, and everything under the sun, which was a big mix, making it a difficult environment. There were no issues during the onboarding process. In general, I am happy with the product.

What was our ROI?

ROI depends on a lot of calculations, so my company does not consider it. Most of the complaints from our clients are related to the cost of the product. Our company's clients are happy with the features and reliability of the product. Cost is one of the major factors that companies are migrating from Splunk Enterprise Security to some other solution. I don't know if it is relevant or not, but I feel that the acquisition of Splunk by Cisco has spooked a few of the clients since they are unsure if they will receive any support if they don't have a Cisco-based infrastructure and instead have some other company like HP supporting their infrastructure.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Splunk is really expensive compared to all the other tools on the market, including Microsoft Sentinel. Some of the clients prefer to go for a data lake kind of solution because of Splunk Enterprise Security's prices. Some of the clients have also mentioned that the pricing of Splunk Enterprise Security is not visible for them and it is based on storage because of which they are not able to control various aspects associated with the pricing part.

What other advice do I have?

In cases where I see the replacement of existing SIEM solutions from my company's customers' end, I have dealt with scenarios where Microsoft Sentinel replaces Splunk Enterprise Security. I have also dealt with implementations associated with Splunk Enterprise Security from scratch. I have managed migrations of Splunk Enterprise Security from on-prem to the cloud.

The primary reason customers are moving to a cloud-based solution is that products like QRadar and LogRhythm did not initially offer cloud versions. The other reasons why customers are moving to cloud-based solutions are the difficulty of configuring their use cases and the problem of finding the right resources to support them. With Splunk and Microsoft Sentinel, resources will be much more available to users in the market, but for LogRhythm, the market is going down. Training opportunities, the building of accelerators, available information in the outside world, and a lot of reasons have prompted customers to move to cloud-based products.

I would say that it is easy to configure the use cases, and also to correlate use cases, which in turn helps reduce alert volume. More importantly the product can provide good visibility in the area of dashboarding, metrics and security events.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps me find any security event across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments.

Visibility across multiple environments or varied environments is absolutely important to our company's clients, and it is one of the key areas because most clients do not want to go and see multiple tools like CrowdStrike for endpoint protection. Our company's clients want to be able to see one dashboard with all the feeds coming in, along with all the alerts correlated to it.

The product provides relevant context to guide our company in the investigation. When you have more context, L1 or L2 support finds it easier to investigate. I don't know if Splunk already has an AI-based plugin tool or not. If AI is present in the product, it would help L1 and L2 support resolving tickets in a much faster manner, and it is also an area where context helps.

I have seen a reduction in the mean time to resolve from the use of Splunk Enterprise Security by around 30 to 40 percent if it is able to deal with contextualization. L1 and L2 support teams look at a particular incident, and if they end up spending more time adding the context or going through multiple tickets, it adds up the time needed to resolve an issue.

The product helps speed up security investigations by around 30 to 40 percent. Collecting the context is the key step for resolving or investigating purposes.

It is not fair to state why a certain rating is being given to a product since a person rates a solution on certain aspects, and it could be in terms of the migration part. If I speak in terms of the performance and support parts of the solution, I would rate the product a nine. If I consider the cost of implementing and maintaining the product, I would rate other products much better than Splunk Enterprise Security. As a company, we have implemented Splunk Enterprise Security multiple times, and we see the business associated with the product growing higher. My company also provides training to people in relation to Splunk Enterprise Security. My company hopes to do more business with Splunk Enterprise Security. My company has 3,00,000 employees.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Integrator
PeerSpot user
Sneha Golhar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at Wipro Limited
Real User
Top 20
Is quick to deploy, easy to integrate, and provides good visibility across our environment
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk's visualizations make it easy for users to understand the data."
  • "Licensing costs can be a barrier for those with limited budgets."

What is our primary use case?

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with both log monitoring and alerting capabilities from a centralized interface.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Enterprise Security's detection capability is good. Real-time alerts are crucial for threat detection. When unknown traffic is identified, incidents are automatically created and alerts are sent to the monitoring team for prompt action.

Our mobile device ordering website experienced a fraud attempt. We identified a surge in traffic originating from the same IP address through Splunk Enterprise Security. This allowed us to swiftly block the suspicious activity, potentially saving millions of dollars.

Integrating Splunk Enterprise Security with other tools is easy.

It is easy for us to monitor our multiple cloud environments using Splunk.

Splunk offers good visibility across our multiple environments. We can monitor roughly 80 percent of our environment through Splunk.

Splunk is our primary tool for analyzing real-time logs to detect malicious activity. These logs are then used to create security incidents and trigger alerts for further action.

We can see the benefits of Splunk Enterprise Security quickly after deployment.

Splunk Enterprise Security reduces our alert volume because it is precise and customizable.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us speed up our security investigations by sending alerts and providing a deep dive into the logs.

What is most valuable?

Splunk's visualizations make it easy for users to understand the data. Additionally, Splunk can ingest all our data, creating a centralized and informative platform. This combination is a powerful asset for data analysis.

What needs improvement?

Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing structure could be more accessible for smaller organizations. Licensing costs can be a barrier for those with limited budgets.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for 5 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I would rate the stability a 9 out of 10. With a stable environment, we may encounter issues 2 percent of the time.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate the scalability an 8 out of 10. 

Splunk now offers SmartStore, which automatically scales storage capacity without sacrificing performance.

How are customer service and support?

The support team is supportive and quick to respond.

Splunk offers Platinum, Gold, and Silver support. With the Platinum package, they respond within two hours.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We transitioned from AppDynamics to Splunk Enterprise Security, which provides a valuable single pane of glass for managing and viewing security metrics.

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment is easy. The deployment for Splunk Enterprise Security is quick.

What was our ROI?

By automating our monitoring and alerting with Splunk Enterprise Security, we've achieved a significant return on investment. This has freed up over 190 days of manual monitoring effort by our team, resulting in overall cost savings of around 30 million dollars.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing costs are high for Splunk Enterprise Security.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security 8 out of 10.

I highly recommend Splunk Enterprise Security to anyone looking for a comprehensive security solution. It's a single tool that can monitor and manage our entire security posture, including business metrics, IT infrastructure, and security alerts. Splunk also simplifies incident creation and log management, providing a central location for all your security data.

Splunk Enterprise Security is used by 30,000 people across multiple locations in our organization.

The widespread adoption of Splunk Enterprise Security requires regular maintenance to ensure optimal performance.

Organizations with low logging volumes can benefit from using the open-source ELK Stack.

The resilience Splunk Enterprise Security offers is good.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
PeerSpot user
Viney Bhardwaj - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Manager at Ernst & Young
Reseller
Top 10
Mature, highly customizable, and good integration capability
Pros and Cons
  • "If I need to integrate devices for logs, it is easier with Splunk. We can integrate different applications, network devices, and databases. It is also very rich in documents. It is the best."
  • "Splunk does not provide any default threat intelligence like Microsoft Sentinel, but you can integrate any third-party threat intelligence with Splunk. By default, no threat intelligence suite is there, whereas, with IBM QRadar or Microsoft Sentinel, the default feature of threat intelligence is there. It is free. If Splunk can provide a default threat intelligence suite, it would be better."

What is our primary use case?

We mainly use the Splunk Enterprise Security app to use Splunk as a SIEM. I have worked with Splunk on-premises, which is Splunk Enterprise, and I have worked with Splunk Cloud as well. 

We mostly use Splunk for the SOC environment. We use Splunk for security incident monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Enterprise Security fastens our security investigations.

Our organization monitors multiple cloud environments. We have more than 50 customers. Customers have their own licenses, and for some customers, they are shared. We have a single Splunk console. We have customized Splunk, and we have onboarded multiple customers. For some customers, we have integrated Splunk with SOAR. There is a single console to monitor SIEM and other devices. It saves the analysis work. It provides good visibility as compared to the other SIEM products I have worked with. 

We use the Threat Topology and MITRE ATT&CK framework features. You can map your use cases with the MITER ATT&CK framework. It is common in all SIEMs nowadays. It is good. It gives a good mapping of the use case and a better understanding.

Splunk Enterprise Security has not helped reduce our alert volume. It behaves as we configure it. The engineer handles the fine-tuning of the use case and reduction in the alerts.

What is most valuable?

The fast search is valuable. As compared to other SIEMs, Splunk is very fast in terms of the search and providing data.

The customization of the use cases is another valuable feature. It is query-based, and now, there is a feature to have machine learning as well. We can write advanced-level use cases, which is a limitation of other SIEMs.

The third point is the device integration. It is very smooth. If I need to integrate devices for logs, it is easier with Splunk. We can integrate different applications, network devices, and databases. It is also very rich in documents. It is the best.

What needs improvement?

Splunk does not provide any default threat intelligence like Microsoft Sentinel, but you can integrate any third-party threat intelligence with Splunk. By default, no threat intelligence suite is there, whereas, with IBM QRadar or Microsoft Sentinel, the default feature of threat intelligence is there. It is free. It would be better if Splunk could provide a default threat intelligence suite.

The second issue is that Splunk is expensive compared to many other SIEM tools in the market. A competitive price will work better.

The third issue is that Splunk Cloud is sometimes slow. If I create more use cases, Splunk will be slow because they provide limited resources in Splunk Cloud. They can do some optimization there.

The last issue is that they used to give a trial version of the Splunk Enterprise Security app that we could showcase to customers for demonstration, but they have stopped that free trial version. If they can start that again, it will be better. It will help to showcase the capability of Splunk.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for seven years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is sometimes slow. It also depends on the number of use cases or queries. You need to optimize the use cases or queries that are running and consuming a lot of resources. I have also seen Splunk Cloud hanging a bit. I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of stability.

How are customer service and support?

We have contacted their support many times. Their support is average. We sometimes have a hard time with their support. They are not very reliable, but this is the case with all SIEM products.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We are also using Microsoft Sentinel and IBM QRadar. We have also used ArcSight. For some customers, we are using LogRhythm and the RSA solution. Different customers have different SIEM tools, but I find Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk better than the others in the market. I feel Splunk is the most mature tool at this time. It is very easy to customize. You can do whatever you want.

IBM QRadar is the cheapest option available in the market. It is a traditional SIEM tool. It is not as fast as Splunk or Microsoft Sentinel, but from a costing perspective, it is convenient. There are also a few open-source SIEM tools. Many companies are using those, but if you go with a commercial tool, IBM QRadar is very good in terms of cost value. When it comes to customization and maturity, Splunk Enterprise Security is definitely number one. Microsoft Sentinel comes second, and IBM QRadar comes third.

How was the initial setup?

It is easier than other tools.

What about the implementation team?

We implement it for our clients. The number of people involved depends on the license utilization, the number of devices, and the time frame. Two to three months are normally required for the full integration of a customer environment, and a minimum of two people are required for the integration.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is expensive. That is why many customers have moved to IBM QRadar. The price is definitely a challenge for customers.

What other advice do I have?

If budget is not an issue, you can go ahead with Splunk Enterprise Security. Nowadays, Splunk is ready to negotiate. With good negotiation, you might get a good deal. If you are a large organization with more than 2,000 devices or more than 500 licenses, Splunk is the best choice. If price is not an issue, you can blindly go with Splunk because it is the most mature tool in the market at this time. Microsoft Sentinel is scaling up, but it is still not there where Splunk Enterprise Security is.

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

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
PeerSpot user
reviewer2382405 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer/Architect at a government with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
It integrates well, reduces alert volume, and we can customize the dashboards
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk Enterprise Security allows us to create custom dashboards by changing fonts and modifying widgets."
  • "I've noticed that onboarding data from various multi-cloud sources and diverse products, such as security network devices, can be challenging."

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for various security use cases, including writing correlation searches. This has significantly improved both our use cases and correlation searches. We can leverage existing resources, making modifications as needed, rather than starting from scratch each time. Splunk Enterprise Security provides diverse use cases across different environments, including AWS, Azure, and multi-cloud setups, while also integrating with Microsoft Sentinel. Additionally, we can integrate Splunk's service orchestration product for further automation. Overall, this allows us to automate tasks that security analysts previously performed manually, such as reviewing incident dashboards. We can fine-tune alerts based on analyst feedback. Splunk's research team ensures that use cases are updated with the latest security content, enabling us to understand and implement necessary steps while customizing them to fit our company's needs. This is what makes Splunk Enterprise Security so popular; it streamlines processes compared to legacy security products that often rely on manual scripts. Clients, including government agencies and banks, are transitioning to Splunk Enterprise Security due to its reduced training requirements and comprehensive features. Everything is consolidated, simplifying training and certification. Additionally, integrating Splunk's service orchestration product further automates tasks and improves response times. The substantial investment in Splunk indicates its staying power; no other product on the market currently offers comparable capabilities. Cisco's acquisition of Splunk reinforces its potential for success, combining APM, data logging, and security portfolios. In one financial project involving 600,000 users, we were able to monitor all incoming traffic, identify security activities, and distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic, including phishing attacks and potential identity-based threats. Splunk enables tracking individual identities, crucial for detecting attacks where perpetrators hide behind compromised identities, often leading to data breaches and other security incidents.

We implemented Splunk Enterprise Security to assist with AWS security, which includes GuardDuty, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and Inspector. These AWS components generate compliance and security alerts, which we correlate and use to create dashboard reports and identify security events for various use cases. We then enable the out-of-the-box use cases and send notable events to the dashboard. The implementation is currently in its early stages.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Enterprise Security operates based on incoming data, making monitoring multiple cloud environments relatively simple due to data availability and integration capabilities. Data from cCloudRail, CloudWatch, Azure, and other diverse environments can be incorporated. While occasional patching might be necessary, most integrations are readily available, offering extensive coverage without customization. Specific customizations might still be required, but most functionalities are pre-built, leveraging code developed by Splunk. This efficient approach involves analyzing data from vendors like Palo Alto and applying add-ons to apply code and automate parsing.

Our visibility into various environments depends on how much data we incorporate; therefore, the more we scan, the better our visibility.

Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities act as a secondary approval and vetting process, helping our organization ensure there are no unauthorized users.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework allows us to identify criticality levels, helping us respond to incidents. We might integrate incident response with a REST API, where a notable event triggers the creation of a ServiceNow ticket. Information flows from ServiceNow back to Splunk, which then feeds other systems, enabling bidirectional incident management. These processes are largely out-of-the-box, as Splunk integrates well with ServiceNow, except for any customizations. We understand the data integration requirements and leverage Splunk's extensive integration capabilities.

Splunk Enterprise Security does a good job of analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. The amount of information the research and threat detection teams receive from Splunk enables faster threat detection of up to 60 percent, eliminating the need to consult numerous sources. This efficiency is a key benefit of Splunk, as its significant investment in security allows for expedited processes.

I have seen the older legacy product where they have this manual process to identify issues, run scripts, try to identify the output, and then go through ten systems to collect data. This could take days. Now, with Splunk, we have everything correlated with multiple use cases, and we have a correlation search between multiple systems, along with application data. Splunk Enterprise Security can stitch all this information together and show it in a single pane of glass, which makes decision-making faster and allows us to focus on the relevant issues instead of wasting time on non-relevant ones. They have done this well.

Splunk Enterprise Security significantly reduced our alert volume. The initial challenge was dealing with a legacy IBM system that generated a massive amount of unfiltered noise, making it difficult to identify relevant events to send to the incident dashboard. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, and the value of the system wasn't apparent. To address this, we fine-tuned both the SOAR system and Splunk by applying filters and conditions to focus on relevant data. Ultimately, Splunk reduced the alert noise from 1,000 events in two hours down to ten, which were then grouped into a single notable event. Despite potentially having hundreds of background events, Splunk condensed this information into a single, actionable item, allowing us to focus on investigating the most relevant issues.

Splunk Enterprise Security accelerates our security investigations by reducing noise, allowing us to focus on relevant use cases. Everything is categorized as high, medium, or low priority, and people immediately start investigating high-priority issues connected to PagerDuty. Sometimes, this leads to on-call situations, sometimes immediate action. Service orchestration and playbook scenarios enable automated responses, like instantly blocking unauthorized access to a system. The possibilities for security use cases with playbooks and service orchestration are vast, and I'm excited to explore them further in the coming days.

The dashboards and reporting capabilities help to aid our security analysis.

We have integrated Splunk Enterprise Security with various services to streamline our security operations. This integration allows us to leverage diverse data sources for creating lookups, data models, knowledge objects, and regular expressions. By automating the development of use cases and regular expressions, we can apply them to data more efficiently, enabling faster implementation and analysis. This approach enhances our ability to detect and respond to security threats effectively.

Splunk Enterprise Security has enhanced our organization's security posture by providing comprehensive security compliance dashboard reports.

What is most valuable?

I appreciate how Splunk Enterprise Security connects users to the research team and threat documentation, providing access to current events impacting other clients, security vulnerabilities, and relevant use cases. The platform's daily updates offer valuable insights for enhancing our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security allows us to create custom dashboards by changing fonts and modifying widgets. Those familiar with XML coding can further personalize dashboards to align with frameworks such as MITRE. Alternatively, we have the option to use the pre-built dashboards.

What needs improvement?

I've noticed that onboarding data from various multi-cloud sources and diverse products, such as security network devices, can be challenging. Although Splunk has simplified data onboarding with features like data managers, they need to improve their out-of-the-box parsing capabilities. While they've made significant progress, covering about 70 percent of common products, there's still a 30 percent gap where manual configuration is required. This forces us to spend time understanding and writing custom parsing rules instead of focusing on data analysis. With Splunk's recent acquisition by Cisco, I'm hopeful they will prioritize enhancing this functionality and increasing their coverage to 90 percent or more.

I want to see Splunk Enterprise Security dashboards incorporate more features, such as out-of-the-box AI and user behaviour analytics, which are accessible within a single dashboard.

The technical support response time has room for improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security has stability issues, especially with large data volumes, increased data intake, complex dashboards, custom models, and processing that significantly impact performance. Many customers experience this; even with demos using small datasets, performance degrades with millions of data points. This necessitates capacity planning, dedicated teams, and enforced best practices. These practices include restricting complex searches, blocking problematic users, and providing training to prevent performance degradation. Constant vigilance and proactive measures are crucial to maintaining a stable Splunk Enterprise Security environment. I would rate the stability of Splunk Enterprise Security five out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security's scalability six out of ten. We need to add more shared CPU memory and increase the capacity, and scaling requires a lot of planning and effort.

How are customer service and support?

Splunk's support quality has declined in the past five years. Response times are now slower, and resolving an issue can take weeks. Submitting a ticket and connecting with the appropriate support agent often requires numerous emails and calls.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

To improve security coverage and user experience, we replaced our outdated legacy solution with Splunk Enterprise Security.

How was the initial setup?

Our Splunk Enterprise Security cloud deployment utilizes a DevOps approach with a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. This automation has significantly improved our deployment speed, reducing the process from a week to a few minutes. Changes are made in the development environment and then automatically pushed to production after a click-through approval process. This streamlined workflow eliminates the previous manual process and associated delays, resulting in a faster and more efficient deployment cycle.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is based on data volume, which generally suits large enterprises.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten.

Splunk is widely used across larger organizations. While large organizations often have extensive teams dedicated to Splunk projects and upgrades, smaller organizations can also use Splunk, taking advantage of more affordable pricing options like the free tier for limited data. Cost isn't a significant concern for larger organizations, who prioritize Splunk's security features and are willing to invest in its capabilities.

Splunk Enterprise Security is deployed across all departments, processing millions of data points. Over 500 people manage this data: building dashboards and reports, working with Enterprise Security, discussing use cases, and creating custom data models. This represents a massive effort for any large organization where every department utilizes Splunk.

Government departments are transitioning to Splunk, with daily onboarding increasing the current user base of 5,000.

Because the deployment is cloud-based, the Splunk DevOps team handles maintenance.

Splunk offers a resilient SIEM solution with comprehensive capabilities for research and a wide range of use cases. It is constantly updated, ensuring it remains a valuable and comprehensive SIEM package.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise Security. It is an excellent tool widely used by many organizations, making it a valuable choice for security information and event management.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Splunk Enterprise Security Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: April 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Splunk Enterprise Security Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.