What is our primary use case?
When we talk about Splunk Enterprise, I have seen clients using it for their data analysis, collecting the logs and preparing meaningful insights out of it, like having dashboards created from the data that they ingest into Splunk. Apart from that, there is a SaaS platform that Splunk provides which is called the Splunk Cloud platform; it provides similar functionality, but the end-to-end config management is handled by Splunk directly. You just have access to the Splunk search head where you log in and can search the data you ingest into Splunk Cloud. Regarding Splunk Enterprise Security, I have seen customers using it for security use cases and to ensure that the environment or organization is not impacted by any SOC threats; basically, they use it for detection and mitigation both.
Customizing and developing new detections in Splunk Enterprise Security are quite simple since I have got experience with it for more than four years. I am quite familiar with it and enjoy working through that as well.
I do use disparate security solutions that integrate or import data into Splunk Enterprise Security.
The security operations are supported on a very great scale because let's say we have written n number of detections; we also need to ensure that we don't get alerted or notified on false positives. There is a dashboard in Splunk Enterprise Security that displays all the detections identified as a potential risk or alert to the environment. From there, you can triage the work to investigate deeper into it, and from the dashboard, you can drive it towards closure, with different drill-down options to investigate how a particular event was identified as a risk event and whether it was a false positive. If it wasn't a false positive, you can dive deeper into it using different response actions as well; all these customizations can be done and they support any third-party response actions that you want to apply to the Splunk Enterprise Security detection you have.
What is most valuable?
What I like about Splunk Enterprise Security is the way it is able to correlate or ingest any kind of data from any product or source, alert and adapt the whole data as it is, and then provide it in a single visualization format. It handles and provides you options for customizations and different options for alerting as well. Summing up everything from a SIEM and security point of view, I think Splunk is by far the best product that I have been using since my work experience.
Splunk Enterprise Security has indeed helped improve the organization's business resilience. I don't have specific numbers for sharing purposes, but on a quarterly basis, I have seen Splunk helping the resilience and assisting the business greatly in terms of avoiding SOC threats.
What needs improvement?
You need to adapt to new changes constantly and be sure of new learnings in Splunk Enterprise Security; that is the only challenge I would say. However, I don't see it as a problem because if resources are available for you to understand new changes and how detections are managed or how to incorporate advanced threat intelligence frameworks, there is no huge challenge in integrating it with Splunk Enterprise Security. You need to know what things you want to click on the UI; if you are aware of that, there is no challenge. It is just constant learning that you have to give yourself to learn and grow for your own better self.
One improvement I want to foresee is that the AI or agent needs to be fed with accurate data, not false data, so that whenever it performs automation on your behalf, it doesn't misconfigure anything. Trust in the product relies on the AI being reliable and trustworthy, ensuring 100% accuracy and avoiding false positives.
I would say Splunk's ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real time is near accurate; I cannot confirm that it is 100% since none of the systems are. It definitely alerts you on what particular time you need to be notified. However, to achieve near 100% accuracy, how you handle the searches running in your environment and stagger them is important to avoid overwhelming server resources. Splunk provides features to adjust time zones and write custom schedules; there is no challenge with that. However, there will always be delays, so it is about how you ingest the data; if the source is behind the Splunk server's timezone, that could impact results.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Splunk for almost six years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
So far, we have not faced any downtime or performance issues with Splunk; there can be outages, but we are automatically notified when they occur, and the team works on resolution. Since we are using Splunk Cloud, we receive notifications directly from them.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would say Splunk is quite scalable, and we are definitely making the most out of it. Our company was involved in delivering sessions at splunk.conf last year, showcasing how we utilize Splunk and the solutions provided, indicating that we are scaling quite effectively.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate the Splunk support team an eight or nine out of ten; this rating is based on my experience of being part of the partner team that delivered Splunk support. The support depends on the partner, and I appreciate having a dedicated account manager for our customer account, ensuring effective handling of operations and issues. No one can have 100% knowledge, and while there might be delays in response, the support team effectively isolates problems and finds solutions, adhering to an escalation policy that keeps customers updated and satisfied.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Since I have worked more with Splunk, I am somewhat biased but I would say understanding and writing queries to analyze your ingested data is simpler in Splunk and in other products such as Sumo Logic as well. However, no product can match the level of customization and visualization that Splunk can build; you can create reports, dashboards, and present these in a business fashion, which is unmatched.
How was the initial setup?
Deploying Splunk is a piece of cake for me; since I have got so much experience, deploying any kind of environment is not a challenge. I am still in the evolving phase as I started my professional journey with Splunk in 2019. I have made numerous deployments for different testing purposes, replicating customer challenges in our test environment to address their issues directly.
What was our ROI?
That is a bit subjective, I would say because in the Indian market, people often look for alternative solutions to avoid spending more. However, I have seen great satisfaction levels among companies that have utilized Splunk, including the one I am working for now, which has been renewing Splunk licenses over the past decade. If Splunk were not that great, people would not keep renewing it over the years; there is an option for good return on investment, but eventually, people try to find alternatives to save on expenses for R&D or other purposes.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I am not very much aware of the licensing since we are service providers for Splunk or Cribl or DataDog, but I do know Splunk provides licensing in two different ways: SVC-based licensing and ingest-based licensing. The old model charged based on the volume of data ingested on a daily basis, while the current SVC-based model charges based on the compute utilized for searching that data, regardless of volume.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
All over the globe, it is the AI and agent era, and Splunk is also a part of it having introduced Splunk AI as part of its cloud platform features, eventually to be released in on-prem solutions as well.
What other advice do I have?
I usually do not manage or investigate the alerts that have been triggered; I work on building and managing the use cases, optimizing them. The analyst team works on the incidents but from what I have heard, before I joined the current organization there were a lot of changes required to be made internally in the product itself and the way we were writing optimizations. But afterwards, we defined a clean process and the mean time to closure or mean time to resolve had reduced drastically by almost 60 to 70% compared to what it was previously.
It is not that we are limited to risk-based alerting in Splunk Enterprise Security; we are using threat intelligence and we have recently configured SOAR as I just mentioned. Additionally, we are using UBA for user behavioral analytics.
We have definitely seen benefits from the threat detection and threat intelligence capabilities in Splunk; we apply risk scores and threat scores to our detections and to the attributes we want to identify or flag as potentially high-risk or high-threat objects. This helps us prioritize the tasks we want to start our daily task with; it definitely helps with understanding the priority tasks to be worked upon. We also make sure to update our threat feeds regularly since we need to stay on top of all the threat findings globally, ensuring we identify all malicious IP addresses or any file hashes that have been tracked as a threat and are publicly available.
I would advise organizations considering Splunk to stick to the fundamentals; as long as you understand how Splunk operates and the functions of its different components, you won't face challenges in troubleshooting or understanding errors. I would rate this review a ten out of ten overall.
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: MSP