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Daniel Hammons - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director of Detection and Response at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Integrates easily with other solutions and fastens investigation and response
Pros and Cons
  • "The incident review pane is the best part of it because that is where the SOC lives. It is the heartbeat of what the SOC needs to do. You are able to start the investigative process. As you are sitting in the incident review pane, you see the alert, and from that one alert, which is called a notable alert, you can drill in and see all the different specific details that are tied to that."
  • "Being able to have a one-stop shop where you have the alert, but then you can generate the case right there from Splunk Enterprise Security instead of having to pivot to another tool such as Mission Control. You do not have to keep bouncing between them, so if you could do it all in one place, that would be great. The new release is supposed to start getting in that direction."

What is our primary use case?

There are a lot of use cases for Splunk Enterprise Security. The main one is when you are trying to detect an authentication attack. There are lots of people trying to get access to a system, so they are constantly trying to authenticate. Splunk Enterprise Security can quickly detect that through its correlation engine. If there is a specific attack of the anomalous amount of users trying to log into a system, it generates an alert. Our SOC is then able to analyze that alert and determine whether it is a false positive or a true event. If it is a true event, they can work towards containing that attack. If anything is a success, they can quickly provide that information to our incident response team.

How has it helped my organization?

The benefits that we have seen from using Splunk Enterprise Security have been faster response time and faster enrichment of information so that the analyst can act and respond in a more timely and efficient manner, which then provides more information to leadership, such as myself. We are then able to respond. We know how to present risks and how efficiently our SOC is doing to our senior leaders. There is a 30% to 40% improvement because, with the system we had before, the capability of figuring out what was going on to analyze the event was cumbersome. Splunk Enterprise Security has driven and given analysts the ability to analyze a lot more efficiently.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. It is very critical for us.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us find any security event across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments. It helps in all of this. We have multi-cloud environments. We have all four main cloud environments. We also have our on-prem environments. We have also set up a hybrid environment. It has improved our ability to detect and find needles in the haystack that we were not able to see before. There are lots of things they have been able to detect. People were installing things and misusing AUP violations that we were not able to see before.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped reduce our alert volume with the implementation of risk-based learning. When you are doing risk-based learning, you can definitely reduce the volume, but initially, when you move from one SIEM to Splunk Enterprise Security, you do not really reduce volume. You are generating more. Because you are getting better visibility, you are generating more information for the analysts to look at, and then over time, as Splunk Enterprise Security and the team learn the environment, you are able to tune down and then use the risk-based alerting to help reduce a lot of false positives.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigation. There are limitations, which is where Splunk SOAR helps with the enrichment of the information, but it definitely provides good context. In the notable alerts, it provides a lot of key information that you need, and then there is the ability to drill in to see what the actual events were, so it really helps.

Splunk Enterprise Security is efficient at predicting, identifying, and solving problems in real time. With the correlation rules, the ability to have adaptive responses, and the ability to tie in even machine learning into that, we are able to do real-time analysis and quickly gather and detect.

Splunk's unified platform helps consolidate networking and security tools, but sadly, our organization does not use IT observability tools. We are purely from a security perspective.

What is most valuable?

It has so many features. The incident review pane is the best part of it because that is where the SOC lives. It is the heartbeat of what the SOC needs to do. You are able to start the investigative process. As you are sitting in the incident review pane, you see the alert, and from that one alert, which is called a notable alert, you can drill in and see all the different specific details that are tied to that. You then have adaptive response action that can be taken automatically on that, or you can even drill in to look at what events drove that alert to be created. You can then start doing more hunting and querying that way. There is so much information contained in the notable alert itself in that panel. It helps to drive the direction of where the engineer should go.

What needs improvement?

I am looking forward to seeing what is coming out in the new release that was announced, but case management is an important thing. Being able to have a one-stop shop where you have the alert, but then you can generate the case right there from Splunk Enterprise Security instead of having to pivot to another tool such as Mission Control. You do not have to keep bouncing between them, so if you could do it all in one place, that would be great. The new release is supposed to start getting in that direction.

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 one environment that has been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years in the Splunk Cloud. I am currently in the process of migrating my on-premise corporate environment to Splunk.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

At this point, Splunk Enterprise Security is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is very scalable. Particularly, when you do search and clustering, you are able to scale rapidly to be able to meet the demands of what is needed for your SOC. The data model setup helps to quickly drive and get rules created without having to need a new data source or a new rule. You just send that new data source to one of the data models, and you already have the rules there, and it automatically starts generating alerts based on those existing rules.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate their support a seven out of ten. Sometimes, you get some solid people, but other times, it takes a bit of effort to get across what the actual issue or situation is. This is a challenge for any help desk organization particularly when you have lots of customers calling in and all of them with unique situations.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

We were using another tool previously. There were many reasons for switching. One big reason was the ease of integration of data into the tool. With the previous tool, to integrate a normal log source, such as an identity access tool, into the SIEM, we had to pay for PS engagement in order to even get the information in. Splunk has native integration with all these different apps. It is natively tied to all the different IDAM and ID tools out there. It is very easy for the team to implement it themselves. They do not have to go and get extra help to do it. They can install the app, get the keys and authentication set up between the two new tools, and then it just works.

How was the initial setup?

Our deployment experience was just fine. I deployed Splunk at other companies before, so it was not new to me to do it with this company. The pricing and everything else went smoothly. The Splunk team was super helpful. They were very engaging. They helped to build it. We were able to get access to Splunk engineers who worked for Splunk, and they helped define the sizing. They went through and evaluated what our current solution was and helped us build out what we needed in order to meet and exceed that capability. Splunk has been super helpful.

For one environment, I am using the public cloud, and then for my other environment, I am using an on-premise setup. We have the AWS cloud.

What about the implementation team?

We did use professional services to help with this. At my previous company, I would not have used professional services because I had a team of Splunk architects who knew what they were doing and knew how to do it. In this company, we were moving from a different technology to Splunk. My teams were not as familiar with Splunk, so I needed the extra help. We had the help of Splunk professional services and third-party professional services. We used Verizon.

What was our ROI?

The environment that we had set up has been running for two years. I had planned that initially for a certain amount of growth, but within the first year, we had already doubled the size of the data. It was able to handle the information so much more efficiently that a lot of the groups that were not integrated into the SIEM before started saying that they needed their data monitored as well, so we started growing quite quickly. It has helped us exponentially.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I evaluated several SIEM solutions before choosing Splunk. With Splunk, we had the ease of integration of data because getting the data in as quickly as possible and making use of it is important. Another area is that in certain tools, you have to generate one rule per data source, whereas Splunk has the data modeling capability where you have all the data sources going into the data model, and then you create one rule per data model instead of per data source. It helps reduce the workload for the system, so there was that aspect of more performance than any other solution.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. It is a market leader from an SIEM perspective. It has bells and whistles, but it does not let you get lost in those bells and whistles. It helps drive the analyst into what is the most important thing that they need to focus on, and that is protecting the company. They are able to be more efficient. They are able to help do what the mission of the company is, and that has enabled the company to not worry about the security part. Without a risk, they are able to do their business and help their customers.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Valarie - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC Technical Lead at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
Gives visibility into what's happening across the network and allows us to dig deep
Pros and Cons
  • "Being able to aggregate detection and alerts from various sources is valuable. Like everyone else, we have a wide range of tools in our shop. We are able to stop at one spot and look at all the data. All the data is able to come through, and we can then jump from source to source or index to index. We can dig deep whenever we need to and get a good high-level understanding."
  • "The first thing that comes to mind is a little bit of UI improvement. It sometimes can be a little bit buggy or it can be a little bit slow, but that varies from customer to customer."

What is our primary use case?

I am a SOC lead, and we use Splunk Enterprise Security for alerting and working on incident review and incident response.

We have a hybrid environment. We have multiple clouds, and I am not sure if I know all of them. We have Azure Labs that we run for our students. We have cloud infrastructure. We have cloud applications on which we need visibility.

How has it helped my organization?

It is incredibly important that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility into our environment. Especially being someone who goes through and reviews the work that my analysts are doing, I definitely need to be able to see what is happening all across different domains of our network.

We work for a large university, and we have different tenants. We have our students, we have our employees, and then we have our faculty as well. We definitely need to see what is happening across the domains and across all of those different tenants.

It saves so much time for the analysts, and it empowers analysts to carry out and triage an investigation, wherever needed. It is incredibly hard when you are working with different sources. I am sure everyone else knows that you cannot expect your analysts to be on the same page a hundred percent at the time. They might say, "Hey, I am going to go into this tool and look at these alerts here, or I am going to look at these learnings from this tenant." We need to be looking at all of those sources and all of those domain tenants at once. Being able to see that across the board and not having to jump through hoops to get the data that we want is extremely valuable. I do not have metrics for how much time it has saved because I do not know our life before Splunk. I know that it has done a great deal in saving time, and now with SOAR, that is exactly what we are looking into. We are looking into how we can empower that even more by combining it with Splunk Enterprise Security.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data. Splunk is definitely a leader. I cannot imagine leaving and going to another toolset and losing the capabilities that I have and the knowledge that I have. One of my favorite parts is that Splunk really does work. It seems to me that they work with actual users on a regular basis, so they know the pain points and they know what our issues or our primary concerns are.

In the beginning, it did not help to reduce our alert volume, but over time, it has definitely reduced that. Something that I am working on primarily with our SOC right now is increasing our alert volume because we are at such a low rate because of the work that we can do with Splunk's capabilities. We are looking into what areas in the network we are not alerting on. We have these out-of-the-box solutions, but there is more that we can build on. It is empowering our analysts to be SOC analysts, but the more advanced employees can work towards the threat detection engineering side or SOAR playbooks development side or even just on the backend of setting up and working with the configuration.

I wish I knew the metrics for the reduction in the alert column. I do not have any approximation, but our SOC is very manageable. We are a small team, and the number of alerts varies. On average, we get about 300 alerts a day on the high end and 150 alerts on the low end. If it is a very slow day, such as a vacation for everyone, and we do not have a lot of activity going on in the network on our endpoints, it is very manageable for a small team. Our SOC team has four full-time employees, and then we have intern/student workers because we partner with the university. We have three of them. Overall, there are seven, but, of course, students are only able to work a maximum of 15 or 18 hours a week or something like that, so the amount of man-hours that we have is pretty low.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations. There could be a little bit more, but that also depends on the analysts and where they are in terms of maturity. I have a lot of capability to go and expand what I need to, but others do need a little bit more guidance. It is not easy on the first look for someone who has never done it before, but after being taught or learning about it themselves, it is pretty easy. It can still do a whole lot. If we are looking at an anonymous login, we are getting context from different sources. If there is an activity that is going on in the host machine, such as we have some login from Russia, which has never happened before, there is a firing of alerts from the EDR. We can see our email gateway firing alerts regarding their account. That allows us to contextualize and correlate the activity very easily.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization’s business resilience. We are able to take action immediately when we need to. Especially with risk-based alerting, we are able to understand what needs attention right now. We do work with young junior analysts a lot, and we are able to teach them how to identify what needs action right now or what needs to be investigated or triaged immediately. We are basically protecting our crown jewels first rather than some low-hanging fruit that we see everyday, but we cannot take a look at them because we have some important things going on in our network.

What is most valuable?

Being able to aggregate detection and alerts from various sources is valuable. Like everyone else, we have a wide range of tools in our shop. We are able to stop at one spot and look at all the data. All the data is able to come through, and we can then jump from source to source or index to index. We can dig deep whenever we need to and get a good high-level understanding.

What needs improvement?

The first thing that comes to mind is a little bit of UI improvement. It sometimes can be a little bit buggy or it can be a little bit slow, but that varies from customer to customer.

They can continue building out the Splunk community. They can give incentives for customers to collaborate and expand on what they are working on but also provide the tools to do that. There are good resources such as Splunktern. I love the Splunk education and training platform. It is amazing, but I wish there was a little bit more. Especially with the training and applications, they should give us real-world use cases and a little bit more specific scenarios. Splunk is doing a much better job than a lot of other organizations or technology platforms, but they can give more information. I know a lot of my Splunk users do not even realize the things that they can do. On the user end or analyst end, they need to be more proactive by giving more of a heads-up. For example, I found out about Splunk research today. I have been using Splunk for two years. I wish I had known about that more. They can reach out more. The incentives can be anything. Some people love stickers, and some people love shirts. They can create that community a little bit more.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I do not have much to compare it to, but it is stable. We hardly have any issues, and if we do, they are intermittent. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The growth that we have seen in my time with our team has not been so much. However, we are adding more tools or trying to gain visibility into different areas of our network or applications that have already been there. Being able to throw some logs in and figure out that we should be monitoring this has been painless. We can just forward them all over. It takes an hour or so. We get the answers and the visibility that we need.

How are customer service and support?

I have not used it very often. I have used it once or twice, but I would say that the engineers I have worked with have been extremely knowledgeable. They have helped so much. We were working on SOAR, and we were pretty new to it as a SOC. We were able to work all of that out with a Splunk engineer on a call. They were able to answer our questions. They knew our needs and goals, and they were able to guide us to meet those. That has been very effective for us. I would rate them a ten out of ten. I have not had any bad experiences.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We have had Splunk since I have been in this company.

What was our ROI?

Specifically, I cannot say what return on investment we are getting. However, when we look at other products, we know we are not going to have the same capabilities and we are not going to have the same response times and correlation capabilities. Even working with other vendors and getting their logs into Splunk can be a nightmare, and that is enough to make us say that we do not want to buy their product.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Personally, I have not evaluated other solutions. We do have some friends and family connections who use other solutions. Based on their stories, we will continue using Splunk.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten. If it were a ten, it would do my job for me.

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.
Sr. Security Engineer at a sports company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
The user interface gives you a single dashboard to directly view all high-level information
Pros and Cons
  • "I like Splunk's automated threat detection and orchestration capabilities. Splunk offers a single solution for analyzing, aggregating, correlating, monitoring, reporting, visualizing, etc. You can get all of these capabilities in one place. On top of that, it provides a cloud, testing, on-premise, and hybrid solution, giving customers more flexibility for their use cases."
  • "We've sometimes faced issues with upgrades. The incident review dashboard sometimes breaks after updates. When we add a space or something in the description or anywhere in the SQL, the drill-down value may be reset with a blank value. Before rolling out any software, they should test it thoroughly and ensure clients won't have issues with the upgraded version. It should be compatible with all or most of the apps. All major issues must be addressed before rolling out the upgrade."

What is our primary use case?

I use Splunk for visualization, reporting, monitoring, log aggregation, and other security purposes. We gather various logs into one place and analyze them based on specific business use cases to get high-level insights that inform decision-making at every level of the organization. We also use it to aggregate other IT logs — not just security. 

Our organization is working in a massive on-prem environment. We're one of Splunk's oldest clients. It's convenient to migrate everything to the cloud, and we would have more flexibility. However, we currently have our resources and everything established to use Splunk on-premises, so we aren't switching to a cloud environment.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk allows us to monitor logs and track suspicious activity in real time. With the help of the SOAR platform powered by AI and ML, we can respond quickly. Our security posture is better, and we can resolve security incidents quicker. Splunk has improved our visibility by providing critical security metrics in our dashboard and strengthened our security controls. 

The number of alerts we receive is similar to what we saw using our previous solution. While it hasn't necessarily reduced our alerts, Splunk is improving our resolution time and overall security.

What is most valuable?

I like Splunk's automated threat detection and orchestration capabilities. Splunk offers a single solution for analyzing, aggregating, correlating, monitoring, reporting, visualizing, etc. You can get all of these capabilities in one place. On top of that, it provides a cloud, testing, on-premise, and hybrid solution, giving customers more flexibility for their use cases. 

Splunk's real-time monitoring is one of its best features.  The user interface gives you a single dashboard to directly view all the high-level information. The security incident monitoring and investigation page is also very helpful. You can document an investigation step by step. Many investigators can work on a single incident also based on their shifts. Everyone can add notes on the investigation page. 

The incident response features are based on real-time data. The monitoring team can immediately take over an incident and prioritize tasks based on risk scores. We can assign multiple technicians to one security incident based on their skill, improving resolution time.  The incident review dashboard provides many useful details, like the indicators of compromise and risk scores.

We can get threat intelligence from multiple platforms, including the latest known IOCs, to support our response to security incidents. We store the threat data from various sources in a centralized place, and it updates every six to 12 hours. 

The MITRE ATT&CK framework feature is helpful for understanding which phase an incident is in and what the next steps are so a technician can prevent it from progressing. It gives us a detailed overview of other tactics it might be associated with, enabling us to stay vigilant. We can correlate with other simultaneous or sequential incidents and take action to strengthen our security based on these incidents.

What needs improvement?

We've sometimes faced issues with upgrades. The incident review dashboard sometimes breaks after updates. When we add a space or something in the description or anywhere in the SQL, the drill-down value may be reset with a blank value. Before rolling out any software, they should test it thoroughly and ensure clients won't have issues with the upgraded version. It should be compatible with all or most of the apps. All major issues must be addressed before rolling out the upgrade.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Splunk for eight or nine years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate Splunk nine out of 10 for stability. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate Splunk eight out of 10 for scalability. Scalability is always a challenge. The larger your environment, the more issues you'll have. There aren't many problems with Splunk on the cloud, but scaling can be challenging in an on-prem environment. If you're ingesting a significant volume of data, you need a proper maintenance routine to maintain your base architecture. Sometimes, it's a bucket application. It can take a few hours to reset those things, and network issues might contribute to that. 

How are customer service and support?

I rate Splunk support eight out of 10. It varies based on your data volume and number of licenses. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

I have used several solutions for different clients, including QRadar, Palantir, and Microsoft Sentinel. Splunk has more capabilities than QRadar. It's also more flexible and user-friendly. You can modify and customize the solution to show you the information you want.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment depends on the environment. It may take only a couple of weeks to deploy Splunk in a small environment, but a larger environment involves a detailed process that may take months. It helps to have a larger staff. It also depends on how process-oriented an organization is. Some organizations will take much more time in the planning and design phase. 

After deployment, Splunk requires a good deal of maintenance, depending on the volume of data you're ingesting and your user base. It may require multiple resources to manage this environment. 

What was our ROI?

Splunk improves our security controls, resolution time, and threat-handling capabilities. We're saving time and resources, meaning more money for our clients. 

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

I don't know about Splunk's pricing because I work on the technical side, but I know it is a costly platform. There are cheaper products and some open-source ones, but Splunk costs a lot because of the features it provides. Still, the pricing is a concern for many of my clients, and more would use Splunk if they lowered the cost a bit. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of 10. I would recommend Splunk because it covers multiple services in one place. It also has a strong developer community. You can easily get help from community support. Splunk is a versatile product that competes well with leading security tools like Microsoft Sentinel.

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
Sathish Suluguri - PeerSpot reviewer
Splunk SOAR/Phantom at PricewaterhouseCoopers
Real User
Top 10
User-friendly, feature-rich, and best support
Pros and Cons
  • "It is user-friendly. It is more effective than other solutions. The support and help for troubleshooting and the documentation from Splunk make it very effective."
  • "The only improvement I am expecting is the cost of the licensing. Clients are going to other solutions just because of the cost."

What is our primary use case?

There are many use cases. Most of the use cases are related to security, data integration, and data sources. 

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Enterprise Security helps with real-time detection. When we integrate any data source, if any external IPs or external devices are accessing that data source, we get notified. We get alerts based on the use cases we develop.

Splunk Enterprise Security has improved the incident response time a lot. Splunk is doing log ingestion, and it is also used to search the database for issues. It is ingesting and identifying. All that is happening in a single solution.

Splunk Enterprise Security is very easy to use. We can monitor anything. We can monitor and integrate any type of applications and servers. It is very easy and effective. I work with different security tools, but none of the security tools has these many features.

Splunk's documentation is clear. Irrespective of the environment we are working in, we have clear documentation.

One of our clients is using the Threat Intelligence Management feature. The actionable intelligence provided by the Threat Intelligence Management feature is very good.

I have been working with different vendors. Splunk Enterprise Security is a very effective and user-friendly tool. Whether it is Sentinel, LogRhythm, or QRadar, each one of them has its own limitations, but Splunk has all the features.

Its benefits can be realized very quickly. It does not take lots of days or months.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped to reduce our alert volume. There is a 60% to 70% reduction.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations.

What is most valuable?

It is user-friendly. It is more effective than other solutions. The support and help for troubleshooting and the documentation from Splunk make it very effective.

It has multiple features. It has data integration, search, reporting, and alerting.

It does not need any advanced programming. It only requires basic programming.

What needs improvement?

In terms of features, it does not need any improvement. Everything is good so far. The only improvement I am expecting is the cost of the licensing. Clients are going to other solutions just because of the cost.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with Splunk for more than 7 years. I have worked with Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Cloud, and on-prem Splunk.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is very stable. We never had any issues or bugs.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Its scalability is good.

How are customer service and support?

The support from the Splunk side is very good. They provide the best support.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

I have used Sentinel and QRadar. I switched because of the advanced features, support, and good documentation. It is very effective. It is the best solution. The only problem is the cost.

How was the initial setup?

I have worked with cloud deployments and on-prem deployments. Its initial setup depends on the environment. It is sometimes complex, and sometimes, it is very easy. We also get good support from them.

Our implementation strategy has 3 phases. We first go for development, and then we go for Pre-Prod. After that, we move to Prod.

What about the implementation team?

Currently, I am the only one handling the deployment, but when it comes to operations, we need at least two to three people.

It requires maintenance. Generally, 2 people are required, but for my clients, I am the only one who is taking care of the maintenance.

What was our ROI?

We have seen an ROI.

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

It is expensive. I work for multiple clients. I am working for more than 5 clients, but most of the clients are switching from Splunk to Sentinel because of the cost. Even though Sentinel is very limited, clients are moving to Sentinel.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend Splunk Enterprise Security to anyone who is looking for a similar solution. This is the only solution with all these features.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a 9 out of 10. It is stable, user-friendly, and feature-rich. It is very helpful. Even though it is expensive, the stability, support, and technical documentation make it very effective.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
SAURABHYADAV4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at HCL Technologies
Real User
Top 5
The solution speeds up our response by enabling us to automate some of the investigation steps
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk's interface is user-friendly, and it has apps and add-ons for most applications. We can easily normalize the data to make it readable and understand the logs. We easily get all the field extractions and enrichment done by using the apps and add-ons. This helps us understand the application logs because the raw data is useless unless we extract some useful information from it. These add-ons make it so much easier."
  • "It would be nice if Splunk reduced the cost of training. Their training sessions are way too costly."

What is our primary use case?

I work in security and use Splunk for endpoint and application security, use case development reports, etc. I haven't used Splunk much for threat intelligence. We have a threat intel feed configured, and we create use cases based on those and the recommendations by the threat intel team. If something isn't covered, we create a use case for it. For example, if an application has an authentication interface enabled, we check all their authentication mechanisms and all the login policies. 

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk speeds up our incident response by enabling us to automate some of the investigation steps, such as finding information about the user or the source of the incident on machines. We can then move directly into the remediation phase and assign those tickets to the remediation team. It also triggers automatic email alerts to the recipient user. If our security analyst wants to see the alert logs or anything, they can easily drill down to identify any information required.

It allows us to configure use cases involving our machine-learning toolkit, and we have an adaptive threshold in ITSI. Using these tools, we can eliminate false positives and do some whitelisting to weed out users who are performing benign activities. Removing the false positives reduces the incident response time.

We can start to see results immediately once we have achieved a steady state. For instance, we can easily show how much our mean resolution time for incidents has fallen and provide metrics in a way that is easy for our clients to understand. 

What is most valuable?

Splunk's interface is user-friendly, and it has apps and add-ons for most applications. We can easily normalize the data to make it readable and understand the logs. We easily get all the field extractions and enrichment done by using the apps and add-ons. This helps us understand the application logs because the raw data is useless unless we extract some useful information from it. These add-ons make it so much easier.

Dashboards are useful when we present things to management. They want the numbers and the results. The leaders aren't interested in what we are working on. We need some visualization for our presentations. Splunk has beautiful and useful visualization and dashboard alerts. We can easily create visualizations using the available options and create different types of charts, reports, and graphs that are easy for management to understand. We can also provide our leaders direct access to the dashboards, so they don't need to reach out to our team to get this data or we can automatically send them the reports via email. 

Splunk has several useful features, like asset and identity management. If we integrate our asset and identity management properly in this log, it's effortless to identify the user, device, or asset. We can get all the details if we integrate those things into the lookup engine.

What needs improvement?

It would be nice if Splunk reduced the cost of training. Their training sessions are way too costly.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used Splunk for around seven years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk is highly stable if you meet all the prerequisites and have enough physical memory for your local storage. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

If you use the cloud version you can scale as much as your licensing allows. It's easy to scale, upgrade, or add instances according to your needs. 

How are customer service and support?

I rate Splunk support 8 out of 10. They're good, but I think there is room to improve because Splunk is the market leader, and they should strive to provide the best possible support. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

I previously used QRadar and ArcSight. Splunk is one of the top products. Compared to Sentinel or QRadar, Splunk is the market leader in features and security. You can integrate application, physical, or cloud security and onboard those logs into Splunk, then tailor it to your requirements. 

How was the initial setup?

I've worked on multiple deployment models for Splunk, including hybrid, cloud, and on-prem. The deployment is straightforward. We do a POC and then scale it based on our requirements. 

What was our ROI?

I feel like Splunk is worth our investment. 

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

The cloud version of Splunk is somewhat expensive, but it does provide some flexibility because you do not need engineers to manage the system. Everything is hosted in the cloud because it is a SaaS service. It depends on the usage. It is costly, but everything good thing comes at a price.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Splunk Enterprise Security 9 out of 10. 

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
PeerSpot user
Kiran Kumar. - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Administrator at Wipro Limited
Real User
Top 10
We can create dashboards, speed up our security investigations, and reduce alerts
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk has a wide range of features that customers use to find and analyze all kinds of logs."
  • "The price has room for improvement."

What is our primary use case?

We provide comprehensive infrastructure support and ingest mine data in three ways. The first is Agent-based where the information is sent from client machines to an agent. The second is TCP port forwarding where data is sent to Splunk through an open port. The third is the HEC token. We then use the Splunk DB Connect app to ingest data as per the client's requirements.

How has it helped my organization?

We are currently onboarding data from AWS to GCP. We are moving data from on-cloud to our production and deployment level environment. Additionally, the data is being added to the services on those machines. To forward the logs to Splunk, we have created a default index, which is a way of storing data in a particular way. We have created the index based on the requirements of the data storage.

Currently, we are ingesting all kinds of government security PI data. Similarly, we can ingest any kind of confidential data into Splunk using masking. This allows us to filter the data and mask sensitive information. For example, if a user account number has ten digits, we can mask out the first six digits so that only the last four digits are visible. We ingest this kind of confidential data into Splunk, and we also ingest PI data and Splunk governance data.

We are using the threat intelligence management feature. We have a separate security team, called a soft team, which is responsible for finding vulnerabilities, threats, and malware alerts in our Splunk environment. We use the threat intelligence management feature to identify any suspicious activity that may be coming from outside users. The soft team continuously monitors these alerts and creates proxy alerts to identify any potential threats.

Splunk's insider threat detection capabilities help us to easily identify threats by using Splunk queries. We have predefined Splunk Insight and are also using the one in the app, which is configured on top of Splunk machines. This allows us to quickly identify how many unknown IPs are syncing into other machines, and we can use this information to identify threats.

We use threat pathology and MITRE ATT&CK. I am currently supporting a financial institution with its infrastructure, which is split into two teams: one for complete infrastructure support, including hosting and operations, and the other for security-related matters. My team is continuously investigating new security threats, so we will take care of the onboarding process. As part of the infrastructure support team, I am responsible for handling all onboarding tasks. If I encounter any security concerns, I will escalate them to the SOC team.

We have a lot of operations using the Mission Control feature in Splunk.

Splunk helps us analyze malicious activities and detect breaches. We are using a Splunk SaaS application in a multi-class environment. To maintain high availability with zero downtime, we have maintained close to 70 indexes and 50 searches. Splunk provides us with alerts from the entire infrastructure, which helps us maintain our service. We use Splunk Mission Control to iron out any issues. For any special needs, we can go to Mission Control to verify and mitigate alerts.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped us reduce our alert volume. Splunk currently ingests five terabytes of data, and we can set parameters to exclude rotational works and backlogs to reduce the number of alerts.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations.

What is most valuable?

Splunk has a wide range of features that customers use to find and analyze all kinds of logs. For example, they can use SQL queries to identify vulnerabilities. Additionally, they can create dashboards to visualize and filter their data, and to create real-time alerts when thresholds are exceeded. Splunk Vision is a popular tool for data modeling and visualization and is used worldwide.

What needs improvement?

The price has room for improvement.

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?

We are maintaining a multi-cloud environment across multiple regions, and for the last two years, Splunk Enterprise Security has maintained a 99.999 percent uptime.

How are customer service and support?

We open cases on behalf of our customers with Splunk. If the technical support resolution is not up to par, we request a meeting call to work with the support team and resolve the issue for our client.

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

We also use the Red Hat OpenShift enterprise Kubernetes container platform. OpenShift is a more popular container tool with excellent support, but all of our OpenShift deployments are on-premises, along with production clusters around the world.

How was the initial setup?

For the deployments, we scan the data to ensure that the Splunk machines can support it. If we identify anything on the machine, we ask the customer to remediate the issue by upgrading the version of Splunk. Most of our customers are using version 8.3.3.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of ten.

Organizations that value their security should not choose the cheapest SIEM solution. They should expect to invest in a SIEM solution that can meet their specific needs, even if it means spending more money.

Monthly patching maintenance is required. 

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?

Google
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.
PeerSpot user
IT Director at Administrative Office U.S. Courts
Real User
Reasonably priced, helps with compliance, and saves a lot of time
Pros and Cons
  • "The most useful feature for me is the ability to create different kinds of alerts and set a different kind of denominator that will capture the real event. That is helpful for a power user like me."
  • "It will be helpful for customers if they can create some real-world cases, and we can find a case study to align with. I know that Splunk has tremendous potential. We only include a tiny piece of it. There is a lot of stuff that we need to learn. If Splunk can provide more real-time examples, that will be helpful for customers."

What is our primary use case?

We gather all the security logs from all the endpoints, network appliances, and the security filter. We have set up automatic alerts that are sent to system administrators, so we have pretty much real-time alerts about anything that happens. 

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Enterprise Security has definitely improved my organization. First of all, it helps with compliance. Our organization has something called scorecard requirements. It is an annual self-check checklist. Having alerts set up is one of the requirements, and secondly, we have a local administrator who gets the alerts. That makes our job a lot easier. So, we pretty much know what is going on in a real-time setting.

We are the judicial branch of the government, so we are pretty much into our private cloud. We do have a setup to monitor our private cloud but not outside our organization. If we can monitor one cloud, multiple clouds will not be hard at all. It is easy.

Splunk has absolutely reduced our mean time to resolve. Knowing on time and having firsthand information is very helpful for any organization. We are able to capture what is going on, and the visibility of it is absolutely tremendous. I cannot provide the metrics, but it has saved a lot of time.

Splunk has absolutely improved our organization’s business resilience. We have been using Splunk for the last six or seven years, and I cannot imagine a life without Splunk. 

In terms of Splunk’s ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time, this is something that we will look into. We have not yet looked into machine learning, AI, and all of Splunk. Currently, we are more in the reaction mode, but we are trying to get more in the protection mode or have more proactive measures. We have not got to that point yet, but we will definitely be there.

What is most valuable?

I am not into the administrator type of setup. I am more like an advanced user. The most useful feature for me is the ability to create different kinds of alerts and set a different kind of denominator that will capture the real event. That is helpful for a power user like me.

What needs improvement?

Splunk conferences are very helpful for networking and talking to folks who have a similar situation. It would be helpful for customers if they could create some real-world cases, and we can find a case study to align with. I know that Splunk has tremendous potential. We only include a tiny piece of it. There is a lot of stuff that we need to learn. If Splunk can provide more real-time examples, that will be helpful for customers.

For how long have I used the solution?

It has been six or seven years. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk has a reputation for being scalable. You can start small, and if your demand increases, you can scale your platform. Splunk does a good job. It allows customers to have scalability so that they can expand their capacity. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of scalability.

How are customer service and support?

In our company, we have a Splunk consultant who is very good at providing a solution. So far, I have not had any problem that is unresolved. I would rate their support a ten out of ten. In this industry, there is good support, and there is bad support. Splunk's support is more like Cisco's support. It is pretty good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We used something else, but I do not remember the name. Splunk is what we have been using for a long time. It is more advanced in terms of IT security. There is more scalability and the capability to do a lot of different things on multiple platforms. This is where it is more advanced than other products.

How was the initial setup?

I was not in the deployment team, but I was involved in the early stage of evaluating all different kinds of products.

What was our ROI?

There are a lot of things for which you can measure a return on investment, but security is something on which it is hard to put a dollar value and measure how much return you have got. However, in terms of helping the administrator or helping the company to put security in place, Splunk does a great job. I cannot imagine a life without Splunk.

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

The pricing is a little bit on the higher side, but looking at what Splunk provides us, it is reasonable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated what was on the market, and fortunately, we picked Splunk. Looking back, it was the right decision.

What other advice do I have?

Splunk is moving in the right direction and providing better and more mature products. This is my fifth conference, and I see the progress. I see Splunk bringing in all new products. They are pretty much in line with the security trends. They have improved a whole lot to meet customers' needs.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a ten out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Resident Consultant (Security Analyst) at helpag
MSP
Top 20
Accelerates security investigations and threat detections and allows customizations
Pros and Cons
  • "I find it beneficial that Splunk Enterprise Security easily integrates with other tools. Due to its excellent API capabilities, it facilitates connections with various cybersecurity tools."
  • "I have noticed a return on investment with Splunk Enterprise Security, as it delivers substantial value for money."
  • "Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power. When we execute heavy, resource-intensive queries over long periods, the performance dips."
  • "Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power."

What is our primary use case?

We have customized use cases for Splunk Enterprise Security as per our environment, due to our infrastructure related to cloud, virtualization, and a few application servers, along with Active Directory management, where we look for user interface and access management. We receive alerts related to any password breaches or unauthorized user access, or if any applications stop running. 

Consequently, we created multiple customized use cases, and accordingly, we receive alerts on Splunk Enterprise Security. It integrates with other tools for threat intelligence and anomaly detection. We are enjoying a good experience so far, and our admins ensure that the use cases are well-maintained. Additionally, they perform fine-tuning as needed. 

We have some database servers integrated for alerting us about unused services. We communicate with our database admins regarding incidents related to data management issues. We suggest actions to the database admins based on these alerts for better data management.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Enterprise Security is highly customizable, which is an excellent feature. We are continually fine-tuning it to meet our requirements, and everything has been smooth thus far. We also have well-designed dashboards that allow us to visualize data from various use cases in comprehensive graphs, which is beneficial for management reviews, especially during inspections, to display the status of our environment.

We monitor multiple environments, and those environments are integrated with Splunk Enterprise Security, functioning effectively.

In terms of visibility, it offers insights into integrated devices such as firewalls, cloud infrastructure, and virtual machines. The extent of visibility corresponds to the number of devices we integrate with Splunk Enterprise Security. We have access management servers and Threat Intelligence integrated, enhancing visibility across various elements in our environments.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides good visibility into our environments.

Splunk Enterprise Security aids us in detecting threats faster. Over time, it has incorporated enhanced AI support that enables self-analysis and offers valuable feedback. It operates as an intelligent tool, parsing and generating relevant incidents effectively.

Splunk Enterprise Security significantly improves our organization's business resilience. Since my introduction to Splunk Enterprise Security in 2022, I have observed an increase in its intelligence levels, and I look forward to integrating more infrastructure with it. Our reliance is shifting more towards Splunk Enterprise Security for providing solid decision-making capabilities and easy integrations with multiple cybersecurity and IT infrastructure controls.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce our alert volume to a good extent. It goes beyond mere incident handling by providing feedback to IT infrastructure personnel and database administrators. The incident responses have enabled us to make several environmental corrections, reducing flaws and incidents over time. For instance, alerts related to unnecessary service account logins have prompted us to give feedback to admins, which reduces their workload. False positives are a notable aspect we address to minimize unnecessary alerts, while true positives associated with malware or MITRE framework indicators prompt effective management action.

Splunk Enterprise Security accelerates security investigations. The tool contains extensive data, and the key lies in how to extract that information, depending on the analyst's capability. Our company emphasizes obtaining Splunk Core admin and user certifications to enhance our understanding of the Splunk Enterprise Security product.

What is most valuable?

I find it beneficial that Splunk Enterprise Security easily integrates with other tools. Due to its excellent API capabilities, it facilitates connections with various cybersecurity tools. We utilize different controls, such as Anomaly and Threat Intelligence, and also integrate it with Data Diode, which assists in one-way communication for infrastructure. Splunk Enterprise Security can seamlessly receive logs from various infrastructures, including Data Diode and firewalls.

We utilize Threat Topology and MITRE ATT&CK features, as these aspects fall under the MITRE ATT&CK framework. They provide coverage for continuous user activities and password issues. The MITRE ATT&CK framework is beneficial for detection and outbound traffic, and it offers a good number of default use cases that we have implemented in our environment.

What needs improvement?

In terms of recommendations for improvement, when performance degradation occurs, we need to do a root cause analysis. The repeated tendency to inform us about memory utilization complaints encourages us to consider adjusting our query needs. Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power. When we execute heavy, resource-intensive queries over long periods, the performance dips. Our admin quickly intervenes to correct resource bottlenecks, allowing everything to function properly again.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with Splunk Enterprise Security for approximately two years now.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I find it easy to scale Splunk Enterprise Security for our environment, and I would rate its scalability an eight.

How are customer service and support?

I have sought assistance from Splunk Enterprise Security support in the past, particularly during deployment, and they provide friendly and effective help.

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

Having experienced using QRadar from IBM, I find Splunk Enterprise Security more intelligent and supportive.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment of Splunk Enterprise Security is straightforward, and integration with other security controls is quite easy after the initial setup.

What about the implementation team?

Initially, we required the assistance of Splunk Enterprise Security consultants for the deployment process.

What was our ROI?

I have noticed a return on investment with Splunk Enterprise Security, as it delivers substantial value for money. This is why we are keen on expanding our infrastructure under Splunk Enterprise Security rather than other SIEM options.

What other advice do I have?

We are currently using Splunk Enterprise Security for our SOC in our office, and as long as the office continues its use, we will still be using it.

I haven't faced any other difficulties apart from the CPU resource issues. I find Splunk Enterprise Security to be very customizable and user-friendly. The only consideration is that if we want to increase the volume of logs processed, we need to buy more licenses.

Maintaining Splunk Enterprise Security requires personnel, especially due to the existence of different search heads and various forwarders in our robust setup, supporting a centralized logging environment.

I find it easy to scale Splunk Enterprise Security for our environment, and I would recommend that potential users consider their capacity to invest financially based on the criticality of their infrastructure, as adoption comes with licensing costs.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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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.