What is our primary use case?
My customers used the solution for application performance in uptime and networking.
How has it helped my organization?
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring has helped our customer's organization by making troubleshooting easier. The solution helped them have a centralized place where they could dig in across multiple other tools and consolidate all the information in one place.
What is most valuable?
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provided our customers with visibility into their overall infrastructure. They could quickly start identifying where the problems were coming from. If something was going sideways, they could more easily target the specific pathways.
One of our customers was on-premises. The other was a hybrid with on-premises and private cloud.
I was on a team helping them build a brand new tool, which was instantaneous. Another team got it a while ago, and they weren't sure what to do with it. So, we came in and helped them over a six-week engagement. We pivoted them from not feeling like they were getting all that much value to getting good value. It was more of a learning curve situation.
Splunk's unified platform has helped our customers consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools. I was on the team of a company that was helping build a brand-new monitoring solution. They had probably a dozen separate stand-alone silo tools that could not talk to each other.
Instead of logging on to 12 different places to check each tool individually, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring helped consolidate everything into a single location for viewing. We didn't get them to the point where they were ready to fully decommission the other systems.
They were going to decommission 12 systems on the six-month game plan. By now, they would have realized the cost savings. It would have been a multimillion-dollar savings for them.
Our customer, with 12 separate systems, was all on-premises. Part of our other customer's footprint was in AWS. It was incredibly easy for our customers to monitor multiple cloud environments using Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring. It was a combination of cloud and on-premises for our customer.
The solution provided them with a single pane of glass where they didn't have to log into multiple places and see everything in a single location. You can develop dashboards that give you cross-platform visibility, which is a huge win.
What needs improvement?
A wide variety of logging makes log onboarding difficult. Over the years, Splunk has done various things to make it easier, so I want to give them props for that. However, the reality is that every vendor has its own logging format. Some vendors have multiple log formats because they change their own products over time.
They have different log formats for different products in their own suites, and no industry standard makes it chaotic. Splunk is probably the best product out there in terms of how they handle it, but it's not perfect yet. They need to keep pushing that cutting edge and trying to improve it. I have no idea how they could do that because they're trying to wrangle chaos, and it's hard.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I think Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is a solid product from an infrastructure perspective. I haven't seen any bugs in the tool. Like many things with Splunk, everybody knows there will be patches when there's a core upgrade. However, that's more with Splunk Core and not specifically the Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring part.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution's scalability is wonderful. I've worked with customers as small as 25 gigs a day, which is tiny, all the way up to close to a petabyte a day. You have to make sure you scale the tool intelligently, but it's more of a budgetary constraint than a technical one. The solution handles the big ones beautifully if you have the budget to have the needed hardware.
How are customer service and support?
Splunk's technical support has significantly improved in the last year. The support went through a rough patch about a year and a half ago. I had to coerce customers to use it because it was really bad there for a while. Splunk's support has vastly improved recently, and I hope it continues to improve.
Those people who changed the attitude, mindset, and processes need all the accolades because it's so much better than it was. Unfortunately, that does mean that it was really bad at one point.
Splunk's technical support still has some room for improvement in certain areas. Mostly, you can tell the more junior people who just read off of a script and really don't know where to go. I always introduce myself as a consultant to let the support person know that I have already done the basic introductory troubleshooting, and they can skip the first ten pages in their script.
Some frontline people in Splunks' support team are wonderful and clearly have more experience. However, it is still obvious that they occasionally bring in somebody brand new who's a little lost.
I rate the technical support seven and a half to eight out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
I've worked with Core Splunk as a consultant for seven years and was a customer for seven years before that. So I've seen it all: the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. Usually, the actual building of Splunk is super easy because I've done it so many times. Every customer's environment is unique in terms of how to get the data.
It's more about navigating the local customer's politics and archaic technical debts. Somebody thought that a certain architecture was a good idea ten years ago, but today, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Wrangling customer chaos is hard, but the Splunk piece is usually easy.
What other advice do I have?
There's always room for improvement, but Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is a solid product overall. It definitely helps customers who have a lot of legacy systems that don't work well together.
Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Consultant