Splunk SOAR Reviews

We use it for risk management. And, we're trying to automate our L1 and L2 agents' functionalities. Through automation, we're trying to reduce the effort that is put in by an agent.

The amount of time that our L1 and L2 agents used to take to do a simple task was about 40 hours per week. Using SOAR and automation we have reduced that to 10 to 15 hours per week. That is a big win. Building up the playbooks helps with the daily investigations for our agents and risk management team.

It has also helped to reduce our mean time to detection. Something that used to take, on average, 30 minutes now takes about five minutes. It really depends on the kind of event it is. And it has definitely helped free up our IT staff for other projects.

Splunk SOAR has also reduced our dependency on UBA, although we still use it. And similarly, while we still use Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) for threat detection, SOAR has reduced our dependency on that by using it for investigation. Of course, ES has to be there as it is receiving feeds, but the SOAR/ES collaboration is just a better way to function.

It's pretty easy when it comes to setting up assets. If you want to fetch emails or call a REST API, you can set up an asset and grab that information. Of course, we need to do some improvisation as far as coding is concerned, but you can just set up an asset such as O365. Or, if you are looking for any of the threat feeds, you can just set up an asset and they're readily available. You can then grab that particular information or those logs and bring them into SOAR.

Another good aspect is SOAR's ability to integrate with other systems and applications. We haven't faced any challenges with that. It's pretty simple and easy.

And although I'm more of a developer as opposed to an end-user, the reviews that we get from our end-users are that they picked it up pretty quickly. Based on that feedback I would say using SOAR for an investigation is pretty easy and convenient.

Creating playbooks using the solution’s playbook editor, for me, is very cumbersome. There have been instances where I have said to myself that I just don't want to use this editor. I might just use a code block and write my own code within it. I've tried using the editor for some of our playbooks, but I find it's cumbersome. It's easy to drag things in the GUI, but for the actual coding part and joining those bits in a full code, it's not as good as I would like. They have tried to make it as simple as possible, but its functionality is not up to the mark.

The functionality in the playbook editor is 80 percent there, but that 20 percent is still lacking. They could make it more efficient.

I've been using Splunk SOAR for almost two years.

Initially, there was some lagging, but there are no issues at all now.

I'm pretty impressed with Splunk's customer support. They're pretty responsive and I appreciate that.

Positive

We were using Phantom, which is a Splunk product, but they asked every customer to migrate from Phantom to SOAR. In my opinion, it's still the same thing, but in a more improvised way.

It is a cloud solution for us. The deployment was in between straightforward and complex.

Training our SOC team to use the playbooks happened pretty quickly. After a couple of weeks, we were up and running.

We have somewhere between 30 and 50 users of SOAR, and there is no maintenance on our side.

Splunk employees helped us out.

It took us four to five months to see value from SOAR, it didn't happen right away. But that was because we were still building up the environment, including the playbooks. 

Initially, we were trying to use it as a case management system, but after a lot of development, it wasn't up to the mark for the end requirements that we had from the business for that. SOAR is more of an orchestration and automation tool. Using it for case management was not appropriate on our end.

My advice is that if you are already using other products from Splunk, like Splunk ES or Splunk Core, first try to refine your logs to make them SaaS-compliant. I don't think SOAR accepts a SIEM model, it's more of a SaaS. Start looking at the logs and making them compliant if you want to bring some of your logs into SOAR. Also, spell out the integrations you require, the type of functionality you want to use it for.

We have a couple of different use cases. A lot of it started out in our security space, and we have use cases related to our legal and withhold process. We manage and handle our phishing and spam activity as well as our digital or any copyright act complaints.

We have a multi-cloud implementation, but most of our use cases that are currently implemented tend to not be specific to monitoring our cloud environments.

A lot of it comes down to the time and effort savings. For what we are doing with Splunk SOAR, a human would take a lot more time. Some things are very repetitive, and with Splunk SOAR, it might take a little bit of work to get that human work translated to the programming language or functions inside a playbook, but it allows us to take all that workload off that person and be able to do more with that one person.

For some of our actions, there has been about a 300% increase in productivity. For a lot of the use cases that we have implemented inside of Splunk SOAR, there is not as much to resolve. There are mostly actions where if something happens, it should go and do something, so it is automating that human process. It takes most of the work away from the person.

We have been able to benefit from a decreased workload on our limited staff. That same staff has been able to do more things because they are not having to do the work that this tool is doing.

Splunk SOAR has had no bearing on our resiliency.

The playbooks are valuable. They are the core component. Being able to implement and build a code process to work through and scale out what we want to do is valuable.

I have put a number of ideas on the ideas.splunk.com site for feature requests for the Splunk SOAR product. I posted one of them about three years ago, which finally got implemented in the latest release that just got announced, so the time to implement new features and things like that is a little bit concerning. I tend to post my ideas there so that other people in the community can see the features or ideas. They can then upvote them and make comments on them. I thought that is what the site is for.

We have been using Splunk SOAR for about three years.

Overall, the stability of the product in terms of day-to-day operations is great. It is 100%, but because of the inter-dynamic and connected nature of SOAR, it relies on other services. When those services have changes or issues, it impacts SOAR, but SOAR, unfortunately, does not always handle them very well. It might look like there is a problem in SOAR or in the playbook or process that happened, but it might be a third party that caused it. Unfortunately, it requires someone to go into SOAR and fix something and do rework because, ultimately, that is the interconnection point where it fails.

We have not designed our SOAR to scale. I am just going to grow it as big as it can until finally, I need to split it. We are not that large, so I do not know whether it will scale well or not.

Overall, it has been great. We have not had any major bugs or incidents that have required anything more than requesting copies of the code for apps to make the additional changes that we need. Overall, the organization has been very good with that. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We had no other automation or orchestration technology prior to Splunk SOAR.

It was complex. Several of our use cases required modifications to existing SOAR apps, meaning new features had to be coded or added to the SOAR app support we wanted to do. Additional custom bits of code had to be created. At the time, we first implemented a lot of the features that are there in the product now, but they were not there. If we had waited two years to do the initial implementation, we probably would have got a much faster time to value because a lot of the work went in early on to build out features, but then they came out with a whole new version of it. The sad part is that for upgrading to the latest version of Splunk SOAR, we had to migrate from Python 2 to Python 3, so the process by which those playbooks and other things get migrated is difficult and requires a lot of work and rework.

We did have a Splunk professional involved in our initial setup. I believe it was a direct Splunk employee. I do not believe it was a third-party person. They were good. 

We have a lot of Splunk knowledge. We have complex use cases. We have a high level of knowledge. We did not want someone who just came out of the training class. They had to send us someone who was going to be valuable to us, and they did.

It is hard to quantify whether we have seen a return on investment. The expectation is that we do, but we are so short on staffing that it is difficult to calculate whether it is giving us a full FTE worth of a person. We think we are getting it, but we do not have good numbers to say that we are.

It is also hard to say whether we have seen time to value because there are some use cases that take so long to implement. Because of the way that SOAR is structured and interconnected with so many systems, to get something going and then make sure it continues to work, the time to value starts to become a little bit back and forth. Some of the use cases are great. The services underneath them have not changed. There has not been a lot of transition, but with the other ones, such as an API update, an update is required on the SOAR side, so it is a little harder.

When we first purchased our Splunk SOAR license, it was based on an event-count model. It was based on the number of events. I had strong opinions at the time that automation should not be stifled by the amount of automation you can accomplish, so the previous structure was not as beneficial for us. Later that year, we got told or saw at a conference that they announced user-based pricing.

We are now in a renewal period, so we migrated to a user-based license model, which is more appropriate for us so that we no longer have to worry about stifling our automation based on the quantity. If I have an event that happens 500 times a day, but it is relatively minor, I can still spend the effort to automate it. The previous model meant that we could only automate high-value items in Splunk SOAR, meaning they had a large cost of the human factor to automate them, whereas now, I can transition. I can do many different things with Splunk SOAR that we were intentionally limited on.

We had evaluated other options twice. We evaluated before the acquisition by Palo Alto and then during our latest renewal period, we went ahead and reevaluated Palo Alto's competing products just to make sure that we are doing our due diligence about technology and whether this was going to be better or worse for us.

Overall, I would rate Splunk SOAR a six out of ten.

As part of the cybersecurity incident response team, we were responsible for handling phishing emails related to business-as-usual operations. It was a manual process that would include five to six checks to determine the category of the email, its legitimacy, if it was malicious, and if it was an impersonation or a phishing email. We also worked on a use case for our infrastructure's proxy solutions. End users would request that certain websites be unblocked, as they had been blocked by the proxy's default policy or categorically blocked by the proxy. For this, we evaluated publicly available information about the website and the justification provided by the users, to determine whether the website should be whitelisted or made accessible.

Then, we implemented the automation process to simplify such tedious processes. In addition, we had a manual process in place for our threat hunting and threat intelligence platform, where we monitored leaked data on the dark web. This was documented as a use case. Our account management team also conducted weekly checks on the status of accounts. The process also made the team check if they were logged in on their accounts and if the account was disabled, which were manual processes that were later integrated into Splunk SOAR.

As a security analyst in the SOC center, I have seen the impact of implementing Splunk SOAR on our phishing email analysis process. Before its use, analyzing each email would take at least 15 to 20 minutes, with some complex cases taking up to 30 minutes. Of all the emails received, 30% were complex, 50% were average, and 20% were straightforward and would only take five to ten minutes to analyze. With the automation provided by Splunk SOAR, we can significantly reduce the amount of time and human effort required to complete this task. Instead of two analysts taking two to three hours to analyze 20 to 30 emails, one analyst can now complete the same task within one to two hours.

The most advantageous feature of Splunk SOAR is its ease of writing search queries, which can be attributed to Splunk's powerful analytics tool running in the background, offering a smooth user experience.

Improvements are needed in automation options as customization is limited, which may make complex use cases challenging despite the solution being able to meet basic requirements.

Currently, the tool only allows categorization into two categories, malicious and non-malicious, which has been identified as a limitation by security analysts in various group brainstorming sessions. The ability to create custom categories for emails can benefit security analysts.

I was associated with this solution for almost three years. In my previous organization, Meredith, we initially deployed Splunk. Before that, we were using the ArcSight SIEM solution. Later on, after moving on to the Splunk environment, Meredith thought of opting for an automation process. So, we onboarded Splunk SOAR, but the user Splunk was managed by a third-party company.

Stability-wise, it is good. It doesn't have any downtime issues. If you consider Splunk SOAR as an independent solution to be deployed at work, then that would not be easy. The challenge is that Splunk SOAR cannot work without the Splunk SIEM solution. But if you have Splunk as your base, then Splunk Phantom works well. So the issues with Splunk Phantom are very minimal. I would rate it an eight on a scale of one to 10, where one is considered the worst and 10 is the best.

In terms of scalability, I believe Splunk SOAR is decent. I haven't encountered any stability issues, even with a large infrastructure of over 10,000 end-user devices and high log inflows. I would rate its scalability as an eight or nine out of ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best. It works well in both large and small work environments.

The technical support for the Splunk SIEM solution was average. Splunk is still working on improving its customer support, as they do not directly support SOAR, which is a separate entity. Other vendors, on the other hand, support various environments. I believe that Splunk can improve its customer support services.

Neutral

I previously used Demisto, a security automation tool, in one of my previous organizations, Dell Technologies. The ease of writing custom queries and making granular modifications were the key reasons why we used it. In my next organization, I used Splunk SOAR because we already had Splunk in our environment. Currently, I am working in a bank that does not have a Splunk environment, so I am using a different automation tool.

The deployment warranted collecting information on the external and internal parameters of our network system. A network engineer along with a team of four to five people from Hurricane Labs was involved in the deployment of the Splunk SIEM solution for the company. The deployment of the Splunk SIEM solution took approximately six to nine months. During the first three months, the team familiarized themselves with the environment and started the transition from an off-site setup. Over the next six to nine months, the team worked to mature the solution and address any issues with logs not being collected properly and displayed on the Splunk screen.

Splunk SIEM was deployed by a third-party vendor. The vendor was responsible for the end-to-end deployment and was the main point of contact for the project. However, I am not familiar with the specific details of the deployment and therefore cannot accurately explain how the deployment of the solution was done.

In terms of pricing, I would rate it a six or seven out of 10, where one is the highest and 10 is the lowest. It’s on the expensive side, and I'm not sure if a lot of the small-sized organizations will be able to afford it. A medium enterprise environment will be able to afford it. We had to pay for the cost of the licenses for the services we received.

If you use Splunk as your SIEM solution, you can consider Splunk SOAR as your automation tool. However, automation tools such as AutomationEdge or Demisto may provide better value if you have other SIEM solutions.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use the solution to automate some of our legacy processes. We review items like phishing and emails.

The product’s integration with other Splunk products is valuable. It's easier to collect and enrich all the data to give our incident response teams better access to the information to make their decisions.

Some of the training materials are on a basic level. They don't feel like they're really in-depth. I would like to have more advanced and in-depth training.

My organization has been using the solution for two months.

There have been no issues whatsoever with stability. I wouldn't expect there to be any downtime.

We have a large environment. We have more than 10,000 devices in our organization. It's a complex environment, depending on which areas we're working with. We have different types of regulations.

The team we're working with right now is extremely helpful, and it's easy to coordinate with them and get them involved. They're very welcoming and open to helping us. They are going out of their way to set up meetings to answer questions and help us with the process.

Positive

There's a lot of overlap of concepts between our current SOAR solution and Splunk SOAR. The dashboard's functionality in Splunk SOAR has great value compared to our current platform. It was not easy to make dashboards or reports at a high level in our current solution. It was a bit tedious and difficult. It’s a lot easier to facilitate with Splunk SOAR. Splunk SOAR integrates nicely with all the other Splunk products. We can enrich the data.

We are still going through the initial deployment of the product. The deployment is easy since it is a SaaS solution. There's not much for us to configure right out of the box.

One of the biggest factors that helped the management to decide to switch to Splunk SOAR was its cost. The solution's cost model, Mission Control, and other features make it cost-effective.

We are fairly new to the solution. We are still adjusting Splunk SOAR. As I use the platform more, it'll become more intuitive. My core focus is on the SOAR platform. We're still beginning to get the tool fully customized for us. We are going through the basics to get all the way to fully leveraging the tool. We are still considering how to go from our current setup and expand it.

Our organization monitors multiple cloud environments with Splunk SOAR. It is important for our organization that the product has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment. It allows us to have better incident response. Having visibility on where the attacks or different issues are coming from allows us to better respond to them.

The workshops are the biggest value I get from attending Splunk conferences. I'm getting a lot of real-world examples from different companies. It helps with networking and meeting other individuals who are going through the same type of process or are already leveraging Splunk SOAR. I can get feedback on how they're leveraging the platform. It gives us a lot of insight into things we should consider as we start to set up and build environments.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

My primary use case is for SOC automation but it's used for a lot more than that. Some of the use cases are more or less appropriate for it. It's capable of doing a lot of things.

We use the SOAR platform to ingest alerts and escalations that we get. They do the actual enrichment processing and triaging but we don't use it for detection. We potentially could, but it's not what the product is meant for.

The visual playbook editor updates that they released have been absolutely instrumental because the old editor was impossible to look at for most of the time. It made my eyes bleed. I still have to look at it from time to time. 

Splunk does provide substantial value. 

It definitely does reduce our mean time to resolution through the enrichment details that it provides. Inputting your facts and details of the things you do not want to see with the events coming into it and easily filtering down off of that is one of the main value drivers outside of phish removal.

The most valuable feature is the API connector, depending on how it's formatted and who made the actual app offering for it. The REST API is my favorite component. It's very easy to use. The filters are also really valuable. Those are the two primary features but I enjoy using the rest of it. 

SOAR is probably the most unreliable product Splunk has and that's because most of it is content driven from what you put into it. There are certain parts of it that have a little bit of difficulty at volume too. It's always changing. There is new stuff coming out for it that's going to make it a little bit better, but it does have some drawbacks.

It's specifically geared for SOC and not broader automation. The artifact filtering that's forced on everything inside the platform is pretty awful. It's for a subset of active playbooks which, out of the two hundred that we own, I think three or four of them are active, but we have to play with that setting for each one of them. 

Every block should also have that option specifically because if you're not doing the artifact filtering on the front end, it's not good. 

We've had lots of processes that have been victim to filtering not working appropriately at scale. It's hard to actually track down and trace because we can't reproduce the issues that we see in our testing environment or in production. That was two minor versions ago. It might have changed, it might not have, but we don't have a lot of trust in that feature.

UI elements like interacting with our analysts are near impossible. Finding stuff on the actual dashboard is really impossible most of the time. One example is that the timeline takes up three-quarters of the screen, but not a single person uses it because you have to individually set the container, the artifacts, and the actions to a specific attribute field that's really difficult to correlate to the actual events you put into it. The artifacts are really weird too because they're not traditional forensic artifacts. You shouldn't be able to change the value of an actual artifact. It was in that capacity but we also use it for that purpose in the platform. 

My company was one of Splunk's first five customers. I have been using it for the last three years.

I've only crashed SOAR a few times and it was my fault. If you have a production environment that's been running for a month or two and you have a few thousand events in it, if you mess up your query when you're trying to ask it a question and you do page size zero, it will just give you things on it, and it will crash it. That's a fun thing, but you shouldn't do that in general. That was a mistake on my part. Generally, it is very stable and available as most of the issues are usually the fault of the vendors that it's talking to, but that's with any platform.

Scalability is interesting. Some of the assets do choke each other out. There is a cyclical lock thing that we had to fix on our inside. We have a CrowdStrike app, and we give it a file and ask it to do something and it goes great. It tells us that the default wait time is fifteen minutes, and there's only one of me. But there are five processes competing for that, and you get a giant backlog. We had to make our own custom app to get it later. 

We have about fifty users on SOAR and a few hundred playbooks. Our environment is fairly large in terms of standard customers.

I didn't do the initial integration, it was many years ago but we do deployments with the platforms team because we have the experience. 

We have it down to a pretty good science right now because platform science does a really good job of automating the steps that go into setting up the server and whatnot. One good thing about the SOAR connectors that we have in the apps is the ability to save states and for apps just to self-heal. That has been really helpful because things go down from time to time and we don't have to worry about it because there's a second or third process that's going to pick it up.

I have heard they are changing pricing, not possibly for the better. In comparison to the other vendors we looked at, they're all in the same ballpark of what they should be billing on. SOAR makes the most sense out of all of them, in terms of the billing factors.

We are looking at other platforms currently to compare areas. Splunk's editors are exceptionally better to look at. Visually, it's easier to find things and configure them. 

There is more capability out-of-the-box for doing typical data transformation that you don't have to write too much code for, which is really nice. The code blocks have annotations in them. So when you actually open and look at what you worked on, four or five months later, you have your notes right there in the same place where it runs, which is really handy. 

It's also just built for broader automation and it's all more HTTP, actions-based. Instead of having to build a connector, then put that on GitHub and install that in your platform, you can define an endpoint with credentials and you can do the same thing with SOAR. It's encouraged to do it with the actions and assets, which can be beneficial depending on what the product is. 

If we do continue using SOAR, I think we're going to default to using more HTTP actions and stop using too many assets because it's a bit of a burden to create one, especially if out-of-the-box the actual configuration doesn't do what we need it to. 

One example of this that we have is the request tracker app that we use for all of our tickets. When you ask it for the ticket information, it will return the metadata on it, nothing inside the actual ticket. That's a fork we have to create. It didn't actually do the basic product functionality that the vendor should be providing. 

We also find that the vendors don't always keep the SOAR connectors updated. Sometimes they'll update the associated API, and then their connector will stop working because they're on different versions, and then we have to force our own fix on that. They usually make a SOAR connector just to say that they have one, but they won't put too much effort or thought into it.

I'd probably rate the functionality an eight or a nine out of ten. I would give the UI a four out of ten. I would rate general Splunk SOAR a seven out of ten. 

Splunk SOAR is primarily used for automating security use cases for clients who want to reduce human intervention and personnel involvement. It facilitates end-to-end security workflows and helps to decrease the time spent on manual investigations.

Splunk SOAR can be deployed both in the cloud and on-premises. The cloud deployment comes pre-installed, so if we want to connect to any on-premises applications, we may need an additional server.

Building playbooks using Splunk SOAR is an easy process.

Splunk SOAR's playbook viewer is excellent. The viewer underwent an update a couple of years ago, making it much more streamlined and easier to use.

Splunk SOAR offers end-to-end visibility throughout our environment. The solution provides us with information about the actions being executed, the flow of the playbooks, where failures occur, and everything in between. It also collects logs of the actions in the backend.

Splunk SOAR simplifies the visualization and troubleshooting of our cloud-native environment. We only need to set up an additional server to connect to our cloud-based applications. Once that is done, the process becomes very straightforward.

Splunk SOAR has the ability to integrate with other system applications in our environment. Currently, SOAR is integrated with nearly 300 applications through APIs.

Splunk SOAR, as a whole, has helped numerous clients automate processes, reduce investigation time, and free up personnel to focus on other tasks. It is a highly effective tool for security automation.

Using Splunk SOAR in an investigation is extremely easy.

Splunk SOAR has significantly reduced our mean time to detect in a relatively short period.

Splunk SOAR has helped reduce our mean time to resolve.

Splunk SOAR has helped free up our IT staff's time to work on other projects.

Splunk SOAR has saved our organization a good amount of time overall.

With Splunk SOAR, we have been able to consolidate tools in our environment, such as Radius and CrowdStrike.

The ability to automate Splunk SOAR and customize the playbook use cases is the most valuable feature and is very exciting for me.

The UI can be more customizable for the clients.

I have been using Splunk SOAR for almost five years.

Splunk SOAR is highly stable. The benefits that Resilience offers to SIEM are crucial at the moment, given the vast amount of data and other factors. It aids us in efficiently handling that data, and, with these additional tools, it helps to manage the data with minimal human intervention. As a result, we can reduce the mean time to resolve, the mean time to detect, and save money as well.

Splunk SOAR's scalability is great. I have never had a client complain about the solution's ability to scale.

The technical support team prioritizes all the tickets based on their criticality. They genuinely provide end-to-end support and contact us via email before scheduling calls. If it's a cloud instance, they simply attempt to push changes over the stack, making them extremely helpful.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward. It can be completed by a single person, who handles the installation and setup.

I've heard from clients that they are receiving more value from the fit than they initially expected. They are also pleased with how much Splunk SOAR has been assisting them with various tasks. Additionally, a couple of companies have reduced the number of personnel in their security team due to the implementation of SOAR.

For completely new users, it may take some time to perceive the benefits. However, for those who are already familiar with the solution and hold certifications, they can quickly recognize the advantages.

The licensing cost is reasonable.

I give Splunk SOAR a ten out of ten.

I started looking into security automation at that time. Initially, it was Phantom, which was quite popular five years ago. Splunk bought it and changed it to SOAR, so it became pretty easy to use. It's a relatively new concept, which is why we wanted to see how it works.

Once Splunk SOAR is deployed, it takes a couple of weeks to train the SOC team of our clients to use the playbooks.

Splunk SOAR requires maintenance if we plan to scale up the database, increase the number of users involved, and expand our development efforts. Additionally, the amount of data processed and other factors should be considered. For a premium user who actively uses it daily and is heavily involved in development, the solution may need regular maintenance. However, apart from such cases, I believe it doesn't require significant maintenance.

For those considering using Splunk SOAR, there is ample documentation available on the Splunk website. Additionally, they can download a free trial version, which can be installed on their server for experimentation.

My company has two use cases for Splunk SOAR. We use it to enrich alarms by pulling in outside sources of information. Splunk can also automate actions while ensuring they are structured and reproducible.

With SOAR, you build a workflow, so you think ahead about all the steps that can be automated for a specific type of investigation. You need to do a decent amount of work in advance so that it does exactly what you tell it to. We need to gather a lot of essential details for our incidents. For example, if we're investigating a suspicious email, we need to gather a lot of information about who the user is.

We can enrich alerts by pulling in more information about each user. We can see their locations, roles, etc. Having that knowledge may influence our decisions or analysis. We can also submit files to be reviewed and get the results. It's akin to a doctor ordering diagnostic testing. The doctor can use the results to make decisions. 

Splunk has benefited us from that perspective, but it takes some effort upfront to think about the flow and build it out. It reduces some of our manual research by offering additional context for events. I can pull the files, automatically submit them to a sandbox, have it run, and get the results from the sandbox. I don't have to notify one of my engineers and tell them to get this file I submitted to the sandbox. 

It also improves ticketing because we can notify users when suspicious emails are quarantined and ensure a ticket is associated with it. We constantly track the work. We can close the ticket when the issue is resolved and release the email if it's legitimate. Splunk helps us document the entire process.

Splunk reduced our detection time a little by helping us quickly differentiate between an actual event and a false alarm. I don't view SOAR as a detection mechanism in itself. The events still occur. It helps enrich alerts so we can distinguish between actual events and noise. 

For every event, it saves the responding staffer about 15 to 20 minutes because they need to do less data entry. They need to do the research and follow our procedure for a ticket. It takes time to assign a ticket and make entries. Finally, they need to perform an assessment and close the ticket.  

Splunk SOAR frees up our staff to work on other things to a degree. There is always more than enough work, and somehow the volume still feels like it's always crazy. Still, it allows people to do some other tasks. It will enable my engineers to focus on more thought-provoking problems instead of menial tasks. I want them to spend time learning the underlying mechanism in case SOAR goes down. 

If Splunk is unavailable for whatever reason, I always want to have someone who understands the mechanics of what it does. At the same time, it improves retention if you can eliminate some mind-numbing work and allow them to focus on challenging items. Your employees will be happier in general. They can do some more unusual, engaging work that enables them to learn and grow. 

We couldn't consolidate any tools by using Splunk SOAR because everything was manual before we implemented it. We didn't have an automation tool. 

I like the way Splunk interacts with various systems via the API. The ability to integrate Splunk with our ticketing system has been an immense help because we can maintain our workflow while blending Splunk with our support desk and other ways that we track work.

Sometimes we flag events based on conditions in the app or service that is sending us the feed, and we focused on a couple. We get some normal events, but we also see some security issues occasionally in the same feed. I don't know if they injected this or if this was the first time we saw it. There was another type that was security-related, but we didn't know about it before. 

We have playbooks written to extract these events and put them into the workflow since it wasn't structured as expected. It was a miss for us. We couldn't figure out why it broke or what actually happened there. It was something in this feed with legitimate and security events, so we tried to understand the names and what we would call them.

It was a unique time. That goes back to an inability to detect these kinds of events. API documentation is typically a weak spot. Many vendors focus on the product first and save the API information for the very last. 

Splunk's integration isn't bad. However, it comes down to which APIs are available. For example, I would like to automate file extraction, and a particular vendor seems to have an API that should do that, but I can't. You're at the mercy of the vendors. While APIs probably leverage more than ever, it's still like pulling teeth to get some vendors to support it correctly. Nevertheless, it's highly beneficial when it works.

Depending on the playbook, it can sometimes get a little crazy and overwhelming, but I think it's generally okay.

I have used Splunk SOAR for about a year. 

Splunk is relatively stable. We had an issue early on. It was a bug. Splunk sorted it out. Our uptime has been consistent. 

We haven't had any issues with scalability. 

It took a little time before we realized Splunk SOAR's value. I have one engineer who dedicated himself to building many of our playbooks and a lot of the automation that we have. Another engineer is only starting out. 

You need to have the right mindset so that you don't get scope creep. It's critical to manage what you want to do because you're dealing with a blank slate. There are costs like computation time, but it's relatively straightforward. You need to be thoughtful and take your time to do everything in small chunks. It took us a while to get going with SOAR because we have to integrate our devices. It isn't a turnkey solution. 

I don't remember Splunk SOAR's price off the top of my head. Still, I believe it was a solid value because of the time saved, consistent results that are reproducible, integration with multiple systems, etc. The benefits justify the cost. 

We didn't seriously consider other options. We looked at what was happening in our environment, and our SIEM is a hub for our security operations. Palo Alto is another vendor we use, so we briefly looked at their SOAR solution. However, it wasn't in the right position to work with the Splunk piece. Splunk gathers all the log material. We can act on that and interface with all of our key security devices because they have rich associations with multiple security vendors. It made more sense for us to focus on that.

I rate Splunk SOAR a nine out of ten. If you're thinking about implementing the solution, you should consider which events will save you the most time. Think about the procedures you're following today and where you can benefit the most from automation. 

The second piece is thinking about the other solutions involved and the capabilities they offer. Do you have the API access to automate what you want? Your success depends on those vendors and sorting that stuff out. You must also approach your SOAR playbooks and workflows in a modular way. Don't try to handle everything upfront. 

It's best to automate piece by piece. You don't need to tackle an entire ecosystem right off the bat. Take what you can and constantly improve it as you grow more comfortable. Splunk SOAR's strength comes from its interactions with other systems. Ensure that you're fully leveraging that.

I am the CTO of a startup. We evaluated this product.

Our major requirement was to open APIs to our product. I felt that the open-source product that I evaluated was better in terms of open APIs to integrate into the existing product because Splunk SOAR is an enterprise product and not an open-source one. However, after evaluating the go-to-market time and how soon we can implement things, the customer preferred Splunk SOAR because it could be easily integrated. Over time, they may choose to have the capabilities inside the in-house product instead of using Splunk SOAR, but at this point, they are using Splunk SOAR.

We have our own product. We were developing our in-house engine based on user analytics and behaviors, but because of funding issues, we stopped working on that. During that time, I started looking at Splunk SOAR to compare its features, and that is how I was able to recommend it to the customer. I told them that instead of creating these capabilities in the in-house product, they could start using Splunk SOAR. In the future, we will be able to import the workflow from Splunk SOAR into the product. We would need a standardized backend to be able to import the workflows. At this point, it is not available, but in the future, just like JSON or XML, it should happen. There should be portability. I am not sure if it is in their roadmap. It is their loss in one aspect, but it is a gain in another aspect because they can claim that workflows are portable across platforms.

A major use case for my customer was dealing with DDoS attacks. The customer is in the BFSI industry. The major issue for them was people trying to get access to customer accounts by logging in or generating OTPs from different locations. They wanted to limit access to OTPs and logins from particular geographies because 95% of their customer base is from an Asia-Pacific country. They were able to do that and solve that issue. They were also able to reduce the cost of customer care because when a customer gets a message about an OTP for a withdrawal, they tend to call customer care. Instead of generating an OTP, they created a workflow to avoid generating an OTP when it is requested from other geographies. They developed a workflow to make a call to the customer and confirm if they have requested the OTP for money withdrawal. In our geography, rules are becoming stricter and stricter, and banks are held responsible for such cases. The customer was able to meet the requirements of the government. They were also able to save money and reduce operational costs. They could save 75% of operational costs.

I have used the solution's playbooks and the visual playbook editor to help automate tasks. I am a technical person, so it is easy for me to use the playbooks and visual playbook editor. I also write playbooks at the code level.

Spunk SOAR has saved us time in alert triage.

Spunk SOAR has saved time in threat response. They were able to stop 75% of the cases of sending OTPs to the wrong people.

Spunk SOAR's automation helped reduce tedious manual tasks. Based on the input that I got for the first two quarters, there was somewhere about a 75% reduction.

Workflow management is most valuable. It is easily customizable. 

Portability is one thing that is currently lacking. The open-source product that I evaluated had portability. It would require a lot of development effort, but it will save the cost of rewriting all the playbooks.

Its stability is pretty good. UI is more responsive than other tools for writing playbooks and other things.

When I evaluated, there were just one or two users. They have been using it only for two quarters. I will know its scalability better after a year or so.

It is SaaS-based. Being a BFSI business, most of their core applications are on-premises, but the applications that we have evaluated stay on AWS.

It is much quicker to onboard compared to the open-source tools I have used. We were able to onboard initial applications in a day. It is very fast.

I helped the customer to onboard it. There was also help available from the Splunk team. 

I evaluated Splunk SOAR and a few other SOAR solutions. I evaluated an open-source solution and the IBM solution. I preferred Splunk SOAR because of its log processing and the way it allows you to customize workflows. I felt it was better than any other competitor in the market because it is a next-generation SOAR tool.

I would rate Splunk SOAR a nine out of ten because there is no portability.