Splunk Cloud Platform Reviews

We use it for security monitoring and application monitoring.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. We monitor AWS and Oracle Cloud. It is easy to get all the data into Splunk from our AWS and Oracle Cloud. The integration is comparatively easy when it comes to on-prem versus Splunk Cloud.

It has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment, which is pretty important for us. About 80% of our infrastructure is on AWS. It is pretty important for our digital resiliency to monitor our AWS and Oracle Cloud platforms end to end.

It definitely reduces our mean time to resolve, but I am not sure exactly how much time it has reduced because as a Splunk Cloud customer, we provide our platform to our application teams. 

We have Splunk Enterprise Security and our regular Splunk Enterprise. We use Splunk Enterprise Security for monitoring all our security use cases and our regular Splunk Enterprise for application monitoring. We have our own custom digital apps that we monitor on the enterprise cloud, and all our enterprise security monitoring happens on the Splunk Enterprise Security app. There are so many custom applications that we currently support. 

We do digital transaction monitoring, so when a customer sends some money to a different customer, we monitor the end-to-end transaction of that customer when it happens on the digital platform. It is pretty important for our L1 and L2 teams to monitor that end-to-end transaction. 

With Splunk in place, we can identify the bottlenecks where transactions are getting held and immediately take necessary actions to release the transaction and reach the customer. That improves the transaction time frame. There is improvement in terms of how many analysts are monitoring how many transactions and how fast transactions are happening from end to end. It improves our performance and customer experience. It is also easy to monitor end to end transactions.

They can offer more self-service capability to their customers. Currently, most of the things happen behind the Splunk Cloud Platform. As a customer, I do not have an opportunity to see my platform. If they can offer more self-service to see the health of my endpoints and stack, it would be appreciated. 

Their support also needs improvement. I have had issues with the support team. When I run into issues, it is always hard to get hold of them and get things done with the support team. Other than that, product-wise, it is very good.

I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for more than four years.

Its stability is 99.5%, but I have had pretty bad incidents in the last couple of years. Last month, we had an outage for the whole day. Support-wise, I am not happy.

In typical cloud infrastructure, you can add your EC2 on demand based on the load of your customers, but with the Splunk Cloud, that is not the case. They assign a fixed number of searches and indexes. They have named it as a cloud, but it is still an on-prem instance sitting in their cloud, so in terms of scalability, I do not see much advantage with Splunk Cloud because, at the end of the day, you get approval from your Splunk account team or a management team to add a new instance into your cluster. 

The support that we get from Splunk is not always great. Whenever we have issues, we have to chase them to get the answers. When we have an incident, identifying the root cause of that incident with the Splunk Cloud support team is always a pain. The Splunk team should improve their customer support experience. I love the product, but the only issue is getting support. I would rate them a three out of ten.

We had IBM QRadar, and we moved from IBM QRadar to Splunk Cloud. Cost-wise, Splunk is a premium solution. We pay more, but we get a better experience with Splunk Cloud Platform. It is easy to manage. There is a better user experience. When it comes to identifying issues, it is pretty easy with Splunk. Cost-wise, we have not saved much, but in terms of resiliency and digital experience, we get a lot from Splunk.

We get a lot of capabilities with Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise Security. We also do application monitoring, and we wanted to embed both solutions into one. That is the whole reason we got Splunk.

We have a bunch of tools, not just Splunk, in our ecosystem. Splunk is one of our tools for monitoring purposes. We have other tools for alert management, global alert repository, etc. In our ecosystem, Splunk serves the main purpose of detecting and bringing the issues to our analysts to resolve them. Splunk plays a vital role.

I was initially involved in the whole migration process. We used to have the Splunk on-prem instance, and only application teams were utilizing it. We bought the Splunk Cloud Platform, and we merged both the application and security into the Splunk Cloud Platform.

Cloud deployment is pretty easy because you do not have to manage any of your infrastructure. They take care of that. 

We could see its time to value in roughly one year to sixteen months. We started the migration and moved to the cloud, and in a year to sixteen months, we could see a return on investment.

The ROI is in terms of the mean time to resolve the issues. We could do all of our security monitoring and enterprise security. We integrated security monitoring with our SOAR platform. We have so many L1 and L2 teams using Splunk day in and day out to monitor the transactions. They definitely have more visibility and reduced mean time to resolve the issues. They can identify an issue pretty fast. 

Currently, we have the ingest-based license. They are offering SVC-based licenses as well, but I am not a fan of SVC-based licensing. At the end of the day, I want to predict my budget and how much I am going to pay to the vendor so that I can plan my yearly budget.

I would always suggest going with the ingest-based license because you can control how much you want to ingest. It feels like you will be paying less when you switch to SVC-based licensing, but this is not true because you cannot control your users and what kind of searches they want to run. If you go for that, you will need a whole lot of manual effort to control your users.

We evaluated Elasticsearch. We evaluated Exabeam. We evaluated one more solution. Among all the solutions in the market, Splunk is the best.

The good thing with Splunk is that you can search your data across all the indexes pretty fast. The way the processing language works with Splunk is awesome. Most of my analysts can search the data as quickly as possible, whereas, with the other solution, there was always a lag while searching for data. With Elasticsearch, you have very limited capability to search across the whole platform. It is very easy with Splunk. The secret sauce of Splunk is the way they index the data. That is the main difference between Splunk and its competitors.

I would rate the Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten. The product is good. The only issue is the support.

The primary benefit that I get from attending the Splunk Conference is to be able to see all the new features that Splunk is releasing and how to use them and implement them in my infrastructure, platform, or ecosystem. I also get to know how other organizations are using Splunk to solve their use cases. Another thing is that we have so many vendors utilizing Splunk as their base and building so many new products. I visited one of the booths, and I was very impressed with their booth. They are doing all the content validation, security validation, and simulation of attacks. They are using their tool, and they have integrated it with Splunk. They are bringing all the data into Splunk to showcase how to maintain the hygiene of the content. That impressed me a lot. When I attend Splunk conferences, I get to see how others are utilizing Splunk as their base and building new tools out of that. It gives me some ideas of how to implement it in our organization. Of course, we cannot implement everything, but at least we can see the best fit for our platform.

I use Splunk on my phone, on-premises, and for the automation tasks that we carry out.

We use it to work on dedicated forms and infrastructure and have a lot of virtual machines and instances that are being run for every single application. Our infrastructure is purely based on Azure by Microsoft. 

Keeping CMDBs of all the virtual machines is a heavy task. When you use it for your portal use, it might be two or three virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created, we use post-provisioning inside the virtual machine. While post-provisioning, we install Splunk agents so that any activity that is happening inside the VM is virtually monitored by Splunk.

We create a dashboard. We are able to monitor everything from that dashboard. 

Splunk also offers enhancements and automation. Splunk plays a major role when it comes to automation. We extract the data from Splunk, and then we use it to automate using a jump server so that we can put in actions on any number of virtual machines.

The automation is the main advantage. When we need to search for data, as engineers, it's very easy.

I like that it's an independent cloud platform. It can work with AWS or Azure. 

Its monitoring is completely automated. We do not have to put in other engineers just to maintain Splunk. It maintains itself, and it's very user-friendly. For the dashboards to be created or any sort of code that we want to do with Splunk, we can do it by ourselves. We do not need to have separate resources so it is very cost efficient. We do not require many people; it's resource-efficient as well.

We do use the federated search feature and find it helpful. Earlier, it was hard to withdraw data. We'd have to maintain it. Now, Splunk does it for us. It's a very time-efficient service. It's made a huge impact on automation. We can grab data in real-time any time we need to.

The solution integrates well with other applications and systems in our environment. 

It could have a more efficient UI. If they could integrate more AI and make search more efficient so that other people can access and use it, not just engineers, that would be ideal.

It needs to mature; it's just getting established in the industry on a wider scale. 

The API still needs some enhancements from a post-performance point of view.

From a monitoring point of view, Splunk is doing very well. However, if they could provide a post-provisioning aspect. Right now, we have to install a monitoring tool while we are post-provisioning every virtual machine. If they could be a provider that precluded having a virtual machine being created or provisioned, that would be ideal.

Alerting could be faster. Sometimes the actions that happen take some time to reflect on the Splunk dashboard. There is still latency. Especially when you work in a multi-cloud environment, you deal with a lot of regions. They still need to focus on availability across regions. 

They need to have some security enhancements. Most users are using it with other single sign-on features like Okta. If they had their own SSOs that would be ideal. we'd be able to work independently. Right now, we have to log onto the virtual machines then move to Okta, then go to Splunk. 

I've been using the solution for somewhere around a year or one year and a half.

The stability is okay. Sometimes it goes down. I have not witnessed that as I do not use it continuously after the deployment. The resiliency is good. I'd recommend it four out of five.

Everyone in the company uses Splunk.

The scalability is very good. It's extendible.

I don't directly deal with technical support. We have a dedicated team that would work with Splunk.

Generally, my understanding is that if we have a query, we raise a ticket. There may be a separate portal or mailbox we can access as well to get assistance.

We previously used Qualys. We switched mainly due to the costs involved. We also didn't want to migrate our resources to it. We simply wanted a monitoring tool, which is why we chose Splunk. Splunk in comparison is really cost-efficient. 

I was involved in the deployment of the solution. 

Whenever a new resource or a new agent comes into the picture, in an organization, it's always complex. I don't blame Splunk for it, or my firm. It's like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and it's the developers who need to cut the pieces. It works really well as of now. 

The deployment took somewhere between six to eight months.

We did need a lot of resources or staff members for the deployment. We have a vast infrastructure. We have a dedicated team inside as well who manage incidents and tickets using platforms like ServiceNow, and we still have a lot of resources dedicated to maintaining Splunk. The number of resources that are required to maintain it is more than the number of resources we use for development, actually.

How many people you need depends on the region. I work for Asia and North America. So for us, it was not much personnel. We needed four to five people in the development. There were somewhere around ten to fifteen people working on different parts.

About 90% of the deployment was handled in-house.

I'm only aware of general pricing terms, however, they have enterprise agreements as well. I can't speak to the exact cost. It's reasonable, from my understanding. I'd rate the affordability seven or eight out of ten. 

Evaluating other options would be a task reserved for the highest management personnel at our firm. I was not involved with that process.

We aren't using the solution across all cloud platforms. We use Azure. However, we would have the flexibility to gather insights from others. We just don't use that particular capability.

Right now, the solution does not affect our decision-making. It's still a very new platform. We're not relying on it completely. It's a work in progress. We need some time with it, to build up trust with it. Splunk is great so far, however, we still need more time and it needs more of a presence in the market.

Right now, in terms of compliance and privacy policy regulations, we limit the features that are not compliant with us. However, they are very flexible. We just use the features we can and block the ones that are unnecessary.

It hasn't had an impact on our security posture. We have very detailed security layers and several processes and teams. We haven't had any real use cases for Splunk. It hasn't actively blocked anything. We already have what we need in place. 

I'd advise new users to check if this solution is reliable from a security point of view. Talk to Splunk about the cost as well. Splunk is really convenient for that. And whenever you deploy it in your infrastructure, make sure that the cloud providers or the on-prem solution that you are using are compatible with Splunk. We had issues in that some features that we were using in the cloud were not compatible with Splunk. So we had to make a lot of changes. That is something anyone who is trying to deploy Splunk needs to check - compatibility.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We're looking to migrate an acquisition into the Splunk environment. We acquired a company and their Splunk environment was small and separate. We didn't want to have to maintain old Windows environments in unique use cases so we wanted to migrate it to the cloud as a proof of concept.

In their case, they had global data domicile requirements. We didn't have the same global deployment for our other larger environment that they did. So it made sense for us to migrate them to a bunch of small cloud stacks that were globally positioned rather than deploy a bunch of tiny enterprise environments to do the same thing.

The solutions are segregated at the moment. We're currently migrating the ACS environment. We have our own Splunk Enterprise implementation that we still use for Azure currently. It's fine, it doesn't drop.

It has definitely improved our organization by virtue of reducing the amount of overhead we would have had for those environments. Having to implement, maintain, or even update the existing stuff would have been extremely time-consuming. Splunk Cloud handles all of that for us. So it's definitely been helpful from that perspective. It's allowed them to maintain upgrades for far further than they are. Some of the hosts of that environment were still on version 7 so they could get upgraded feature parity.

They do well at empowering staff by providing business resilience. Users have the capability to utilize Splunk in ways to make their jobs better for resiliency purposes, reporting, and whatever it is that they need to do. Splunk is a very powerful platform in that way. 

In their case, they had global data domicile requirements. We didn't have the same global deployment for our other larger environment that they did. So it made sense for us to migrate them to a bunch of small cloud stacks that were globally positioned rather than deploy a bunch of tiny enterprise environments to do the same thing.

It's pretty important to us that Splunk has end-to-end visibility to our native cloud environment. We need to be able to figure out where the points of failure are. Knowing whether it's a forward, on our end, an index, the cloud environment,  a firewall, or something else entirely is important to troubleshooting that kind of process. 

Splunk has helped to reduce our mean time to resolve. For the specific use case, the ability to bring in more Splunk data and market makes work consistently accessible.

I think that Splunk's ability to predict, identify and solve problems in real time is better than what we use it for. Our observability journey is still pretty early so we haven't done a lot of predictive detection that is possible to do with Splunk. It looks like it can do the things that we needed to do in a pretty effective way. We just haven't done that yet.

Some of the implementation is challenging. They're not very proxy-aware. Their recommendation is to set up an intermediate forward in a DMZ environment or something like that. That's not always the most convenient way to do things. It would be better if we could use an HTTP proxy, send data out via HEC, HTTP, or in a way that is proxy-aware.

We did the POC six months to a year ago. We've been in the process of migrating some smaller use cases over the last three or four months.

We haven't used it a lot but it's been pretty stable.

Splunk support is pretty good. There's some work to be done. When I provide them with a bunch of data, they don't need to ask me some of the initial questions. But otherwise, they're pretty good.

Positive

I have seen ROI. The adoption of the company has increased dramatically. We have hundreds of alerts, hundreds of reports, and hundreds of dashboards that people use for their business cases, whether it's deliverables, resiliency, or troubleshooting.

Splunk is expensive. We have had some challenges in ensuring that all data is available in Splunk due to its cost. It has definitely proven its value in the data that we have brought in. From a resiliency and reporting perspective, those things are all very valuable. But it's certainly not the most cost-effective product in the world.

It is a valuable product, but it is certainly challenging at times to be able to bring in as much data as I would want due to the cost of the product.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten.

We use Splunk Cloud Platform for IT operations, IT security, and business value. 

We implemented Splunk Cloud Platform to resolve our IT security issues.

The federated search feature is a valuable tool that can be used effectively in the right architecture. However, the extent it is utilized will vary depending on the customer's needs. In my experience, more advanced customers tend to use this feature more heavily.

Splunk Cloud Platform provides good visibility into multiple environments, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid.

Splunk Cloud Platform is the best tool for a reason. It is a high-functioning solution with high integration for getting data in and out, and it is customizable.

The most significant benefit of using Splunk Cloud Platform is the freedom of data. The security team can see the data that's relevant to them, IT Ops can see the data that's relevant to them, and the business can see the data that's relevant to them. Sometimes, the same data is applicable to all three groups. Sometimes, it's not. But everyone has access to the data, and it's immutable. It can't be changed or deleted. The ability of all of these departments to leverage the same data is how Splunk Cloud Platform has benefited our company the most.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped us make key decisions, such as cost-saving decisions related to licensing. It has also improved uptime and helped us improve performance in areas where our network or servers were not performing well. Additionally, it has helped us make better business and IT decisions and has supported our planned growth.

Splunk Cloud Platform helps us access data for compliance and privacy regulations. It currently has the features to mask data, perform the least privileged access, and provide only certain commands and functions within the platform.

We are the best in the industry because of Splunk Cloud Platform. Splunk Cloud Platform fills the SIEM role for our organization, and without the best SIEM, we would be no better than our competitors.

Splunk's extensibility is one of its best features. It offers a wide variety of ways to ingest data, generate reports, and create dashboards. Its integrations with other systems are also very impressive.

Splunk Cloud Platform's most valuable features are enterprise security and ticketing integration.

The reporting provided by Splunk Cloud Platform is often good, but it only provides the data and not the flash, whereas the other platforms provide both. From an enterprise standpoint, we are more limited in terms of what data we can export and how we can present it.

Navigating the solution can be more user-friendly.

The documentation has room for improvement and the price is high and can be improved.

I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for over five years.

When architected properly and maintained to an optimum level, Splunk Cloud Platform is unbelievably stable.

One of Splunk Cloud Platform's key selling points is its ability to scale to petabytes and beyond.

Base-level support is suboptimal. Enterprise customers need the premium support package. Responses are often delayed, and resolution is slow.

Neutral

Over the past 25 years, I have used several different solutions. In the past, I preferred using a terminal interface rather than a web interface. Splunk has an API and a mobile app, but ultimately, Splunk users are confined to their browsers. This is one thing I would like to change, as I would prefer to be able to use Splunk outside of a browser. However, this is also one of Splunk's biggest advantages, as it is a universal platform.

We used Splunk Enterprise before migrating to Splunk Cloud Platform.

My knowledge of Splunk has since grown exponentially, but the first time I deployed Splunk Enterprise eight years ago, it was unbelievably hard. There were so many moving parts and things to consider. It was too much for one person to figure out, and I didn't have the budget to get help from the Splunk team.

The cost of using Splunk Cloud Platform is high, but the value it provides is worth the investment.

I give Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten.

Monitoring multiple cloud environments is never easy. We are looking forward to new features from our cloud partners, such as AWS Security Data Lake, Google, and Microsoft. These features will make it easier to integrate our cloud environments. Splunk Cloud Platform is currently the best solution for collecting data from multiple cloud environments. AWS has five million different ways to export data, and we need to use all of them to collect all of the security and IT-related data. Splunk supports all of these data sources.

A year ago, I would have said that Splunk needed automated response, an easy-to-detect, easy-to-run, and manage business analytics platform, a user and entity-based business analytics platform that is integrated within the product, threat intelligence, and a current dashboarding tool. Splunk now has all of these features. A year ago, Splunk's competitors had these features, but Splunk did not. Splunk has since acquired or developed these features in-house. Very little in Splunk's product is not tightly integrated into the current releases. If someone is starting from scratch, meaning they are just rolling out a new security solution, and they do not choose Splunk, they are making a mistake. Splunk provides so much of everything that it is the best choice for most organizations.

We perform daily maintenance on the solution.

I advise new users to find someone who knows Splunk. Even a good technical person will not be able to do this on their own. They are not going to train them on day one. Good technical people who know Splunk are valuable assets, so they should seek them out and get them on the project.

We use Splunk Cloud Platform to monitor our environment.

Monitoring multiple cloud environments is made easy with the Splunk Cloud Platform due to its fast ingestion and data recovery times.

Splunk's visibility into multiple environments is excellent. I have found that a hybrid environment works the best, as the login portion remains on-premises while the rest is in the cloud. This reduces the maintenance required on-premises.

There are two types of integration. The first involves bringing something into Splunk, while the second entails moving something out of Splunk. Bringing data into Splunk is relatively straightforward, with multiple options such as RAS, SysLog, and Splunk's built-in functions. However, exporting data from Splunk is more challenging and not as straightforward as the process of bringing data into Splunk.

Splunk Cloud Platform has influenced our decision-making processes. Splunk is primarily employed for security purposes; thus, it excels particularly in SIM. It encompasses an asset and identity framework that effectively gathers information about an organization's assets and individual identities, encompassing all users. Therefore, when considering Unified Business and SIM, Splunk proves to be highly proficient. 

The cloud performance is good.

Not having to perform any maintenance because it is handled by Splunk saves our administrators time which is valuable.

Splunk should offer various options for real-time monitoring. If we could enhance the speed of data ingestion or data retrieval, that would be an added advantage. Additionally, there is room for improvement in SaaS-to-SaaS integration. I believe that reintroducing HTML dashboards would be beneficial, as they provide dedicated web features. This, in turn, gives users the flexibility and freedom to create custom dashboards more easily.

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for five years.

I would rate the stability of the Splunk Cloud Platform as an eight out of ten. We still encounter some lagging and errors, but not as much as with the on-premises deployment.

I occasionally get in touch with Splunk technical support, usually regarding data onboarding. These include routine activities like installing or uninstalling applications, as well as making changes to existing ones. On average, we submit at least one ticket per week to them.

Positive

I have used many tools including Elastic, Grafana, Tableau, and Sumo Logic.

Splunk is indeed superior in many cases, but other tools are also making progress to catch up, with Elastic being one of them. They have begun developing their own SIM offering, complete with its own SIM features. Similar to Splunk Cloud, Elastic also has its Elastic Cloud Stack. Some of the features provided by Elastic seem to outperform Splunk. Therefore, there is room for Splunk to enhance these aspects. As for pricing, it could be more competitive, considering that other tools also provide the freedom to choose the Cloud Stack. Although Splunk offers this flexibility, the process often involves extensive discussions, making it less adaptable compared to other tools.

The initial setup is somewhat complex regarding the CI/CD pipeline, and Splunk manages the deployment. Splunk provides a feature called ACS, which enables us to manage the deployment ourselves if desired, but it's simpler to have Splunk handle the deployment on our behalf.

The deployment took around one month and required ten people from Splunk's DevOps team.

The implementation was completed by Splunk.

The pricing is high for small organizations. The cost makes more sense for organizations that have a large amount of data ranges.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten.

There are numerous tools that offer real-time reporting and alerting capabilities. Splunk is indeed effective, but due to the prerequisite of registering logs beforehand, a delay is inevitably introduced. Therefore, while Splunk is suitable for real-time reporting alerts, it may not be as optimal as some alternative solutions.

Resilience has added value and contributed to the improvement of our organization. This is highly significant. In most cases, the SOC team relies on the tool for issue mitigation and ticket resolution. Therefore, it is crucial for Splunk to remain consistently up-to-date and respond as quickly as possible. This holds immense importance.

The extensibility is good, but there is room for improvement, especially in integrating certain logs. Enhancing the process of incorporating raised logs is possible. In most cases now there are limitations on log creation. Previously, a direct option existed to import logs. However, this process has been altered, requiring users to develop an add-on for log integration, leading to increased complexity. Furthermore, users are expected to have knowledge of Python. This can be problematic in cases where users lack such expertise. Therefore, this aspect could certainly be enhanced.

For those who want to evaluate Splunk, it comes down to the volume of data. If they are dealing with a substantial amount of data flowing into their SIM, Splunk would be the superior option. Splunk effectively manages extensive datasets in comparison to other technologies. It also offers numerous additional functionalities, such as an enterprise security suite, assets, and identity framework. Moreover, it has undergone industry testing and has been employed in the field for a considerable duration. In contrast to other organizations, they provide a wealth of features.

I use the solution to create alerts for different servers. I also create dashboards in Splunk.

We have a lot of servers. It was hard to track which were down as we didn't have a monitoring platform. Splunk changes that. It receives data and if it doesn't get any data, it creates an alert so we are notified if something is down.

We also use it for making reports to help make management easier. 

The monitoring of servers for high CPU utilization helps us out. If there are offline servers or high utilizations, we can see the incidents and optimize our processes. 

The cloud is very fast. We have a lot of data in our Splunk instance and it isn't slow in any way. 

The maintenance is good. We have good support if we have queries or issues. With on-premises Splunk, if we ran into issues, we'd have to figure things out ourselves. With the cloud version, it's easier to get support. 

We can monitor multiple cloud environments, including Azure and AWS. 

It can be difficult to monitor cloud platforms. We are integrating more cloud servers and patching data sources from those servers. It's very easy to use Splunk and have everything go to the dashboards.

We get good visibility into multiple environments. We can easily search from Splunk Cloud to our on-prem or AWS directly. We also do not ingest the data in order to see it.

We can easily integrate with other systems. It's very helpful. We can leverage Splunk to gather any specific reports we want with this integration capability. 

The reporting is very good. Every month we have a call with Splunk personnel and they'll show us reports to show high usage for search, for example. From our side, we can change or update in order to optimize our systems. 

The cloud has helped us with decision-making. It helps make maintenance decisions very easy.

It's very resilient. 

Testing can handle a lot of logs, however, we are unsure if the speed will be affected.

When we are using OneDrive or SharePoint, as a developer, we'd like to have better integration between the two.

There are some issues with Splunk blocking some shared mailboxes. 

Support could be improved. 

I have been using the solution for five years.

The Splunk cloud is very stable. I've never experienced crashing. If there are issues, they will notify us. It doesn't take long to resolve issues at all. Things tend to be resolved in an hour or so. 

The solution is very scalable. 

I haven't experienced the extensibility, or the ability to extend the system, however, my understanding is that it is very good. We have yet to upgrade it.

When we have high-priority tickets, it's hard getting help efficiently. We'd prefer to call. It takes time to get someone to help. We've had to submit tickets via the portal, and they asked us to call instead. It's hard to get above P1.

It would be ideal to get a specific phone number or email so that we do not have to wait hours to get help.

We do have different Splunk support services where we talk to them bi-weekly, and at that point, we can talk about any high-priority issues. They do try to help us with queries. 

Positive

We previously used Splunk on-premises. 

I do not have any experience with the initial setup. Since it is a cloud deployment, Splunk handles the maintenance mainly.

I'm not aware of the exact pricing. That said, my understanding is that it is very reasonable. However, every application has a price. We need separate licenses for everything. They don't have any bundles. 

For the first few years, I used the solution on-premises, and then I moved over to the cloud. 

I use the classic dashboard; I don't yet use the studio. 

It has not yet affected our security posture. 

We have not yet explored federated search. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

If a user is planning to use the Cloud Platform is to consider the pricing. It's fast to access and there is no downtime. It's very good from a user perspective. I'm happy with it. It's helpful.

Users should work to maximize the power of Splunk to get the most out of it. Leverage the applications, including security. 

We have a lot of third-party contractors that come in on our network and do the work. We use it to pretty much check what they are doing and make sure they are not doing anything that they are not supposed to be doing.

We do a lot of user interaction. We have users logging in, and we mainly look into failures and what is causing them to get locked out. We do a lot of that.

We also have Duo. We use Splunk Cloud Platform to keep an eye on who is using Duo, where they have failures, and why. We have quite a few people who are not supposed to be using Duo, and then they end up, for whatever reason, on the Duo side of the house. We use it to keep an eye on them so that we can help them get back to where they are supposed to be.

The improvement is in terms of helping those users who get locked out because we have that happen quite often. Daily, we have users getting locked out, and using Splunk makes it so much easier to help them. Rather than trying to go to the server and find those logs, we can just go to Splunk and then the dashboard for that particular user and find out exactly which machine is causing the lockout.

It helps us to easily find out which machine is causing the lockout. A lot of people know that customers can exaggerate. We can bring that back into perspective. They might say that they get locked out every day, whereas it might be once a week. We can see that. We do have a dashboard that tells us who is locked out right now. We do use that, and it helps us a lot because even before the user realizes it, we can go back and help. That helps us because they almost do not even know that it is happening. We can see it in real time, and we can fix it and unlock it. If it is something that is reoccurring, we can say, "You have been getting locked out multiple times in the same place for the last couple of hours. Go check this." We can also see why they were locked out. If somebody is putting in the wrong password, we can ignore that and unlock it. We, of course, are going to see where it is coming from. If we see some weird IP address or some weird computer that looks like it belongs to us, we will address that, but it helps us to help the user quickly. We are told what is happening as opposed to having to ask what is happening. We have definitely seen time to value. Instead of having to research, we are told it is there.

The Splunk Cloud Platform has reduced our mean time to resolve. It has easily saved 20 to 30 minutes every time someone gets locked out. We get 10 or 15 instances per day where people get locked out. It definitely saves a few hours per day.

Splunk Cloud Platform definitely frees us up to handle true problems and do true troubleshooting as opposed to handling lock-out issues. It is, of course, big for the user, but it is minute for us because it is answering a question that does not really matter to us. It matters to the user, but for us, we can just unlock their account, and we can figure out why at another time, whereas now, we can unlock their account and figure out why immediately. For example, if it was a machine that they logged into but they do not remember, or they have a cell phone that they logged into but they have not changed their password on, we can figure that out a lot quicker. That helps them quicker. It keeps us from having to go back to that user, and we can knock that out right then and there.

We have not gone into its ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real time because we use it more after the fact. We do have an MSP, and they handle more of the security side. Their software does real-time monitoring, and they get alerts. We use the Splunk Cloud Platform to see what has already happened.

All the features are very equal for me. I do not use any one feature more than the other. They all are pretty equal to me.

It works as needed, and it does everything that we want to do. I have not come across anything that I would consider missing as such. If anything, sometimes we have dashboards that would not go into the dark mode. It is a minor issue, but it is the only thing that I wish was there. The dark mode would definitely help.

We have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for about three years.

It has always worked when we needed it.

We are a very small shop. We only have 150 gigs a day, and we are not anywhere near that 150. However, from what I see, if there is an easy transition from 150 gigs to 300 terabytes, that is easy scalability.

We did not use any similar solution.

I was not involved in its deployment. It was already implemented.

Splunk Cloud Platform has been able to provide business resilience by empowering our staff, but currently, only two of us use it. One thing about coming to the Splunk conference is that we learn a lot. It is a lot more than what we probably can do. We also learned that for most people here, Splunk is a big part of their job. That is their main focus, whereas we have so many different things. We use Splunk; we do a little bit of networking. We do troubleshooting from swapping computers to the almost top level of moving cables.

I would rate the Splunk Cloud Platform a ten out of ten.

We are primarily using it for InfoSec, cybersecurity intelligence, information gathering, and forensics. We also do a little bit of application performance monitoring for some appliances that can only be monitored through log ingestion.

We are starting to monitor multiple cloud environments. We have our internal cloud, and we are migrating to AWS. We are engaged in that path. In terms of monitoring, it is more or less the same because we are using the same integration pattern, which is to use Ivy folders and gather logs. We use it at its minimum, but the way I see it at the Splunk conference, we can go further. Will we go further? That is a million-dollar question.

It has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment. For sure, it is important for operation and application support, but we need to embark our staff and management for that. They are the ones who are committing big dollars to that.

It has not reduced our mean time to resolve because we are using other tools as well. We are aiming to go on that path in the coming months.

It specifically has not improved our organization's resilience. There are a myriad of modern tools that we are implementing. Splunk is one of them. It is one of them helping us.

Index Manager is most valuable because we do not have to bother about internal storage. It is all managed by the Splunk team.

The security connection should have a seamless integration. Other than that, the way we are using it, so far, it seems quite good.

We have owned Splunk Cloud Platform for the last year and a half.

The stability of the solution is quite good. 

We had challenges with the sizing of the cloud tenant that we purchased, but that was based on past decisions, so we are stuck with that until our next move. That should come in the next year. At that time, we will resize the tenant in a more efficient way, so scalability does not apply because the tenant we bought is a closed one. There is no scalability on either side. I learned that after the fact, so I am not impressed because we did not buy it. I guess people who buy that type can have good feedback on scalability.

We migrated from an on-premise solution that we had for about three years. We saw cost efficiency when we went from on-premise to the cloud, but I do not manage the budget.

We are using Dynatrace in parallel. We used Splunk as a cybersecurity tool, and we embraced Dynatrace a few years ago. So far, Dynatrace does a great job. Splunk is closing the gap. With today's announcement at the Splunk Conference, they are catching up. We are also using Microsoft SCOM, so it is a trio. It helps us do a better job.

I was not involved with the setup of the on-prem one, but I was involved with the migration to the cloud. My experience was interesting because I started from zero, but with the help of Splunk's professional teams, we could achieve our project. On a personal side, it helped me to gather the knowledge that brought me here at the Splunk conference.

The setup is always challenging. We had four or five people involved in the migration. We also involved a lot of key players in application migration. We had 20 to 30 people involved at some point in the migration path.

We used professional services.

We have, for sure, seen an ROI with Splunk. Our DevOps team is able to gather faster answers to their questions. Obviously, it brings value, whether it is Splunk or any other tool. 

We could see the ROI in a few months. We gave time to our DevOps specialists to embrace the solution and get used to it. From there, as they made their own usage and use cases of the tool, it gave them speed to achieve what they were looking for.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a seven out of ten.

We collect almost everything that we log and push it into the Splunk Cloud Platform. That is pretty much our use case. It is mostly for our cyber monitoring tool, firewalls, normal cyber logs, Windows event logs, etc.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped improve our organization's business resilience a little bit. It is a big organization, and I am just a little part of it. Its impact on the whole business has been a little bit.

We use ES for correlation, incident handling, and things like that. It reduces the mean time to resolve a little bit as compared to the other SIEMs that we were using. We are not using SOAR right now, but that is where we want to be.

I like the fact that we do not have to maintain all the cloud infrastructure. That is probably the main thing about the Splunk Cloud Platform. We do not have to worry about maintaining the infrastructure that is out there. We just push things up and maintain our infrastructure on-premises. This is important for us because we just do not have the manpower and resources to manage all the infrastructure. 

We used to use another SIEM with which we constantly had to replace hardware and things like that, so it is a good benefit to have that cloud infrastructure there whether it is coming from a SaaS environment or we just build it in the cloud.

One thing that is a stickler for us is the ability to download apps. I guess it depends on what kind of license you have. It allows some of them if I want, but this is something that we need on a day-to-day basis. When one of my customers needs an app, and I am able to find that app on the Splunk base, I have to create a ticket and wait for five days for them to download the app into the cloud environment. That is probably one of the main things. It is painful because I have to wait to get that app in the cloud.

Another issue is that if I build my own app to some configuration, I cannot load it up there myself. They have to vet it, which is important but it takes a long time to do all that.

We have been using this solution for a little less than one year.

It is very stable.

Scalability does not apply to our environment. Because it is a cloud, scalability is relative to how much you can afford. It scales itself if your data increases because it is a cloud environment. 

Splunk's support is very good, but because the cloud environment was pretty new, I ran into a couple of stumbling blocks with the support for the Splunk Cloud Platform. However, it started to get a lot better. Currently, it is a lot better than when I first started. At that time, a lot of the support staff was probably new to the whole cloud environment, and I realized that. We were the first DOD department to go into the cloud, so it was tough in the beginning with their support. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We were using ArcSight. The decision to switch to Splunk did not come from me. It was the decision of the company itself. It was a requirement. We could not track the up/down status with the other SIEM. Splunk can do that better. That was one thing. 

Another thing was the way Splunk can put things like MITRE ATT&CK into their platform. The way it handles rules and things like that makes it a lot better with the processing power. Splunk is search-based, whereas ArcSight is real-time. It fires the minute an event comes up, whereas Splunk has a separate way of doing it. They run a search every hour or so. It is not resource intensive. A lot of times, I can only turn on a minimum amount of rules, especially correlation rules, in ArcSight. I used to have about 300 or so in ArcSight. I probably have about 400 or 500 in Splunk, so the hardware processing power is a lot better.

I was involved in its deployment. Its complexity level was 50/50, but that was expected because of the lack of training initially. We had an awesome team from Splunk that helped us out. They were there for us for at least a month. They helped us and then trained us on the environment. By the time they left, we were good to go.

The return on investment is not in a monetary sense. Things are a lot less stressful in our environment. We are able to see things that we were not able to see before. It gives us a little calm because we know if something is up or down. We are able to see things that we could not see before in other SIEMs. So, there is a reduction in the stress level. 

We have seen a time to value. I can do plenty of things a lot faster than I could previously.

We evaluated Sentinel, QRadar, and LogRhythm. All of them were very good SIEMs, but we had a lot of challenges when it came to getting them certified on government L5. IBM has its own private cloud. They do not use AWS. We did not have that issue with Sentinel, but it is not as robust. Even though it is at a high level in terms of industry-level SIEM, it could not meet our requirements. It is still a challenge. Sentinel is the only one that is a competition to Splunk if you talk about cloud, not on-premises. It is native to the cloud.

It is awesome. I love it. Anything is possible in Splunk. I have gone through a lot of challenges with use cases. When I needed to figure something out, I got it resolved sooner or later. I either got Splunk support or I went to the community and looked it up. I have never run into anything that I could not do with Splunk. It is very good.

Overall, I would rate the Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten. 

On Splunk Cloud, I mainly look for errors in applications or issues that come up with our internal applications. I have also used it to create dashboards and display customer data to customers in an effective way so that they have insights into their data.

There is less overhead now for infrastructure management. There are fewer issues that we have to worry about on the infrastructure side. This has freed up more of our resources' time to work toward initiatives on the Splunk platform itself. It is hard to measure the time savings. If one resource was working on it, that resource could save anywhere between 15 to 20 hours a week.

It must have reduced our MTTR, but I have been with Splunk for as long as I have been in my current environment, so I do not have anything to compare it with.

It helped improve our organization’s business resilience. The solution helps us find where errors are and potentially where threats are a lot faster. We can more effectively push out alerts not only to our team but also to the teams across the enterprise. It is nice to have on hand.

It is quite effective at helping us identify problems very quickly. We do not participate in real-time searches within our Splunk environment, but close to real-time is possible, and it is quite effective.

Not having to manage Splunk Cloud's infrastructure is valuable. Being able to deploy within the cloud and not having to manually manage our configs on the infrastructure side and set up our own architectures has been the biggest help.

Other than that, the new Dashboard Studio has been a pretty big win, but I do not know whether that is more cloud-specific or not. Dashboard Studio has a cleaner look for customers that want to see their data but not necessarily search. For the customers that want to see their data, having an easy and effective way to drag and drop to see where things are going to be if they want to change them has been pretty beneficial.

They can streamline the process of creating custom apps. I do not have a lot of experience with it. It was not very difficult for me to do so, but there is probably a better way to present the ability for people to push their own custom apps to the platform and go through Splunk's manual and automatic reviewing process.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

I have not seen any downsides when it comes to uptime and availability. Being in the cloud reduces downtime, especially compared to being on-prem where if something goes wrong, you will have to go in and fix that infrastructure yourself.  I have not necessarily seen significant downtime with Splunk Cloud or on-prem at this time.

I quite enjoy the fact that if we need more indexes or search heads, it is very easy to plug and play with Splunk Cloud. With the infrastructure model that we had before, we would have to go in, set up a new search head out to the cluster, and add a new indexer to the cluster if we needed it. It will have more benefits going forward as we move more and more into the cloud.

I have worked with Splunk support, and I would rate them an eight out of ten. It depends on where you are and what project you are working on at the time. It would be quite beneficial to work with them if you have a specific project that you are working on, and they have some insight into it. I do not work with support too often myself. Usually, one of our Splunk Infrastructure managers works with them, but there is always room for improvement. Availability in terms of making the time to gain insight into specific projects and problems that we are having is an area that can be improved.

Positive

My company has been with Splunk for quite some time now. We are well integrated at this point, and we are in the process of migrating over to Splunk Cloud specifically. We used Splunk on-prem for a while. We are currently in a hybrid situation, and we are making our way toward being completely on the cloud.

I help from time to time with the migration process, but I am not necessarily in charge of the total migration functions that we currently have today. The most I have done in terms of deploying to the cloud was creating a custom alert action for the cloud environment, which is one of my biggest contributions so far. I am not completely in charge of it, but from time to time, I will assist in the migration process. It is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get more and more familiarized with the cloud and how to benefit from it by using features like federated search, it becomes easier. It is somewhere in between in terms of complexity.

We would have seen an ROI. I do not have a specific number, but assuming that we did not have Splunk Cloud, we would have to manage our own infrastructure. Not having to manage nearly as much infrastructure and not having to have the personnel to manage that infrastructure on a regular basis, frees up that time for them to do what they are really designed to do. This has definitely added value.

I am a little bit familiar with the pricing and licensing model. I am not sure about the particular pieces of the actual price that we have, but I do like the idea of going towards a more CPU-based approach rather than the ingesting approach. This CPU-based approach gives us the ability to ingest more data if we need it.

The biggest value that I get from attending Splunk conferences is the insights from everybody here. You have people from many different companies doing very different things and deploying very different models within their different Splunk instances. You get an idea of where everybody lands and maybe grab some ideas that you would not necessarily have thought of by looking at it from the inside of someone who is in a completely different field than you are.

There is definitely a big difference between Splunk Cloud and on-prem. For me, one of Splunk on-prem's biggest features is being able to deploy my own custom applications internally, which is something that is a bit of a process with Splunk Cloud. So, given the information that I have, I would rate it a seven out of ten.