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reviewer2506578 - PeerSpot reviewer
Splunk and Python Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jun 26, 2024
Improves our ability to handle data from applications
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk's strength lies in its single-page view."
  • "Due to its high licensing cost, Splunk is out of reach for many organizations."

What is our primary use case?

As a Splunk engineer, I collect data from various sources, including Universal Forwarder, Heavy Forwarder, DB Connect, and Syslog to monitor application logs. This data is used to create dashboards that visualize application health and identify potential security incidents. Additionally, I configure alerts to notify teams via Slack or email when CPU or memory usage reaches critical thresholds, allowing for prompt resolution. Furthermore, I use Splunk to create KPIs and NDDs for various aspects of the organization, including a custom ITSI service for Microsoft 365. This service monitors child entities like Teams, Outlook, and Edge within a parent application, tracking metrics like team member logins and meetings, CPU usage, and memory usage. All this information is consolidated into a three-page ITSI report.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect malicious activity, such as failed login attempts by unauthorized users. These attempts, whether brute-force attacks or phishing attempts, trigger alerts with detailed information about the incident mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This allows our security team to investigate and take appropriate action quickly.

How has it helped my organization?

We managed Splunk's large clustered environments, I oversaw data collection from roughly 750 applications via universal deployment clients. This experience, coupled with my nearly six years of Splunk expertise, made monitoring application logs and creating Splunk knowledge bases straightforward tasks. While processing task cut-off tickets from the application team could be time-consuming, the actual monitoring itself was easy to manage.

The end-to-end visibility provided by Splunk is important because our company uses applications like K-Connect and Splunk to monitor user activity across different sectors. Having previously worked in both healthcare and finance, I'm familiar with how this process works. We access user information including personal data to track their activity from start to finish within our systems. Splunk allows us to mark specific user data points for further analysis, ensuring we have a full view of user or patient activity within each organization we serve.

Splunk helps me find security events across multi-cloud and on-prem platforms. I would identify missing data by checking the last hour's timeframe (span=1h). If on-prem or cloud data was missing, I'd investigate which logs weren't being ingested, whether an indexer was down, or if a forwarder wasn't sending data. Additionally, I'd check if the application or event log volume was overwhelming the universal forwarder, requiring a queue to process the data effectively.

Splunk improves our ability to handle data from applications. This data is often unstructured or unavailable in a usable format. To make it usable, we used to normalize the logs manually through back-end commands and edit various Splunk consoles and platforms. This process transformed the data into a structured, human-readable event format, allowing us to extract the information we needed.

We can identify potential malicious activity through Splunk by analyzing database logs with SQL queries. For instance, a high number of failed login attempts within a short timeframe could indicate unauthorized access attempts. Additionally, with multi-factor authentication systems like Duo, a user logging in from two geographically distant countries within a short period might be suspicious. To address this, I've developed SQL queries that check for logins within a one-hour timeframe across different countries. These queries trigger alerts on a dashboard, allowing IT to investigate the user's IP address and determine if the login is legitimate.

Splunk has significantly improved our business resilience by providing a single pane of view for all our data. This visualization allows us to monitor for anomalies, including unusual application activity, unauthorized executables, and suspicious shell scripts running on both Linux and Windows servers. By triggering alerts for these events, Splunk empowers our organization to proactively identify and address potential threats, ultimately improving overall stability.

Splunk allows us to easily check the data for malicious activity. It also helps reduce the alert volume by allowing us to set thresholds for alerts. For example, we only receive an alert when the CPU usage exceeds 90 percent or the number of failed logs is more than 15.

Splunk helps us investigate by providing relevant context from system logs. We can search the Splunk logs for specific applications and timeframes, and then examine all the data fields for suspicious activity, failed login attempts, or any other anomalies.

It helps security teams investigate threats faster by providing a central platform to collect and analyze data from various security applications. This focus on enterprise security allows teams to identify and respond to threats across the organization, leveraging frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to match attacker techniques and tactics.

What is most valuable?

Splunk's strength lies in its single-page view. This interface allows us to explore all our data, build dashboards with alerts, and visualize real-time information through various charts like column, bar, and pie formats, providing a full user experience.

What needs improvement?

Due to its high licensing cost, Splunk is out of reach for many organizations. Making their licensing more affordable would open up Splunk's solution to a wider range of users.

Buyer's Guide
Splunk Enterprise Security
September 2026
Learn what your peers think about Splunk Enterprise Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security has excellent scalability.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment is complicated  because our organization works with on-prem servers. All the data needs to be duplicated and all the searches and indexes need to happen properly.

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

The Splunk licensing is high.

While more affordable, alternative SIEM solutions lack the flexibility and in-depth visualization capabilities offered by Splunk.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of ten.

While Splunk Enterprise Security offers a user-friendly interface, its true power lies in its ability to create highly customized dashboards that streamline investigations and reporting.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Nagendra Nekkala. - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager Ict & Innovations at Bangalore International Airport Limited
Real User
Top 10
Jan 8, 2024
Helps increase our security posture, saves time, and improves visibility
Pros and Cons
  • "The ability to manage large amounts of generated data and to protect all devices from unauthorized use are the most valuable features."
  • "The threat detection library needs to increase the frequency at which the playbooks are updated."

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Enterprise Security to enhance our overall security posture by proactively managing our threat profile across the enterprise. This enables us to see valuable insights and effectively monitor all OEM devices.

How has it helped my organization?

It is easy to monitor multiple cloud environments using Splunk Enterprise Security. This helps with DLP and security across our SAM solutions.

Although I favor the cloud's convenience for credential management, Splunk Enterprise Security's visibility remains consistent across multiple environments.

Splunk's insider threat detection reveals daily threat events and highlights anomalous behavior on the dashboard.

The threat intelligence management feature continuously monitors activities across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, and informs stakeholders of any suspicious activity.

Splunk Enterprise Security has endpoint security protection to analyze malicious activities and detect breaches through the analysis of new log content.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats two to three hours faster.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our incident review times, security posture, network protection, and endpoint protection. We saw the benefits within the first month of use.

A decrease in false positives has enhanced our risk analysis, security posture, and the speed of our alert investigations, resulting in daily time savings of four hours. 

Splunk Enterprise Security has saved us two hours per day of investigation time.

What is most valuable?

The ability to manage large amounts of generated data and to protect all devices from unauthorized use are the most valuable features.

What needs improvement?

The threat detection library needs to increase the frequency at which the playbooks are updated. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was straightforward. We wanted to cover all of our endpoints. Two people were required for the deployment.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed in-house.

What other advice do I have?

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

Splunk Enterprise Security is a leader in the market and provides great visibility into an organization's security posture.

We have 100 people that are using Splunk Enterprise Security.

The continuous visibility and SOC requirements of the resilience Splunk offers are a benefit to any SIEM. Resilience is important for organizations that run a hybrid environment.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Enterprise Security
September 2026
Learn what your peers think about Splunk Enterprise Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer2309169 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Security Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Nov 30, 2023
Customizable, enables us to easily analyze logs, and provides real-time visibility
Pros and Cons
  • "The best part of Splunk Enterprise Security is its customizable settings."
  • "Splunk Enterprise Security has not helped reduce our alert volume."

What is our primary use case?

I utilize Splunk Enterprise Security to create alerts within various use cases, including data onboarding, gap analysis, and business testing. I ensure that the use cases adhere to the defined criteria and address any changes or requirements raised by the client. Additionally, I handle any necessary backend modifications in Splunk by deploying code to appropriate environments, including the production environment.

We implemented Splunk Enterprise Security to capture more effective alerts. We create alerts to utilize advanced filtering capabilities. Additionally, we employ Sentinel as our endpoint security application. I have created all instances of the query as intended and have mapped them to Splunk. However, the corresponding alert is not being generated. These are the areas that require attention.

My expertise lies in Splunk Cloud and Azure. While I have worked with AWS in the past for a short period, my current focus is on GCP and Splunk Cloud. My responsibilities involve troubleshooting, alert verification, and key generation. Based on specific requirements, I employ my self-generated queries to identify the relevant fields, such as email or location. Next, I implement lookup conditions and pinpoint the table containing the desired field type. This process allows me to determine the specific requirement of the use case and define the search parameters accordingly. Finally, I conduct a time-bound search to identify any defects.

I deploy to Splunk Cloud, GCP, and on-premises environments. I have experience working with both platforms. When working on the cloud, we don't have the same level of visibility as we do on-premises. For example, we cannot directly access the fraud department systems. In the cloud, we must make all changes and deployments through the Splunk UI. This is relatively straightforward, as there is no backend to manage. However, it requires a thorough understanding of the configuration files and the data fields we need to modify.

How has it helped my organization?

We manage multiple cloud environments, including Splunk Cloud and GCP. Splunk Enterprise Security dashboards make it easy to monitor these environments seamlessly. We have a single user interface that allows us to log in to our account instantly and check for any issues, such as Data Collection Processor errors. This unified UI also provides access to the back end of both Splunk Cloud and GCP instances, eliminating the need to switch between different platforms. Whether we need to manage Splunk Cloud or GCP settings, we can do so directly from the UI, which is easy.

Splunk offers comprehensive visibility into our IT infrastructure. The only challenge lies in managing multiple user accounts. We need to create separate accounts for the UI, production environment, and staging environment. Additionally, if we have a DCP or a system cloud, we need to create corresponding accounts. Once that is done we can log in and use it.

Regarding Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities, we receive an alert for every new case creation. If there is a high likelihood of a specific alert occurring, we have a corresponding use case in place to address it. We also receive soft tickets, which are potential alerts that may materialize in the future. These soft tickets are documented in Jira, and we continuously monitor them. By analyzing these alerts, we can identify potential issues. For instance, this morning, we received an alert for a new case with a missing application name. The interaction table contains the destination user account, process ID, process name, OS, and other relevant information, but the application name field is blank. We investigate this particular use case to determine the cause and timing of the alert. Since we are receiving the alert slightly earlier than expected, we consult the ticket for further details and substitute any missing information.

I have utilized the MITRE ATT&CK framework when the use case pertains to a specific data model. To comprehend the data model, we examine the processes involved or the fields that a particular tool utilizes. To achieve this understanding, we align the MITRE ATT&CK framework with the data modules. Subsequently, we extract the field name and field value. When dealing with ranges and incident changes, we must input the corresponding MITRE ATT&CK ID. This involves determining the tech ID and identifying the ID values associated with it.

Using Splunk Enterprise Security to analyze malicious activities and detect breaches is an efficient approach. When testing a use case, it's not necessary to manually enter the application name as it's provided automatically. Since the requirement is for SSO, we need to verify whether it's LDAP, Splunk Cloud, or AWS. Occasionally, irrelevant results may appear during data ingestion. We test for subscription-related issues and analyze the results. This testing process provides insights into the circumstances that trigger specific alerts. Malicious activities will undoubtedly be detected, and all our requirements will be met. Alerts are generated whenever unusual timeframes or activities occur. Various filtering criteria allow us to identify and capture specific user IDs or patterns within events. This capability proves to be highly beneficial.

The speed at which Splunk Enterprise Security detects threats could always be faster but it is designed to detect threats quickly. It uses various techniques, including queries, to identify and analyze potential threats. This allows it to produce faster search results than traditional methods, enabling us to locate the information we need more efficiently. While I cannot provide an exact percentage of how much faster it is, it is undoubtedly significantly faster. It can process thousands of events, ranging from twenty thousand to thirty thousand, in a very short period.

I've gained valuable knowledge from having to troubleshoot various situations. For instance, I've learned that the SIM needs to be flipped to use the new applications. Additionally, I've discovered that the error limit for event results should be increased beyond 10,000 because the source type values have increased significantly. This ensures that alerts are received even when there are large volumes of data. Furthermore, I've learned that some clients have different index limit requirements. Some clients require a seven-day index limit due to licensing restrictions or data ingestion considerations. Those who have the larger license opt for a 15 or 30-day index limit. In these cases, the large amount of data generated can necessitate a 1TB or higher index size limit. These learning experiences have been invaluable in my work, and I'm constantly encountering new scenarios that expand my knowledge base.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations. 

What is most valuable?

The best part of Splunk Enterprise Security is its customizable settings. We can modify the front-end interface, data sources, and various other aspects to suit our specific needs. This flexibility makes it extremely user-friendly and convenient.

Apart from its customizable settings, Splunk Enterprise Security also offers a range of other advantages. It enables us to easily analyze logs, use field queries, and perform other tasks without requiring any extensive training. The search function is intuitive and straightforward, making it accessible to anyone.

The UI-based reporting dashboard is another highlight of Splunk Enterprise Security. It provides real-time visibility into important metrics and allows us to drill down into specific events for in-depth analysis.

What needs improvement?

Splunk Enterprise Security has not helped reduce our alert volume. We need to separate a few of the alerts, and if there is a time based on the priority, we put the time at what time it needs to appear every day or for seven days or more days. If an alert is present or if something is triggering, then it will be detected. However, the number of alerts that can be handled effectively depends on the specific use case. For each result that is affecting the system or for any specific issue, only those particular alerts should be generated. We can define a timer and determine how often checks should be performed. For example, weekly checks may be sufficient in some cases. However, if there are hundreds of alerts generated in a week, it may not be possible to handle them all effectively. Testing must be conducted to filter out unnecessary alerts. Therefore, clear boundaries must be defined in the use case when creating alerts.

The price for Splunk Enterprise Security is high and has room for improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is an extremely stable product.

Splunk is compatible with a wide range of other products and is not constrained by specific configurations. Whether it's a single-sided or multi-sided cluster, whether it's used by a single team or multiple teams across different program locations, Splunk is flexible and adaptable. Data recovery is also a key feature, ensuring that data is never lost. This is one of Splunk's most significant advantages. Multiple indexes are maintained to safeguard data integrity, so even if one index fails, the data remains accessible to all users at all times.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is scalable.

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

Comparing SentinelOne and Splunk, we've found that SentinelOne requires a thorough understanding of our processes, including their business context, process names, and all relevant conditions. In contrast, Splunk is more forgiving, allowing us time to learn and adapt. Additionally, SentinelOne's pricing structure can be more complex compared to Splunk's straightforward approach.

While Splunk offers ease of use, better visibility, and intuitive management, SentinelOne demands more technical expertise to implement and maintain. Splunk, on the other hand, provides granular control over event filtering, enabling us to retrieve detailed information based on specific criteria, such as Linux or Windows events. SentinelOne, however, may not provide the same level of precision, requiring more precise query formulation.

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment is straightforward. We only require the name and the value, and the process is very quick. We were already using GitHub, GitLab, and GitPass, so integration with Splunk was seamless. Splunk is compatible with all of these applications, which makes it a good fit for our needs. We are also using ServiceNow, and Splunk communicates seamlessly with it to raise tickets. The overall deployment time is minimal. One person can manage the deployment process, and I have completed 18 deployments myself. Each deployment takes one day to finish.

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

The cost is on the high end, which makes it difficult for some organizations to use. However, the benefits outweigh the cost.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten. While I have not explored all aspects of Splunk, I have found Splunk Enterprise Security to be a useful and reliable tool in the areas I have used. 

Splunk is deployed in one location. On our team that works on the SIM development team, we have 28 people who use Splunk Enterprise Security.

Splunk Enterprise Security necessitates ongoing maintenance. Tuning tickets are available, so we perform the necessary tuning, and if there is an outdated ticket, we make the required changes. I addressed a ticket from 2018 that required tuning. They requested certain additions, such as authentication or a new index, and maintenance is performed to incorporate these new features.

In multi-cluster environments, maintenance can be performed from different locations simultaneously. This feature is very convenient and allows for flexible maintenance scheduling.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise Security because it is a comprehensive solution for enterprise security. I'm currently working on the SIEM component, but the SIM is also available. Splunk offers various ways to search and configure, making it very easy to use, even without prior knowledge. We can seamlessly integrate Splunk into our existing workflows.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Google
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2382405 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer/Architect at a government with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Sep 29, 2024
It integrates well, reduces alert volume, and we can customize the dashboards
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk Enterprise Security allows us to create custom dashboards by changing fonts and modifying widgets."
  • "I've noticed that onboarding data from various multi-cloud sources and diverse products, such as security network devices, can be challenging."

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for various security use cases, including writing correlation searches. This has significantly improved both our use cases and correlation searches. We can leverage existing resources, making modifications as needed, rather than starting from scratch each time. Splunk Enterprise Security provides diverse use cases across different environments, including AWS, Azure, and multi-cloud setups, while also integrating with Microsoft Sentinel. Additionally, we can integrate Splunk's service orchestration product for further automation. Overall, this allows us to automate tasks that security analysts previously performed manually, such as reviewing incident dashboards. We can fine-tune alerts based on analyst feedback. Splunk's research team ensures that use cases are updated with the latest security content, enabling us to understand and implement necessary steps while customizing them to fit our company's needs. This is what makes Splunk Enterprise Security so popular; it streamlines processes compared to legacy security products that often rely on manual scripts. Clients, including government agencies and banks, are transitioning to Splunk Enterprise Security due to its reduced training requirements and comprehensive features. Everything is consolidated, simplifying training and certification. Additionally, integrating Splunk's service orchestration product further automates tasks and improves response times. The substantial investment in Splunk indicates its staying power; no other product on the market currently offers comparable capabilities. Cisco's acquisition of Splunk reinforces its potential for success, combining APM, data logging, and security portfolios. In one financial project involving 600,000 users, we were able to monitor all incoming traffic, identify security activities, and distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic, including phishing attacks and potential identity-based threats. Splunk enables tracking individual identities, crucial for detecting attacks where perpetrators hide behind compromised identities, often leading to data breaches and other security incidents.

We implemented Splunk Enterprise Security to assist with AWS security, which includes GuardDuty, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and Inspector. These AWS components generate compliance and security alerts, which we correlate and use to create dashboard reports and identify security events for various use cases. We then enable the out-of-the-box use cases and send notable events to the dashboard. The implementation is currently in its early stages.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Enterprise Security operates based on incoming data, making monitoring multiple cloud environments relatively simple due to data availability and integration capabilities. Data from cCloudRail, CloudWatch, Azure, and other diverse environments can be incorporated. While occasional patching might be necessary, most integrations are readily available, offering extensive coverage without customization. Specific customizations might still be required, but most functionalities are pre-built, leveraging code developed by Splunk. This efficient approach involves analyzing data from vendors like Palo Alto and applying add-ons to apply code and automate parsing.

Our visibility into various environments depends on how much data we incorporate; therefore, the more we scan, the better our visibility.

Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities act as a secondary approval and vetting process, helping our organization ensure there are no unauthorized users.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework allows us to identify criticality levels, helping us respond to incidents. We might integrate incident response with a REST API, where a notable event triggers the creation of a ServiceNow ticket. Information flows from ServiceNow back to Splunk, which then feeds other systems, enabling bidirectional incident management. These processes are largely out-of-the-box, as Splunk integrates well with ServiceNow, except for any customizations. We understand the data integration requirements and leverage Splunk's extensive integration capabilities.

Splunk Enterprise Security does a good job of analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. The amount of information the research and threat detection teams receive from Splunk enables faster threat detection of up to 60 percent, eliminating the need to consult numerous sources. This efficiency is a key benefit of Splunk, as its significant investment in security allows for expedited processes.

I have seen the older legacy product where they have this manual process to identify issues, run scripts, try to identify the output, and then go through ten systems to collect data. This could take days. Now, with Splunk, we have everything correlated with multiple use cases, and we have a correlation search between multiple systems, along with application data. Splunk Enterprise Security can stitch all this information together and show it in a single pane of glass, which makes decision-making faster and allows us to focus on the relevant issues instead of wasting time on non-relevant ones. They have done this well.

Splunk Enterprise Security significantly reduced our alert volume. The initial challenge was dealing with a legacy IBM system that generated a massive amount of unfiltered noise, making it difficult to identify relevant events to send to the incident dashboard. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, and the value of the system wasn't apparent. To address this, we fine-tuned both the SOAR system and Splunk by applying filters and conditions to focus on relevant data. Ultimately, Splunk reduced the alert noise from 1,000 events in two hours down to ten, which were then grouped into a single notable event. Despite potentially having hundreds of background events, Splunk condensed this information into a single, actionable item, allowing us to focus on investigating the most relevant issues.

Splunk Enterprise Security accelerates our security investigations by reducing noise, allowing us to focus on relevant use cases. Everything is categorized as high, medium, or low priority, and people immediately start investigating high-priority issues connected to PagerDuty. Sometimes, this leads to on-call situations, sometimes immediate action. Service orchestration and playbook scenarios enable automated responses, like instantly blocking unauthorized access to a system. The possibilities for security use cases with playbooks and service orchestration are vast, and I'm excited to explore them further in the coming days.

The dashboards and reporting capabilities help to aid our security analysis.

We have integrated Splunk Enterprise Security with various services to streamline our security operations. This integration allows us to leverage diverse data sources for creating lookups, data models, knowledge objects, and regular expressions. By automating the development of use cases and regular expressions, we can apply them to data more efficiently, enabling faster implementation and analysis. This approach enhances our ability to detect and respond to security threats effectively.

Splunk Enterprise Security has enhanced our organization's security posture by providing comprehensive security compliance dashboard reports.

What is most valuable?

I appreciate how Splunk Enterprise Security connects users to the research team and threat documentation, providing access to current events impacting other clients, security vulnerabilities, and relevant use cases. The platform's daily updates offer valuable insights for enhancing our security posture.

Splunk Enterprise Security allows us to create custom dashboards by changing fonts and modifying widgets. Those familiar with XML coding can further personalize dashboards to align with frameworks such as MITRE. Alternatively, we have the option to use the pre-built dashboards.

What needs improvement?

I've noticed that onboarding data from various multi-cloud sources and diverse products, such as security network devices, can be challenging. Although Splunk has simplified data onboarding with features like data managers, they need to improve their out-of-the-box parsing capabilities. While they've made significant progress, covering about 70 percent of common products, there's still a 30 percent gap where manual configuration is required. This forces us to spend time understanding and writing custom parsing rules instead of focusing on data analysis. With Splunk's recent acquisition by Cisco, I'm hopeful they will prioritize enhancing this functionality and increasing their coverage to 90 percent or more.

I want to see Splunk Enterprise Security dashboards incorporate more features, such as out-of-the-box AI and user behaviour analytics, which are accessible within a single dashboard.

The technical support response time has room for improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security has stability issues, especially with large data volumes, increased data intake, complex dashboards, custom models, and processing that significantly impact performance. Many customers experience this; even with demos using small datasets, performance degrades with millions of data points. This necessitates capacity planning, dedicated teams, and enforced best practices. These practices include restricting complex searches, blocking problematic users, and providing training to prevent performance degradation. Constant vigilance and proactive measures are crucial to maintaining a stable Splunk Enterprise Security environment. I would rate the stability of Splunk Enterprise Security five out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security's scalability six out of ten. We need to add more shared CPU memory and increase the capacity, and scaling requires a lot of planning and effort.

How are customer service and support?

Splunk's support quality has declined in the past five years. Response times are now slower, and resolving an issue can take weeks. Submitting a ticket and connecting with the appropriate support agent often requires numerous emails and calls.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

To improve security coverage and user experience, we replaced our outdated legacy solution with Splunk Enterprise Security.

How was the initial setup?

Our Splunk Enterprise Security cloud deployment utilizes a DevOps approach with a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. This automation has significantly improved our deployment speed, reducing the process from a week to a few minutes. Changes are made in the development environment and then automatically pushed to production after a click-through approval process. This streamlined workflow eliminates the previous manual process and associated delays, resulting in a faster and more efficient deployment cycle.

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

Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is based on data volume, which generally suits large enterprises.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security eight out of ten.

Splunk is widely used across larger organizations. While large organizations often have extensive teams dedicated to Splunk projects and upgrades, smaller organizations can also use Splunk, taking advantage of more affordable pricing options like the free tier for limited data. Cost isn't a significant concern for larger organizations, who prioritize Splunk's security features and are willing to invest in its capabilities.

Splunk Enterprise Security is deployed across all departments, processing millions of data points. Over 500 people manage this data: building dashboards and reports, working with Enterprise Security, discussing use cases, and creating custom data models. This represents a massive effort for any large organization where every department utilizes Splunk.

Government departments are transitioning to Splunk, with daily onboarding increasing the current user base of 5,000.

Because the deployment is cloud-based, the Splunk DevOps team handles maintenance.

Splunk offers a resilient SIEM solution with comprehensive capabilities for research and a wide range of use cases. It is constantly updated, ensuring it remains a valuable and comprehensive SIEM package.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise Security. It is an excellent tool widely used by many organizations, making it a valuable choice for security information and event management.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Principal Cyber Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Jul 9, 2024
Provides users with insights and the ability to send alerts to analysts
Pros and Cons
  • "The benefits my company has seen from the use of Splunk Enterprise Security revolve around the speed of detection it offers."
  • "I think the only thing lacking is that there are some answers that I couldn't find about the tool without reaching out to support, and it had to be escalated to the engineering team."

What is our primary use case?

I mostly use the solution in my company for incident response, ticket management, and integration with other endpoint products.

How has it helped my organization?

The benefits my company has seen from the use of Splunk Enterprise Security revolve around the speed of detection it offers.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of the solution is the correlation searches. The one-stop shop shows me all my insights, and alerts, and can send alerts to my analysts.

I would say it is fairly important for my organization that Splunk Enterprise Security provides end-to-end visibility in our environment. At the same time, my company has other products that cover the observability piece. From a security perspective, we use data outside of our security data to piece together the whole picture. I think our company's perspective is that no matter how we get the whole picture, we will do it, even if it is from outside Splunk Enterprise Security. I think Splunk Enterprise Security plays a major role in this.

In terms of Splunk Enterprise Security for helping our company find any security event across multi-cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments, I would say that it is great once you get past the learning curve. The learning curve is higher than normal.

I think Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data in a great manner. Splunk is a great product and provides these features, but not so much when it comes to identifying and solving problems in real-time because there are always data delays. There is always onboarding, mapping, creation of correlation search, and then enabling Splunk ESCU part. It works in a general sense and not on a real-time basis.

In terms of whether Splunk Enterprise Security has helped reduce alert volume, I would say that it is the only active SIEM tool my company is currently utilizing. Reducing alert volumes involves tuning up certain areas of the engineering team. If I look at the product alone, I would say it can help reduce alert volume. If I consider the learning curve, I would say that you have to learn how to tune it the right way with the help of professional services or experts. You need to utilize your resources, which I think is the best way to do it.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides our company with relevant context to help guide our investigations since the correlation searches with the enriched data do help gain insights on all of our investigations. At the current point, we are still trying to get past the tool's learning curve so that all of our analysts and everyone on the security team can utilize the tool the best way they can. The more they learn, the better it gets, so currently, we are doing our best.

Splunk Enterprise Security helped reduce the meantime needed to resolve our issues because we have all our data in a centralized location and mapped to a data model. As long as we know what detection and data we are looking at, we can go to our data model and figure out where the issue lies.

Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to help improve our organization's business resilience revolves more around observability. Our company recently migrated to Splunk Cloud, and I think we have more hands-on experience with the ingestion side than ever before. I think it is a lot easier for us since we moved to Splunk Cloud as we don't have to focus on maintaining the infrastructure so much, and we can focus more on the data. I think this is outside of Splunk Enterprise Security's scope and falls under Splunk Cloud's capacity.

Speaking about Splunk's unified platform helping consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools, I would say that my company is not there yet.

What needs improvement?

In the next release, I want Splunk to offer more openness to integrations with other products that may be more of a preference for my incident response teams.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for five years. I am an end-user.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

In terms of stability, if configured correctly, it works great.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

With Splunk Cloud, I think using the tool's scalability feature is easy since one can just call the product's support team.

How are customer service and support?

The solution's technical support is great since they have been very responsive and very attentive while answering all my questions. If the support team can't answer my questions, they escalate it to their engineering team. 

I have had nothing but good things to say about Splunk's technical team. There have been times when I had to rephrase my questions or when there were communication issues, but the time to respond, escalation, and the attempts in trying to find help and answers from the support team's end have always been great. 

I think the only thing lacking is that there are some answers that I couldn't find about the tool without reaching out to support, and it had to be escalated to the engineering team. If this process is the only way I can find answers, I think it is a little bit limiting for an engineer who supports a real-time incident response team. I rate the technical support a nine and a half out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

I have personally not used any other product before Splunk Enterprise Security.

How was the initial setup?

The product's deployment phase was pretty easy to manage since our company has a migration team and support staff. We also had a really good project manager from Splunk to help us, who walked us through every step, and it was a great experience.

The solution is deployed on Splunk Cloud, which runs on AWS.

What about the implementation team?

My company works with Splunk directly to help us with the implementation, and our experience with the product has been great.

What was our ROI?

I have not seen an ROI.

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

The pricing model is great. You can choose between workloads or volume. I am not part of the conversation about pricing in my organization. I just know what I know about the tool from learning about Splunk.

What other advice do I have?

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. End user
PeerSpot user
Abdur Rashid - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC Analyst at nust
Real User
Jun 10, 2024
Helps monitor multi-cloud environments, detect threats faster, and reduce alert volume
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk Enterprise Security's value lies in its ability to collect and analyze security logs, providing insightful dashboards."
  • "Splunk's high cost, despite its recognition in our region, prevents many organizations from adopting Splunk Enterprise Security, suggesting there's room for improvement in their pricing strategy."

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Enterprise Security as our SIEM solution.

The log sources are in multiple cloud environments, but the deployment of Splunk is on-premises.

How has it helped my organization?

Monitoring our AWS and Azure cloud environments with Splunk Enterprise Security is easy.

The visibility into multiple cloud environments is good. We have complete visibility because we integrate all our logs and sources into Splunk.

Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities module runs on the backend and provides complete visibility into anomalous behavior and zero-day attacks.

The threat intelligence management feature is a necessary tool in our environment. The actionable intelligence provided by the threat intelligence management feature is helpful. We can see the IoC to help with our investigation.

Splunk Enterprise Security does a good job analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps us detect threats faster.

Splunk Enterprise Security helps reduce our alert volume by whitelisting the false positives.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations. Splunk uses user-friendly language and visibility to speed up our investigation times.

Splunk offers significant time savings for analysts compared to tools like Azure Sentinel, with analysts resolving alerts 30-40 percent faster. Additionally, Splunk's user-friendly dashboards simplify administration.  

What is most valuable?

Splunk Enterprise Security's value lies in its ability to collect and analyze security logs, providing insightful dashboards.

What needs improvement?

Splunk's high cost, despite its recognition in our region, prevents many organizations from adopting Splunk Enterprise Security, suggesting there's room for improvement in their pricing strategy. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is designed for easy scaling.

Our organization is expanding our clusters day by day.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is collaborative. We do receive a response within the appropriate time.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

While I have experience with Azure Sentinel and other SIEM tools, Splunk stands out for me. It provides a full SIEM experience with informative dashboards, clear language for easy analysis, comprehensive visibility across my systems, and a robust CIM for data organization.

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was technical but not overly complex. We faced difficulties with the log process going down and not getting the results in the client console. The overall deployment took around three hours to complete.

Three people were involved in the deployment. 

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed in-house.

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

Splunk differs from other SIEM solutions by using a gigabyte-based pricing model, rather than the agent-based licenses common with its competitors.

While Splunk Enterprise Security carries a higher cost and requires budgeting, cheaper SIEM, and open-source alternatives often have limitations. This makes the decision a matter of weighing the cost against the features most important to each organization's security needs.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security nine out of ten.

On paper, Splunk Enterprise Security is the top solution for detecting security threats in any organization, but Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive and most organizations don't have a proper budget to implement a SIEM solution. So they look for a more reasonable cost-effective solution. This is a hurdle for implementing Splunk Enterprise Security. It was originally designed for data science and modified for security. It is a top tool for SIEM and data analytics.

Splunk Enterprise Security stands out for its threat detection capabilities, but its cost can be a barrier for many organizations. Originally designed for data science, it excels in both security and analytics, but its price tag often pushes businesses towards more budget-friendly SIEM solutions.

Splunk Enterprise Security offers good resilience for our customers.

For organizations that don't have the budget for Splunk Enterprise Security, I would recommend Azure Sentinel.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Siddharth Rai - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
May 12, 2024
Monitors multiple cloud environments and integrates well with other tools
Pros and Cons
  • "It follows MITRE ATT&CK and Cyber Kill Chain frameworks. There are certain notable events for which we can configure our security posture."
  • "The support and the pricing can be better"

What is our primary use case?

There are lots of use cases such as finding threats, attack factors, and logs. It helps with rogue DNS or brute force attack detection. We have logs related to why a particular account was created. There is alerting. We can get some false positives, but by fine-tuning some of the things, we can reduce false positives.

Splunk is a security monitoring tool. It helps with incident handling, data logging, and observability of metrics. Splunk can handle all these things. Splunk Enterprise security is a premium app of Splunk through which we can have all the threat intelligence and incident reviews. It helps in finding all the attacks and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

We also have dashboards. We can collect logs from different sources and applications. We can also troubleshoot issues. If we are having any issues with an application, we can go to that particular index to see what is the cause. If any application is failing or giving an error, we can troubleshoot the issue. We do not have to log into the server to find the error.

How has it helped my organization?

We monitor multiple cloud environments. We have GCP, Azure, and AWS. It is easy to monitor multiple cloud environments using the Splunk Enterprise Security dashboards. Splunk releases inbuilt apps, so by using those apps and add-ons, we can integrate it with our cloud environments. For example, for Azure, they have a Microsoft Cloud Services add-on. We need to register the app in Azure, and after registering the app, we have to use the tenant ID and set it up. There are a lot of inputs, and we can use all those inputs to onboard different logs from Azure. There is also the capability for HTTP event collection.

We have a hybrid environment, and that works best for us. For a lot of things, we cannot just go fully cloud. Hybrid is the best option for us. We are happy with the visibility that Splunk Enterprise Security provides. It is also about how we configure things. If we do not do it in the right way, we will not get visibility. We have to know what kind of tools we are using and what kind of data we are pulling. We cannot pull everything. We have to know what to pull. If we pull only what is required, we would not have any problems.

Splunk Enterprise Security comes with MITRE ATT&CK and Cyber Kill Chain frameworks by default. There are 12 processes in the MITRE ATT&CK framework. We just have to onboard logs, create the data models, and assign those ATPs to monitor all the kill chains. We can monitor all attack vectors and persistent threats that we want to monitor.

Splunk Enterprise Security is good for analyzing malicious activities and detecting breaches. I would rate it a 9 out of 10 for that. It can also go to 10 for different clients based on different requirements.

Along with Splunk Enterprise Security, we also install another Splunk app that has all the threat intelligence. We then feed the data through a CSV file and create the use cases. We set up alerts for those. In the case of an event, an alert is generated and assigned to a particular SOC analyst. There can be some false positives, but with proper configuration and filtering, they can be reduced.

Splunk Enterprise Security has been very beneficial and valuable for us. Our application teams can use the indexes to troubleshoot the issues they are facing at their location.

What is most valuable?

Being able to ingest data from all the tools and all the apps being used in the environment is valuable. Being able to create alerts when, for example, the CPU usage reaches 95% is also valuable. We can set up alerts and proactively fix the issues. Splunk helps with all these things, and Splunk Enterprise Security has almost 2,000 use cases. It follows MITRE ATT&CK and Cyber Kill Chain frameworks. There are certain notable events for which we can configure our security posture. We can onboard all the logs through indexes and create dashboards to view what is going on in the environment.

What needs improvement?

Overall, it is pretty good. They are improving it every day. They recently released SC4S for onboarding syslog data. However, the support and the pricing can be better.

For how long have I used the solution?

It has been 8 years since I have been using Splunk. I am not a part of the core security team. I handle some parts of enterprise security, such as SIEM data models or the creation of some correlation searches and use cases. The majority of things, such as threat hunting or threat intelligence, are managed by our core security team.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We faced some issues, but we fixed them ourselves. We have around 10,000 knowledge objects running. All the knowledge objects should not be running all the time. They should be distributed over 24 hours so that the servers do not have any extra pressure at a particular time. We used to have an issue with our indexes going down. The CPU was being utilized 100%, and everything was getting stopped. We found the issue. We fixed that, and we are good now.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is pretty easy to scale. For Splunk Cloud, we log a ticket with Splunk support, and they start the process. It does not take much time. However, there is a cost involved in that. 

We have been ingesting 40 TB a day. We have three locations: The USA, the UK, and France.

How are customer service and support?

The SLA for Splunk Cloud support is not satisfactory for a customer. The turnaround time is a bit low. That should be fixed. I would rate their support a 9 out of 10.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

I have not used any similar solution in my current organization.

In my previous organizations, I have used solutions such as Elk, IBM QRadar, and Microsoft Sentinel. Microsoft Sentinel is good. Splunk is better than QRadar. Splunk has a lot of capabilities. It makes it easier to do many things and do them correctly. It does not require as much effort as required in IBM QRadar and Microsoft Sentinel.

Splunk is a bit costly, but if we control our usage during our searches, its cost is okay. When not controlled, it becomes a bit costly.

To those evaluating Splunk and solutions, I would advise knowing the features they would be getting. Elk is open source, but there is an underlying cost of infrastructure. The cost almost becomes the same. You have to hire people who can work on Elk and then you have the underlying infrastructure cost.

How was the initial setup?

We were on-premises, but we recently moved to Splunk Cloud. We have been using Victoria for the last eight months. When going from on-premises to Splunk Cloud, Splunk recommends engaging professional services. 

What about the implementation team?

The migration was done by Splunk. For administration and maintenance, we have about eight people, but the number of users in the environment would be in the thousands.

The maintenance of Splunk Cloud is taken care of by Splunk. Customers do not manage the clusters. With the on-prem setup, we have to patch the servers, upgrade the servers, or restart them from time to time so that the rebalancing of the buckets happens properly. In Splunk Cloud, we do not have to do these things. We only take care of the data normalization part. All other things are managed by Splunk.

What was our ROI?

It does provide a return on investment.

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

It is a bit costly.

What other advice do I have?

Be clear about what you want and try to filter out as much as possible. Create role-based rules and assign them to users rather than assigning every role capability to all the users. Also, everyone should not have access to all indexes. Only certain people should have access. For example, if someone is from the AD team, he or she should have access to the particular index logging the AD logs. They should not have access to all of it. There should also be some kind of training before you give access to people so that they know which searches to use and which ones not to use. They should understand the impact of various things.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a 9 out of 10 based on my experience and the work that I do with the core security team. They are pretty satisfied with it.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
PeerSpot user
JOEL MUNDOH - PeerSpot reviewer
Splunk Administrator / Architect at MetLife
Real User
May 12, 2024
Good visibility, helpful integrations, and very good documentation
Pros and Cons
  • "The security part is useful as it helps secure the entire environment."
  • "The user experience could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

My role is to design and implement and manage a strong environment. I need to ensure the available insights can be extracted efficiently and I use the solution for that. I also configure the Splunk custom dashboard and optimize searches to meet specific business needs. We also do a lot of troubleshooting and upgrading.

What is most valuable?

The security part is useful as it helps secure the entire environment. I designed the security aspect of it for a lot of applications in my company. It's the security thread within the application that we build. I'm able to use Splunk to secure the applications. 

We use the solution to monitor multiple cloud environments. We can monitor even on Amazon products. It's a good source for monitoring all types of applications. 

I can manage and correlate different kinds of searches within my environment. It's good for performance monitoring as well. I can do auditing and reporting through Enterprise Security.

The solution gives us visibility into multiple types of environments. There's a good level of cost optimization as well. It's good for end detection and prevention. I can identify anomalies and get a data view of fraudulent activities. You can uncover the source type and the IP address from where things originate.

Splunk gives us the capability to handle insider threat detection. I'm able to create my own dashboard that will visualize the information. It does depend on how you handle the configuration and permissions. 

We do use the MITRE ATT&CK framework. It helps us discover the scope of the incidents. It helps us to target incidents immediately. We're able to quickly resolve it and stop it. We get data visibility to see what's coming in, which helps us act fast. 

We can work with data from any source as long as you configure it correctly.

The solution has helped us to reduce our alert volume. You can tune your alert thresholds. You can also create rules to define your alerts. It gives you the capacity to optimize queries as well. 

What needs improvement?

They didn't use to be able to integrate with Cisco. However, this has changed now. 

Some minor features could be added. However, I need to do more research. 

The user experience could be improved. It could be more intuitive.

There should be a way to do bulk visualization reporting. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using Splunk for 7 years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We haven't had any downtime. The only issues come up is if there is an extension of limits. If you extend beyond your license, you may get downtime. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable. It's easy to manage. 

How are customer service and support?

We have contacted technical support for troubleshooting. No solution or machine is perfect. We had an issue where a new hire misconfigured some servers and they were able to offer us support. They are helpful, however, they do need to be faster in response. They do provide a to of documentation that can be helpful. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

I'm also familiar with CloudWorks. However, Enterprise Security has more features and can provide more insights. 

I'm familiar with Dynatrace.

How was the initial setup?

Splunk was already in place when I arrived. I simply tried to implement different strategies in multiple environments. 

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

Splunk is pay-as-you-go. The pricing depends on your use case. You only really pay for the amount of data you are dealing with. 

What other advice do I have?

I'm a Splunk customer. 

People shouldn't necessarily look for the cheapest pricing. You need to look at what will optimize costs and the time it takes to secure the data. The most important thing, before cost, is being able to successfully secure your data. You should choose your solution based on your use case as well. 

I'd rate the solution 8 out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
General Manager, Information Risk Management Strategy & Transformation at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
May 8, 2024
Helps with the functioning of an organization's security operation center and to detect anomalies in data
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution's most valuable feature is that it helps with our use cases to detect anomalies in our data and it is important to my company since we have a lot of data on different logs on the systems."
  • "Considering the contract thing and the whole legal area, it takes forever to get the contracts signed and to be able to agree to the terms and conditions for my company as well as for Splunk's team."

What is our primary use case?

The solution is used in my company to help the security operation center in work areas like detection, response, and investigation while maintaining cybersecurity standards.

How has it helped my organization?

My company has benefited from using Splunk Enterprise Security, which has helped us stay out of the headlines in newspapers. The tool helps detect threats early and respond to them effectively.

What is most valuable?

The solution's most valuable feature is that it helps with our use cases to detect anomalies in our data and it is important to my company since we have a lot of data on different logs on the systems. We need to be able to create insights that are indicative of malicious activities, which is one of the main purposes of having Splunk Enterprise Security in our company.

What needs improvement?

The product lacks cross-cutting capabilities. The features in Splunk Enterprise Security that were initially promised to our company are still not available. My company has been asking Splunk for some of these features to be provided in the product for years, and we have been promised that they will be introduced soon in the solution and be part of the product's next release.

I believe that the contract and the terms and conditions mentioned in it are areas where improvements are required.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have experience with Splunk Enterprise Security.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

When it comes to the on-premises version, the stability of the product was quite reliable. When my company moved to the product's cloud version, we faced some major issues related to availability and dealing with events like data corruption.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The product's scalability is okay. I do not think my company faced issues in the area of scalability.

How are customer service and support?

The product's support services were not great initially, but now they are in really good shape. Whenever my company connects with the product's support team, they listen to our questions and queries, so I feel that we are in a much better place now. I rate the technical support as eight out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

My company has experience with ArcSight. We switched to Splunk Enterprise Security because we couldn't get good answers to our questions from ArcSight, and it was just not functional.

How was the initial setup?

The solution is deployed using the cloud services offered by Splunk. Recently, my company also deployed the tool on an on-premises model. In our company, we monitor both, cloud and on-premises, with our cloud instance.

In the beginning phase, I would describe the deployment experience as a costly and hard process. The migration process from on-premises to cloud was hard and took our company a year to complete. There were different kinds of roadblocks on our company's and Splunk's end. My company worked directly with the migration process associated with the product.

What was our ROI?

It is difficult to say whether I have seen an ROI since it is like trying to figure out how much an insurance policy works. I think that our company will receive a return on investment from the use of the solution since it helps the organization's cybersecurity team stay out of the newspapers. My company has always been able to deal with threats quickly with the product.

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

Regarding the product's pricing, I think it has always been difficult to have a conversation with Splunk. Considering the contract thing and the whole legal area, it takes forever to get the contracts signed and to be able to agree to the terms and conditions for my company as well as for Splunk's team. I like the direction Splunk stays in by thinking with the customers about how to reduce costs and only have that data searchable or available, which you need at a particular time. I like the path Splunk is going on, specifically its current trajectory. I appreciate the efforts put in by Splunk in the area partnership, which is what my company expects.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

My company uses Microsoft Sentinel. A multi-SIEM environment provides my company with the best of both worlds. Sentinel has some good features, like Microsoft Graph Security, that the tool uses for the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Sentinel is a good option for my organization.

In my company, Splunk acts as a product that complements Sentinel because the former lacks some features. I think Microsoft is strong in the area of service delivery. Microsoft's EDR tools, like Microsoft Defender, use Servers from Microsoft Graph Security, and my company benefits from such a type of integration, and we are able to send alerts to Splunk. In our company, if we start to ingest all the data we usually ingest in Splunk by moving to Sentinel, it will become too expensive, so we have to choose where to keep our data.

What other advice do I have?

My company has been able to reduce the mean time to resolve with Splunk Enterprise Security as it went down from a couple of days to hours.

My company has seen a significant reduction in alert volume. It was very noisy earlier, but lately, my company hardly sees any false positives.

It is super important that the solution provides end-to-end visibility of our company's environment because you can never know from where threats can materialize. The fact that users can correlate and ingest data makes sense and is crucial, considering the massive amounts of data.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve our company's ability to ingest and normalize data, which is one of the tool's key benefits.

I would not say that Splunk Enterprise Security has helped solve problems in real-time scenarios, but it has helped solve problems on a near real-time basis. In my company, there is always some lag between the data that comes in and the ones being ingested and correlated. Splunk Enterprise Security aids in solving problems in a matter of minutes.

Splunk Enterprise Security provides relevant context to help guide our company's investigations, and it is very important and can be considered everything for our organization. In our company, we pull in data from assets and registries to give index-based alerts and be able to find owners quickly to notify them and respond to threats.

Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to help our company find any security events across environments is excellent. My company is really happy with Splunk Enterprise Security. The product helps our company find bad stuff when needed.

The truth is that it is very hard to deliver solutions that work at a certain scale. I think that one of the things I could say is that it is a solution that scales up at work. There are many organizations where solutions fail, and I can say that since I have been a part of the deployment of many other tools, it is hard to get many products to work. Splunk Enterprise Security works, and our company's analysts rely on it and trust it. I can only see improvements considering the strategies in terms of where the product's management team is going, and I believe that I will be able to rate the tool a nine out of ten pretty soon.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Sagar Shubham - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Wipro Limited
Real User
Apr 16, 2024
Helps improve our incident response time, and provides great visibility, but the deployment is complex
Pros and Cons
  • "Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards are a key asset."
  • "The presence of multiple layers creates a significant challenge for monitoring across cloud environments."

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Enterprise Security for threat detection on our network devices.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Enterprise Security excels at threat detection. We've developed multiple correlation searches leveraging security data. These searches identify threats and categorize them by urgency level, enabling our security analysts to prioritize and take swift action.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped us improve our incident response time. We achieve this by ensuring our queries are completed in near real-time.

Access management focuses on storing and managing access controls, while identity management deals with user identities. For example, if we want to find IP addresses associated with CrowdStrike, we can use access management to look up their IP ranges. Then, we can check if any IPs match by adding them to a specific identity management lookup. Finally, by leveraging the combined identity and access management features of Splunk Enterprise Security, we can create correlations between these entities.

The security dashboard can be customized to display the information we need most quickly. It typically has seven to eight panels, each dedicated to reflecting specific data. While some initial data load time might be present, clicking on a specific panel will display its information as soon as possible. There can be delays in traditional dashboards when searching for specific data. To optimize this, we can create "base searches" within each panel. These predefined searches cover commonly used queries and fields. Alternatively, we can create a "summary index" that holds a longer span of pre-processed data. This summary index allows even large datasets to be displayed quickly when accessed through the dashboard.

Splunk enhances our team collaboration regarding security incidents. When a threat alert is received, we can click on it and choose "investigation in progress" from a dropdown menu. This selection redirects us to a dedicated investigation page for further details. For in-depth analysis, we can drill down into the logs to pinpoint the source of the issue. Additionally, the platform allows us to contact network devices to determine the root cause. Once the issue is resolved, we can close the investigation.

We monitor both AWS and GCP environments using Splunk Enterprise Security. 

Splunk provides threat intelligence capabilities that can be valuable. This, combined with the comprehensive set of dashboards available, allows us to effectively monitor for threats. We can also create custom apps within Splunk for threat detection. These apps can include custom dashboards or reports that display specific information. For example, we could create a dashboard that shows the number of users accessing unknown URLs or another that monitors a particular device for suspicious activity. An example of suspicious activity might be a device where the print command is being executed repeatedly but failing each time. This could indicate a malfunction or, potentially, a malicious attempt to exploit the system. Similarly, a sudden spike in activity, such as millions of clicks on a specific device within a short timeframe, could also be a sign of a threat. By monitoring these parameters within Splunk's threat detection features, we can identify and investigate potential security incidents.

Splunk provides valuable visibility across multiple environments. Whether we have an on-premises or cloud architecture, Splunk offers self-monitoring capabilities. Additionally, depending on our environment, we can leverage existing monitoring tools. For on-premises deployments, we can utilize the Martin Console alongside Splunk for comprehensive monitoring. Cloud environments often come with built-in monitoring handled by the cloud provider's support team. In such cases, Splunk can focus on applications and custom log data for deeper insights.

The threat topology provided by Splunk gives us a comprehensive overview of potential threats. By analyzing queries or notable events, we can identify and neutralize these threats.

Splunk does a good job of analyzing malicious activities.

Splunk has improved our organization's decision-making by centralizing all the information in our environment and allowing us to access multiple dashboards and reports in one place.

Splunk has helped us reduce our alert volume. By using Splunk, we can identify the root causes of failures, which in turn leads to a decrease in alerts.

Splunk accelerates our security investigations by enabling us to resolve issues and document them in Standard Operating Procedures or knowledge-base articles. This facilitates a swifter response to similar incidents in the future.

What is most valuable?

Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards are a key asset. They offer comprehensive visibility across our entire environment, allowing us to diagnose and address security issues directly from the interface.

What needs improvement?

I would like Splunk to offer a quicker and easier way to run queries.

Splunk could improve its cost-efficiency for our organization by offering pre-built architectures tailored to specific environments. This would provide a clearer picture of required licenses and their implementation, ultimately reducing licensing costs.

The presence of multiple layers creates a significant challenge for monitoring across cloud environments.

For how long have I used the solution?

I am currently using Splunk Enterprise Security.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Enterprise Security is a very stable product, but there are occasional bugs that can appear.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We can scale Splunk Enterprise Security up or down depending on our demands.

How are customer service and support?

The Splunk support team is helpful. For complex issues or on-demand requests, we raise cases with them. On-demand requests requiring impactful solutions are paid. However, for UK-based users, standard support is free and usually resolves issues efficiently. In some cases, the support team rushes to provide a solution without even looking at the issue.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment can be complex. It involves creating multi-site clusters for each location and configuring a cluster master for each. This is because the cluster master will replicate data across multiple sites, making the environment more complex.

Four people were required for the deployment.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security 6 out of 10 because of the complexities that occur at times.

I highly recommend Splunk Enterprise Security for organizations seeking comprehensive security monitoring. Splunk offers a centralized platform to collect and analyze vast amounts of security data. This empowers us to gain full visibility across our entire IT environment, including applications, user activity, and potential security threats. Splunk provides insightful dashboards, reports, and real-time alerts to help proactively identify and address security issues.

While cost is a consideration, prioritizing features over functionalities for SIEM solutions can be risky. It's best to identify your business needs first and then choose an SIEM that offers the most relevant benefits to address those needs.

Splunk Enterprise Security is deployed across multiple locations and departments within our organization.

Splunk Enterprise Security required maintenance.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Google
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Splunk Enterprise Security Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: September 2026
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Splunk Enterprise Security Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.