Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

It's the mainstay of our monitoring solutions that we have for auto-logging, et cetera, for our enterprise solution.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to capture the different data streams. We also appreciate the reporting in that aspect of Splunk. If we can grow now, with any security arena, it's going to be proactive, not reactive. It allows us to digest the information, the data, the different data streams, so we can make decisions based upon information that we receive, and it is pretty robust.

The configuration could be better.

We would like to see improved pricing, however, I'm kind of out of that arena. I make suggestions based upon the flexibility with which we serve our customer base, which is millions of our veterans. I would say that if someone was not familiar with it, one of the things that I've heard is that it's kind of hard for them to understand the whole thing. Splunk is just one piece to the puzzle. It's not the whole puzzle. It's kind of not the solution's fault, in that sense. That said, if it could be more accessible to people with different skillsets, that would be ideal.

We'd like to see reporting where there's a way that we can get a higher description without being too technical, for example, where it's kind of more of an executive-level of technical.

I've personally been using the solution for over ten years. At this point, it's been more than a decade. I've used it for a while now. 

We're partners and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Splunk.

We use the latest version. I'm not hands-on. I'm called the architect, however, we do use the latest version as that's a part of our configuration management framework, that all of our applications - especially in security - are up-to-date with the latest and greatest updates, bells, and whistles. We use both public and private clouds.

In terms of creating the solution, for what we do from an enterprise standpoint, everything from monitoring to data capture to reporting, we would rate it at a nine out of ten.

Since we have an IT services company, we have been using Splunk for the deployment to the customer locations as well. Sometimes the customer will come back to us and say that we need to have a SIEM tool, and when we do the benchmarking, we'll do a couple of deployments on the Splunk side and at the customer's locations as well.

As an example use case, we deployed Splunk to a banking institution a few years ago. There the use case was basically this: the customer wanted to set up a security operation center, and they wanted to have a pretty large deployment in terms of the number of endpoints and number of switches and routers. There were many regional branch offices and they have data centers and therefore, many assets in terms of endpoints. They had 30% of their assets are running on the cloud and they needed a complete solution from an incident monitoring and management perspective. That's why we deployed Splunk. 

They wanted to reduce the MTTR, and meantime resolution, and maintain detection. They didn't want to add more SOC analysts into their SOC as the organization scaled up. They have a plan to scale from 5,000 endpoints into 15-20,000 endpoints. They're very particular about deploying the SOC operation center.

Splunk has since acquired Phantom as a SOAR platform. Therefore, we have tried to manage the security automation using Phantom with the help of Splunk deployments. It helps us meet the customer's requirements.

In terms of support, we're able to get the right support at the right time. If there's a break or an appliance issue, they're are on top of it.

This is very important during large-scale deployments. It's not easy to address product-related issues or appliance-related issues, and the number of collectors or number of logs that come into the collector, and managing the collectors across the branch offices, across the corporate offices, etc. It is a cumbersome process for us. That's why it's integral that we get the right support at the right time - and they make this happen.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the dashboard. It's very intuitive. 

The reporting is excellent. The team and the SOC analyst are able to easily track the alerts and the correlation is very good compared to other SIEM tools. 

There are a lot of competitive products that are doing better than what Splunk is doing on the analytics side.

The automation could be better. Typically, the issue that we face is that it has to go to the analytics engine, then goes to the automation engine, basically. Therefore, if there are no proper analytics, the SOAR module is going to be overloaded, and we are not able to get the expected result out from the SOAR module. If they improve the analytics, I think they'll be able to solve these issues very quickly.

The playbooks which they create and provide to premium users can improve a lot. They have to create a common platform wherein the end-customers like us can choose the playbooks, and automation playbooks readily available.

In terms of integration with the third-party tools, what we are seeing is that it's very limited compared to the competitive products. Competitive products have a lot of connectors and APIs that they have developed, and that's where the cloud integration, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud integration comes in. There are a lot of limitations to this product compared to other products.

In terms of Splunk, I've been working on it for more than three years in the current company. Prior to that, I worked with it at another company as well. In total, I have been using Splunk for close to six or seven years.

The solution is stable, however, sometimes in some of the collectors, we are facing a lot of issues. That said, overall, if you rate it from one to five, I would say in terms of stability, it will stand at a three. 

The scalability is perfectly fine. It's very awesome compared to all the other tools, as easily we can integrate with the log forwarding modules and the collector management appliances or modules. That aspect won't be a problem. 

If you look at the SIEM as a market today, Splunk is expensive compared to other competitive products. I'm also into the SIEM evaluation in my current role. I've seen that there are many tools are coming up in the last one and half years. I have also seen many other mature tools that are available now. If you compare next-gen SIEM tools compared to the Splunk, it's expensive. Therefore, it's possible we may not use this in the future or expand on current usage.

In terms of technical support, we don't have any issues, as the professional services which they have extended to us are very, very good. We're able to manage many of the critical issues with their support. I'd say we are definitely satisfied with the level of service provided.

In terms of deployment, it's not so complex compared to the competitive products, however, we will be able to manage that deployment. We don't feel there's any problem on the deployment side. In that sense, I don't think deployment is a complex one when somebody going for Splunk as a tool.

How long it takes to deploy the solution depends on the size of the deployment, basically. Even a large deployment won't take more than a week. When I say deployment, I'm considering all the log collection, log management, and the curation of the incidents, and how incidents are created and routed properly according to prioritization. 

In terms of ROI, for example, if you look at one of our customers today, they are managing close to 100 million events per day. If you look at a traditional SIEM with 100 million events, they need to manage this environment with at least 25 to 30 people. That's 30 security analysts that have to be there. However, when Splunk was deployed, a lot of automation was added on top of it, and today we are managing the same environment with Splunk with close to 15 people. In that sense, if you look at it that way, the ROI is between 30-40%.

In terms of a comparison with the rest of the competition, the licensing cost would be, I would say, 30% higher than most.

Before choosing Splunk, we have evaluated QRadar and LogRhythm. QRadar is much more expensive. LogRhythm lacked reporting.

We ended up choosing Splunk due to the pricing and the reporting features. It also had the kind of scalability that was required. We felt it would help us in terms of positioning from both a cost perspective and an incident alert perspective.

We're partners. We have a business relationship with Splunk.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I'd advise potential new users to ensure they do proper sizing before deploying the product. If it's a very large deployment, the number of endpoints will be quite sizeable. You need to figure out the correct number of endpoints as well as endpoint devices, switches, routers, etc.

It's also a good idea to look at use cases. Splunk is very strong in some use cases. It's important to look into deployment scenarios and check out the use cases before deploying anything.

My biggest takeaway after working with the solution is that the environment is very important. You need to be clear about the problem you are addressing and it takes a lot of planning at the outset.

When configuring our use cases and describing the overall purpose of Splunk Enterprise Security, I would focus on the main use cases that I encountered with this tool.

The ease of use and building queries, specifically SQL queries, is notably beneficial as it is easy to build, and the data model itself is very simple. The advanced correlation capabilities are very useful for identifying patterns or malicious activity of users.

I have worked with Splunk Enterprise Security for two years.

I have contacted the Splunk Enterprise Security support team once, but mainly the other team responsible for onboarding contacted them.

I am preparing my master's degree and conducting this review for completing it at KFUPM University, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, located in Saudi Arabia, to prepare for my defense. I have experience with blue team tools, specifically Splunk Enterprise Security and some other solutions.

The company name is Cyberani Solutions, and my email is first name dot last name at cyberanisolutions.com. PeerSpot will create an account and email the login credentials, and my feedback will be published and possibly shared with third parties if I choose to not remain anonymous.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security an eight.

My customers subscribe to many different tools, like CrowdStrike. They ingest all that into Splunk and use it as an aggregator to launch their investigations into any threats detected.

The solution has improved our organization by providing a centralized place to start investigations. It allows us to consolidate everything into one place that kicks everything off so we can map it back to at least that Splunk instance.

The solution's most valuable feature is its data modeling. Splunk has data from so many different vendors. Moving all that or normalizing that to the data models allows us to look at one place holistically across all the different inputs.

The one problem Splunk has is writing correlation searches. My analysts are intimidated to write queries to create correlation searches. It would be good if the solution had some kind of copilot to automate or help write correlation searches. Splunk Enterprise Security should include more automation, AI, and machine learning capabilities.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Security for three to four months.

We haven’t faced any issues with the solution’s stability.

We haven’t faced any scalability issues with Splunk Enterprise Security.

The end-to-end visibility the tool provides is not that big of a deal. They have so many tools that can do that kind of part. Splunk doesn't have to be the one place for total visibility, but at least for visibility when it consolidates on threats.

Splunk has helped improve our organization's ability to ingest and normalize data. The tool pretty much consumes everything that we have. Everything from dozens of different vendor products gets ingested into Splunk. Splunk Enterprise Security is just that one central place where everything goes.

Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations. Something that requires someone to work on it at the beginning of the day would not take more than 15 minutes with Splunk Enterprise Security.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

There is a lot that we monitor with it. We monitor outbound URLs. We monitor unusual traffic, unusual user logins, and excessive user logins. We monitor whether or not users are logging in from VPN or not, what IPs they are accessing, or whether a user is signing in from multiple IP addresses minus the VPN. 

My organization was already using Splunk Enterprise Security when I was brought in, so I cannot say how it has improved the organization, but I can see that if they did not have Splunk Enterprise Security, there would be a significantly more workload. They would definitely need more manpower. Splunk Enterprise Security definitely helps with a lot of the prebuilt dashboards and other things that come with it out of the box.

Splunk Enterprise Security has reduced our mean time to resolve by 50% to 75%.

Being able to track impossible travel logins and things of that nature is valuable. We can track user logins from various IPs, various countries, and at various times to see if everything adds up. We can check to see if it makes sense that someone logged in from China and in the US within an hour.

There is machine learning with Splunk Enterprise Security, and based on the keynotes at the Splunk conference, there is going to be some AI involved as well. My biggest struggle with Splunk, in general, is memorizing all the commands. If I want to know which users have logged in between certain hours, I cannot write that query out. It would be helpful to have AI so that I can explain in simple terms what I want and then the search gives that back to me. I am waiting for that. That is going to be my bread and butter because my big thing is that I just cannot remember all those commands.

If you have a dashboard that is too large with too many searches, it tends to get bogged down. If you create various different dashboards, you can bypass the issue of not having enough resources to load all the things you need to load.

I was brought onto the team recently. They have been using it for about two years, so I am just catching up in learning as I go. All in all, my experience with Splunk and AWS is about ten months to a year.

It is very scalable.

I have not had to interact with Splunk support. Most of the issues that I ran into can be solved by reaching out to a team member.

I have not used any other similar solution previously. Prior to working with Splunk, it was just basic IT administration work involving monitoring with different tools, such as Trellix FireEye. I am not sure how to compare them with Splunk.

My organization had Splunk Enterprise Security before I got in.

I have not seen an ROI because I am not at level two, but I am sure my bosses have seen an ROI.

We have definitely seen a time to value in terms of being able to take what Splunk Enterprise gives us and view it. It gives us more information in an easier way versus us doing everything ourselves. That alone saves time. If we save one second a day over a year, we are going to save minutes, so these little bits of time add up.

The price can always be lower, but it is fair at the moment.

The cost efficiencies depend on the licensing and how much data we are bringing in. We have a fairly large footprint, so it is cost-effective.

Being at the Splunk conference and seeing all the ways in which Splunk can be used versus the way that I use Splunk is mind-blowing. It is a Pandora's box of tools. One of the things I saw today was manufacturing and the types of data that manufacturers can receive from Splunk within the technologies that they have. It is mind-blowing. Splunk is awesome.

Overall, I would rate Splunk Enterprise Security a nine out of ten.

Enterprise security is the solution’s most valuable feature.

Its reporting functionality is excellent.

I really like the user interface and how it works.

It’s scalable.

The solution is stable.

You can integrate any other tool or any other solution, including existing solutions, with Splunk. They have a good setup.

The log analysis is something that is good. In general, data analysis is something you can do in Splunk in various ways. You can leverage it as per your requirements or as per your investigations. You can write your own queries and complicated queries, and you can have your own alerts. You can correlate events. It’s very flexible.

It is one of the best tools that I'm using. I don't have any feedback as such right now regarding improvements. I'm not also an expert, so maybe I'm missing something.

Writing queries is a bit complicated sometimes. If they could provide some building queries, that would be great.

It's been a while. For maybe four years, I've used Splunk, however, I'm not an expert on it.

It's a stable solution. We are not going to get rid of it anytime soon. It’s reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn’t crash or freeze. The performance is good.

The solution scales very well.

I wasn't part of the engineering side, so I never got a chance to contact the support team directly.

We have a SIEM solution, however, now the company is also trying to move to an Excel solution since the automation is better on their side. We aren't going to get rid of it or did not have any other SIEM solution in their mind when they were acquiring it. However, if any XOR solution works perfectly for us, the company might consider moving out of Splunk.

A different organization would have a different setup of Splunk. If you ask me, mostly, it is a simple setup. However, here in my current organization, it is mostly on the cloud, and a lot of things are integrated in a bit of a complex manner. I also understand that this changes from organization to organization in terms of how they will leverage it.

I’ve never looked into ROI and have not been a part of conversations concerning ROI.

I don’t have any idea what the cost of the solution is. I don’t handle the licensing.

A company that wants to leverage Splunk should understand its environment first - including the organization, the network infrastructure, and the overall infrastructure. Then, based on requirements, they should go ahead with any SIEM solution. Splunk is kind of an expensive tool to have. Therefore, the company should be clear about what requirements they have, what they need, and whether they want to use Splunk. It is very crucial to understand your requirements and your network or your environment first before going ahead.

I’d rate the solution eight out of ten.

Overall, it's a good tool. It's a very intelligent tool. It definitely depends on how you are going to use it. However, I love the product. I love Splunk. I want to learn more about it as much as I can.

Splunk just acts as an extra presentation layer, and we tried it because of the plugins they have to try and get more logs into the environment.

Splunk would be my choice for the presentation layer because it comes with inbuilt reports and a dashboard that you can customize.

Aside from the 5GB limit on the community version, I believe it is the same as ELK. It's a useful tool, and nothing comes to mind right now.

I haven't found a way for me to create my own plugins and integrate them into Splunk, but this isn't necessarily a limitation; it could simply be a lack of knowledge on my part.

Splunk is a stable solution. I am very happy with the stability of Splunk.

Splunk can be scaled to any environment. The way it's designed, it's cloud-ready, and it has a lot of performance, in-built indexing, and performance tuning options. Splunk is easily scalable.

I am happy to report that I've never needed to contact technical support. The README tutorials and the existing forums provide me with practically everything I need. So far, I haven't had to do so. This should be a testament to the solution.

We broaden the scope of IT governance and IT security.

We look at everything from SIEM to network management to endpoint protection, server protection, database protection, and anything else that can aid in visibility, policy enforcement, and monitoring.

Our organization is using a combination of Splunk and Elasticsearch. We get most of what we need from the ELK suite. ELK Stack is usually the primary focus.

ELK has the same inbuilt reports and dashboards that you can customize, but ELK is better for central logging and log aggregation. Once they've all been aggregated, you'll be able to run any kind of queries and APIs to query the logs on ELK and then use Splunk as a presentation layer for the consumers to use.

Security tools, in my opinion, are business tools and should be used by businesses rather than security engineers. I'm experimenting with a hybrid of the two, in which ELK serves as the engine for central logging and Splunk handles the presentation layer and aggregation of additional third-party logs from tools that might be difficult to integrate into ELK.

I would rate Elasticsearch a ten out of ten.

It's a cloud-ready package. It has the same characteristics as ELK. From a deployment standpoint, I don't have any issues with it. The material is freely accessible to anyone who wishes to use it. There is a virtual machine option. You can get a virtual machine by downloading it. The deployment options are simply numerous, and it is up to the implementer.

It wasn't that difficult for me. There are no complaints from me. The material is present, and there are numerous options for deployment. It's relatively simple to go from zero to viewing data with Splunk. ELK is the same way. It is now up to the implementers and their environment to provide you with more data about it.

They could improve their discounts. I think it's a good solution, and it's gaining a lot of traction, maybe they are recouping their R&D costs, Further reductions would be fantastic, and I believe that more and more people would flock to it.

We provide IT consulting services. Our customers occasionally ask us to assist them in locating specific solutions.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using this solution.

I would say the forums and READMEs provide more than enough information about Splunk. Most people struggle because they move too quickly through the implementation process. As long as you follow the guidelines, particularly the specifications for environment requirements and implementation methodology, these solutions should work out of the box.

Splunk is a very good solution, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

I use Splunk for testing purposes. It is used for school research and to learn how to use Splunk. 

Splunk is mainly used for collecting logs and dashboards.

Splunk provides a free version so you can test it before purchasing.  It's better than IBM, in my opinion, because it's an independent entity. IBM, for example, if you want to use EDR, and other features, you must use the features of other companies, such as ServiceNow and Jira.

I am still exploring the features provided in Splunk. As I have not used it for a long time, I don't have a clear vision of it.

As a student, I'd like to see more labs and things for students to test in order to learn.

Having a trial version or more training on Splunk would be helpful.

There is a free version, but it is insufficient for training and learning because it is a little bit difficult to work with, especially if you are a beginner. It's difficult to improve when you're just starting out with logs and SOC. As a result, we require a longer free version.

Splunk is not used in my company. During my internship, I am being taught how to use it at school.

I have been using Splunk for one month.

I did not have any issues with the stability of Splunk. It was quite stable.

There was technical assistance available. When you require assistance, they provide it, they will respond.

We integrate Jira with QRadar which is helpful.

The initial setup was simple because there is available support and tutorials.

I completed the installation with the help of some friends, in the IT department.

I'm only using the free version for the time being.

The cost is reasonable.

Splunk's costing is a little more difficult. The pricing method is complicated, and the way that costing is calculated in Splunk is a little more difficult.

When compared to QRadar, QRadar, it's simple to pay. 

I did some research for a school project. I needed to compare it to Splunk and a few other tools. As a result, I'm not particularly interested in purchasing them.

I would rate Splunk an eight out of ten.