Splunk Enterprise Security Reviews

• We can do things in minutes instead of days.
• We solve issues which we could not before since we have the data.
• We can quickly search for almost anything across many log sources in seconds
• Teams have the dashboards or alerts that they need

There are too many features to list, but here are a few:

• Schema on the fly

• Ease of on-boarding data

• Machine learning

• Apps or Splunk base.
• Great list of apps to use and also build upon once you learn more about how Splunk works.
• We build many of our own apps by leveraging the logic in the others.

• Ease of correlation, creating correlation searches are easy and you can combine multiple sources with little effort

• Data Models Acceleration for super fast searches across tens of millions of events

• Common Information Model

• Security Essentials App

• Enterprise Security

• Splunk SPL (Search Processing Language) is easy to learn and has IDE like capabilities

• Log storage or compression is great and retention is not an issue

• Dashboards are simple to create and the input options like Time Range, Text
• Drop-downs are simple to create.

• Integration with cloud solutions is great and keeps getting better.
• Can get info from rest API’s easily and there are apps for services like ServiceNow, Azure, Office365, etc.

The GUI can be improved to include some of the capabilities that other BI solutions have. Basically, the layout is a little restrictive where you can’t resize all the panels to exactly how you would like them without tweaking some XML code. Over the years, they have really been improving in this area. I would think that will continue and this could become a non-issue.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Technical support is excellent. They also have Splunk Answers, which is community driven and it great.

We were not able to get the value we needed from the previous solution. It was too difficult or complex. With Splunk, we can do things we want and things we have not even dreamed of yet.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had the POC up in minutes. Within days, we got more value out of this solution than our existing solution.

While licensing can be a concern, there are ways to reduce the licensing costs including filtering some events. We have replaced many solutions with Splunk, which have more than paid for the Splunk licensing.

We evaluated ArcSight, QRadar, and LogRhythm.

Do a PoC and you will be amazed. Also, check out the Splunk .conf sessions to see what is possible. If you are into security, watch Mark Russinovich’s RSA 2017 presentation about Sysmon. Check out free EDR type capabilities.

Splunk has great interoperability with other applications through their SplunkBase app store. The apps can quickly provide visibility and streamline complex data mining tasks.

Unlike other cloud based analytics platforms, at the time of this writing Splunk Cloud is a dedicated instance per customer rather than a shared tenancy platform. While this is beneficial from an overall performance standpoint, the product lacks the seamless integrations one has come to expect from a cloud solution. This translates to a much stronger reliance on Splunk's support organization out of necessity, as the customer cannot make most changes in a self-service manner.

We have been a Splunk customer for five years.

Our Splunk Cloud deployment was a migration from an on-premise implementation of Splunk. The migration took much longer than expected due to constraints within Splunk's cloud team, but there were no technical issues with the launch.

The customer support team at Splunk is very good.

The technical support team at Splunk is highly responsive and knowledgeable.

Some of my clients had rudimentary home-grown security solutions that Splunk ES has completely replaced.

In these cases, the improvement was dramatic; they had visibility into systems and activities that they never had before.

In the case of clients who already had a SIEM solution, the change was more incremental. However, in my opinion, the Splunk ES solution is superior because it is so flexible. It can consolidate data from almost anything.

Splunk Enterprise Security is most valuable, my clients use it as a SIEM solution. Splunk gives them the ability to bring multiple, disparate types of data together, then correlate and report on them.

The GUI can be improved. Splunk has always suffered from having a kind of goofy UI, it needs some updating.

There were no stability issues. It is one of the most stable systems that I have worked with.

As of now, no scalability issues were experienced. Splunk is highly scalable, so don’t anticipate that. However, scaling can get very expensive with their pricing model.

Technical support is excellent! It is of top notch level. The customer support folks really know their stuff, the turnaround is fast.

Previously, we were using HPE ArcSight.

That’s a hard one. The initial setup is easy but making it actually work is complex. However, the complexity is something that just comes with all top SIEM tools. Very few companies have exactly the same data and issues, so a great deal of data onboarding and normalization are always required.

We evaluated HPE ArcSight.

Plan your implementation carefully. Be sure you have someone to implement it, someone who knows what he is doing. Splunk’s inherent flexibility is a great thing, but it also provides an opportunity to really mess things up.

The ability to see logs and correlate them using Splunk has greatly improved our organization's functionality with auditing and troubleshooting.

Splunk's capability to receive any types of logs and index them is a very good feature. To get visibility from your network devices, servers, and security devices is a great feature.

Better directions on search head clusters. A lot of the documentation that I saw was either old or out of date. I believe I ended up doing a lot of searching and ended up not completing the feature. I opted out of creating a search head cluster.

Not at all.

None.

Customer Service:

Excellent. I didn't call often however, when I did they pretty much solved my problem.

Technical Support:

Excellent. I didn't call often however, when I did they pretty much solved my problem.

No solution was available at the time.

No the initial setup was fairly basic.

In-house. We had professional services however, we did the install prior to the consultant arriving. So, his workload was light considering we had already installed and configured the Splunk servers.

We purchased and paid for it as an annual subscription for three years and working on purchasing the Perpetual edition.

Pricing is pretty fair. However, I would suggest you trial for at least 90 days if you can get the sales person to offer you the option to renew your 30 day trial a couple of more times to evaluate. The 30 day trial is not enough.

The other SIEM solution providers we looked at were ArcSight, QRadar and SolarWinds LEM.

Splunk is a good product. Pricing is a bit high however, after it's installed you can understand why and get caught up in reading the logs that are available.

Splunk helped reduce development cost since it provides free applications on Splunkbase that can save a huge amount of time and effort. It also gave us the ability to dig into logs to find not just one needle but many needles in the haystack of data, and that helped solve multiple production issues and reduced system downtime.

A great improvement brought by Splunk is the ability to remove sensitive data before displaying it in reports. This allows Splunk administrators to filter data according to the user’s clearance level.

Splunk can be seen as a huge box that allows the storage of all sorts of logs. This allows the centralization of data and makes possible new sorts of correlations that were previously impossible using traditional SIEMs such as ArcSight or QRadar. Splunk allow schema on the fly and therefore simplifies all the data onboarding process. All that leads to flexibility when it comes to defining the metadata since it is not necessary to have all the fields defined and extracted to be able to use Splunk.

Another great feature is the field extractor that allows persons with little or no experience with Regex to define fields and extract valuable information from the data.

Finally, the ability to connect with various sorts of databases, NoSQL solutions, makes it a very powerful tool, not only as a SIEM but also as a datalake for machine learning and data analysis.

Adding custom visualization in Splunk has been improved over the years but can still be made better by integrating more and more JavaScript visualization sources.

Released versions are quite stable. We encountered some visual bugs following major upgrades but that was due to custom CSS that we had edited into Splunk.

Splunk is a data analytics platform and is designed to scale easily. Adding or removing machines from a splunk index can be done without affecting any of the existing members of the infrastructure.

In my opinion Splunk has three levels of support. First level is their forum (Splunk Answers). The Forum is very rich and solves 90% of the issues that can be encountered. Then comes the real technical support team that replies quite fast, depending on the SLA. Finally comes the professional services team, which provides a very advanced level of expertise and can solve any issue.

Yes, ArcSight. We switched because of how slow the support can be with HPE sometimes and also because Splunk is simpler to use, is more data oriented, and is more adapted for business security use cases.

We started Splunk on a stand-alone server. Installing that was very easy, a basic RPM install for Linux and an installer for Windows. When we moved to a distributed environment, it was a bit more complicated but the documentation on Splunk Docs was clear and easy to use so we had no problem there.

Splunk licensing model might seem expensive but with all the gain in functionalities you will have compared to traditional SIEM solutions I think it’s worth the price. Also, when you have small volumes of data to index daily (which might account for high EPS) you will be gaining the full advantage of using Splunk for a very low price.

Yes, Graylog and QRadar.

You're in for a nice surprise, Splunk is fun, easy to use, and will give you the results you are looking for and more. It's a great tool for security and business analysis, you're looking at a big data platform that will allow a lot more than what the good old SIEMs could do.

Imagine a single application with 17 application servers and dozens of log files per server that rotate as often as once per hour. How do you track and analyze anomalies in those log files with the ability to go back and correlate data for the past X weeks? That was use case for just our team, not to mention the hundreds of other application teams.

Splunk has a single purpose in life: ingest machine data and help analyze and visualize that data. The breadth of the data sources that Splunk can ingest data from is broad and deep and it does an exemplary job at handling structured data. It does a great job at handling unstructured data. Breaking data into key/value pairs so that it can be searched is relatively painless.

Deploying Splunk as scale is not easy. It requires a significant amount of relatively complex architecture once you push past the single server instance. Breaking out your search and indexing layer requires someone with Splunk experience. Want to add search layer replication for HA? Want to host in AWS and do cross-region index replication?

Splunk expertise is in high demand today and finding talented engineers to pull off your large-scale implementation is hard. Do your homework.

Out-of-the-box functions are nearly flawless, but when you push at the edges, then things start to get a little flexible in their eloquence. There is a robust community of support to help through most issues and the documentation is exceptional.

There were no issues with scalability, but we invested some serious time and resources to design a scalable infrastructure up front.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent both during the purchase and ownership lifecycle.

Technical Support:

Technical support is mediocre. Splunk is struggling to deliver a consistently exceptional support experience. Their senior engineers are very talented, but those folks are in short supply and many of the most experienced engineers are making hundreds of dollars an hour as consultants not answering your support issues.

No enterprise solution was in place.

The initial setup was done without any prior experience and was up and running, including ingesting data, within a few hours. Setup at scale and scalability took months of effort.

We hired a contractor with significant experience with Splunk, Elastic.io, AWS, and custom development. They were expensive, but worth every penny.

TBD.

You will eat up whatever you purchase quickly. The level of insights that Splunk empowers is addictive.

We evaluated Graylog, Elastic.io, etc.

MTTR is drastically reduced, because the developers and other IT support staff have instant access to log events.

People costs are saved by not having to involve the domain developers from multiple teams, when tracing a problem that spans multiple platforms.

Security is improved by not having to give as many people access to log on to the servers.

The ability to rapidly diagnose problems in production and non-production, across hundreds of log files, is the most valuable feature.

Official training, even CBT, is expensive so not many people are able to get certified. This leads/causes the users to make use of the most basic functionality only.

It is a challenge to manage the environment in such a way, that one’s log, even with the bandwidth license, isn’t exceeded. Splunk has moved towards not applying hard caps in data ingestion, and this will help us in the future.

However, I’d like an easier way to flag certain source log files as non-critical and have Splunk automatically disable those event sources when the license capacity exceeds an arbitrary value.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Customer Service:

I haven't had the need to log any critical issues. Most of my support tickets have been revolved around configuration questions. I'm very happy with the way Splunk's support staff respond - they're pretty helpful. I think I've only had one situation where the response was acceptable, but not stellar.

Technical Support:

The technical support is good. I'm sometimes surprised when the support engineer doesn't immediately know the answer to my questions (as I feel they must be fairly common queries). But, this can probably be excused because of the breath of features Splunk Enterprise has.

We were not using any other solution previously.

I evaluated ELK Stack but at the time, Splunk offered more flexibility, better support and was easier for us to implement.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward, but we used an experienced implementation partner and ensured that our team was intimately involved in the installation/configuration process on a technical level.

We used a combintation of in-house (ie. myself) and an experienced Splunk partner.

The product has a lot of value, and I feel that we’re getting the value that we’re paying for.

Splunk Enterprise becomes extremely expensive after the 20GB/month license, but if you take care of what you log, i.e., by not logging excessive application events, then that license will get you a long way.

We looked at ELK Stack.

Use an experienced Splunk architect to design your infrastructure configuration.

Ensure that your tech leads are intimately involved and understand exactly how the product fits together.

Manage your Splunk configuration in a repository (Git).

Educate the end users as quickly as possible to use the tool effectively.

Change practices and encourage staff to use Splunk instead of old ways of getting the data they need. Prevent, or limit, direct access to the servers or server log files if you can.

The network department, for example, has improved its efficiency by 30%. Security relies on this for event correlation and alerts.

• The speed of the search engine

• All the types of data sources that you configure can be forwarded to Splunk.
• The ease-of-use

Cluster management can only be done via a command line. I would like them to add some GUI options for that. Permissions are not very flexible, so it would be nice to have more granular options, such as double factor authentication.

The administration of the cluster and app deployment to indexers or search
heads can be done only using ssh access and command line, there is no GUI
tools for that.

Permissions in the other hand could be improved by adding for example the
deny option to groups to see and index, etc. Also the authentication method
is just LDAP or spkunk, so some more security layers could be added as
second factor, etc

It is very stable.

It scales out horizontally.

The quality of support depends on the support and license. On the average, I would give them a rating of 6/10.

We previously used ArcSight. Splunk is at another level. It is easier, more stable, and faster.

It is very easy to set up on a standalone server. Of course, if you want a cluster, it is more complicated. In order to manage it, you need skilled people.

It is not cheap :-)

We were using ArcSight before.

My advice is to go ahead with it.

The administration of the cluster and app deployment to indexers or search
heads can be done only using ssh access and command line, there is no GUI
tools for that.

Permissions in the other hand could be improved by adding for example the
deny option to groups to see and index, etc. Also the authentication method
is just LDAP or spkunk, so some more security layers could be added as
second factor, etc