Splunk Enterprise

My main use case for Splunk Enterprise Platform  is for doing data analysis. I can give you an example of how I use Splunk Enterprise Platform  for data analysis. We are monitoring the infrastructure of the client, such as what systems they are using. It could be network devices, or it could be Windows or Linux servers. We get the infra-related data in Splunk Enterprise Platform environment, such as CPU, memory, and host status, and based on that, we do the configuration at our end. If any issues are there, we are generating the ticket. For example, if a disk is occupying more than 90% of its space, then based on that, we are triggering an alert. If any host is not responsive, we generate an alert such as 'host reporting no data'.

We are having multiple ways to use Splunk Enterprise Platform day-to-day. We have multiple environments, such as a high availability environment and a low availability environment. Based on the client's budget, we set up Splunk Enterprise Platform infrastructure. For example, with a high availability environment, the cost will be more, but the availability of the monitoring tool will be high. That is called the clustered environment. If a client has a low budget and they have a smaller number of servers to monitor, then we will go for a distributed environment.

The best feature of Splunk Enterprise Platform is data insights. The data is very quickly searchable. The data is stored in an index. If you have a very large amount of data and you put it in Excel, it will take a lot of time to work on it and get the insights, such as the exact error logs. But in Splunk Enterprise Platform, data is stored in a TSIDX file. We have an index to get the data, so you can quickly get a look at your environment's data. The visibility is very high.

Suppose a thousand servers are under monitoring. All the data from those thousand servers is ingested into Splunk Enterprise Platform. If any of the servers go down, it will quickly create an alert, irrespective of how many. Even if a thousand servers go down, it will create the alert quickly. The investigation is very easy. We have a set of indexes where data will be stored. We will have log files, we will have the log data, so the analysis is very easy.

We also have vendor support. If my environment is not working or is showing an error, the vendors provide support on time. The security level is also very good. Whenever any vulnerability is detected, the vendor will inform us, and they will come up with the latest version so that we can do the upgrades. The documentation part is everything very transparent.

Whatever problem the client comes up with, for example, 'My environment has this many servers, and we cannot do it because it is at different locations,' it cannot be manually monitored. There should be a one-stop destination so that we can monitor all the environments. In that way, Splunk Enterprise Platform is playing a very important role in our organization to serve clients better.

The response time is reduced because within 5 to 15 minutes, if any issue occurs with the server, it will generate an alert. If the system comes back up, there is an automation process, so the ticket will auto-resolve as well. However, the footprint will always be there. It will show exactly when the issue happened. It is saving time also because whatever data we are getting, it is taking less time to parse, index, and process the data and give us the ticket.

Regarding improvement for Splunk Enterprise Platform, compatibility is needed. They are coming out with a newer version every two months, and there is the vulnerability part. When they are releasing any version, they need to check it from a security point of view completely. The remediation they are providing is in the newer version. In the existing version itself, they can review it and provide the fixes so that every two or three months, we do not need to go for upgrades, because upgrades take some time.

The Splunk experts are there who are involved and have the knowledge to do the integration. Everything is fine. The only thing is the vulnerability part, which is the only flaw I observed.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Platform for the last five years.

Splunk Enterprise Platform is stable.

The scalability of Splunk Enterprise Platform is very good. If we are talking about the cluster setup, you can add more indexers, more search heads, and more heavy forwarders. You can add more components based on your requirements. Scalability is very easy in Splunk Enterprise Platform.

Customer support is also top-notch. We are getting the support. They have on-call support and email support.

Multiple options are available, such as Dynatrace  and DataDog, but Splunk Enterprise Platform is the leading one nowadays because it provides security features as well. Splunk Enterprise Platform was acquired by Cisco, and Cisco is a big player in security. Splunk Enterprise Platform is a good one, and it is also cost-saving. It is not charging more. It is charging based on indexing the data only, so we are good with Splunk Enterprise Platform.

Governance  and security within Splunk Enterprise Platform is good. Whenever they find any vulnerability, they immediately inform their customers, telling them to stop using something and providing the fixes. They come up with it immediately. Splunk Enterprise Platform itself was bought by Cisco, so from a security point of view, they are getting better now.

Directly, as of now, we are not integrated with agentic AI, but we are using agentic AI for the troubleshooting part. It will take some time to integrate it, but these things will be there. However, everywhere, human intervention will always be there. It cannot allow the AI to go and change the configuration without the permission of a human being.

Splunk Enterprise Platform has high capability. It is capable of handling that much data. It will use more resources, but it can handle it.

We have used the federated search feature of Splunk Enterprise Platform because the client had location-related security requirements. We have the option and the feature where we can hold the data there, and it can be searched from one location. The data will be stored in a different location, but it can be searchable from one destination. It is very helpful. The environment is providing a very reliable solution to us.

Splunk Enterprise Platform has a very good feature. You can mask the data while indexing it. If you are talking about the access part, we have multiple access levels available. If you want to limit the access to particular data for a particular team, we have that option. We can create a customized role, and it also has in-built roles. Based on that, a dedicated user can only access the dedicated data.

Nothing is missing because Splunk Enterprise Platform has very strong capabilities with multiple roles, and we have customized roles as well. For the login process, we can use SAML and LDAP. It is a very good platform that provides you with a way to maintain data security. The governance tools provided by Splunk Enterprise Platform are very good.

The cost saving is a shared resource for multiple projects. We can work for 10 to 12 or 15 projects with Splunk Enterprise Platform skill set. I am working as an admin and developer, so that part comes under the architect team. We have a dedicated team that decides the pricing, cost, and licensing based on the client's requirements, such as how many servers are under monitoring. For a thousand servers, it should go with a clustering environment and high availability. It totally depends on the demand of the client.

Because we have 10 to 12 projects and 10 to 12 associates, there is no dependency. If someone goes on leave, everyone else has access to all the projects, so there is no dependency. Everyone can work on any of the projects, so it is good. You do not need to put two dedicated people there, and if those two people are not there, then who will work? There is no such issue. With shared responsibility and shared resources, it is working very nicely with less cost.

I would rate this review an 8 overall.

The team I work on is a workflow team for the bank. We get a lot of traffic because of onboarding and workflow processes, which results in around a million hits per day. Whenever we have a release scheduled, Splunk Enterprise Platform  is a very useful tool for me to monitor the logs.

Splunk offers an advantage where I can log and monitor all of the microservices in a single location. Search Processing Language (SPL), which is the query language for the product. SPL does take time to master as it is somewhat complex. When searches are straightforward, then it is quick, but if you need to perform complex searches with multiple pipes, sub-searches, or statistical functions, then it becomes somewhat confusing. You need time to become familiar with it.

I created some Splunk Enterprise Platform  dashboards, which is the main focus of my work. I used a drag-and-drop builder, and it has real-time updates, visualization varieties, drilldowns, and token inputs. I built a dashboard for the application which answered these questions: which workflow combination has the highest hits and which users are triggering them. I wrote a query using SPL which aggregated the results from the API in the given timeframe that we can choose, and accordingly it will show a pie chart. Using the drilldowns and tokens, I built another panel where if you click a particular combination, it will list the number of users hitting that combination and how many times. This is something very useful I found in Splunk Enterprise Platform dashboards.

Regarding the downsides of Splunk Enterprise Platform, as I mentioned, one is the Search Processing Language is somewhat complex when it comes to complex filtering and searching. You need to become familiar with it to make complex searches. That is one thing.

There is not a no-code option for panels. You have to write an entire query for it. It would be better if they could introduce more drag-and-drop options so that people can add more features to their panels and pie charts and visualize the data they want.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Platform for 1.5 years.

Considering the stability of Splunk Enterprise Platform, it is pretty stable. It sometimes takes time when I switch the timeframe, such as from 15 minutes to one hour. It takes some time in loading all of the logs from the application. Otherwise, it is very stable. It is a latency issue.

As I mentioned, the current application I was working on already has a lot of users. So it is a pretty scalable solution. We get millions of hits for the APIs.

When I joined the company, Splunk Enterprise Platform was already in place from the very start. Many of my friends work in several different companies, many uses DataDog, but here, I have only used Splunk Enterprise Platform.

I am not involved in those kinds of decisions yet. I do not know about the pricing.

The whole bank uses the same tool to monitor their logs and analyze production data or any environment data. That is why I have not had any chance to use an alternative.

I am not familiar with the pricing because being a junior developer.

Splunk Enterprise Platform offers Federated Search, which I have not used.

My overall review rating for Splunk Enterprise Platform is 9 out of 10.

My main use case for Splunk Enterprise Platform  is as a SIEM /SOAR .

I use Splunk Enterprise Platform  as a SIEM  where we send all the relevant logs including firewall logs, EDR logs, authentication logs, application logs, and database logs towards Splunk, and then we write rules based on that.

Day-to-day, it is mainly used as a SIEM solution to look at all the security events and write the rules.

Splunk Enterprise Platform offers very good integration patterns and extensive support for many log sources with pre-built rule sets and pre-built integrations. It also has a wide variety of support sources.

Those integrations and pre-built rule sets help my team in our daily work as they made the integrations much faster and easier. Using the community rules was also much faster.

Splunk Enterprise Platform has very good retention and log ingestion methods. The log querying is also pretty good.

Splunk Enterprise Platform has positively impacted my organization by providing very good insight into the different security logs.

I have seen specific outcomes or improvements with Splunk Enterprise Platform, where the time to respond is pretty good. The time to write a rule is very fast, and the time for integration to the different log sources is very good.

One area where Splunk Enterprise Platform can be improved is that the underlying search architecture is not up to the mark compared to something Elastic. This could be improved.

I wish Splunk Enterprise Platform could do more towards AI and use AI to help in SOC automation.

Regarding Splunk Enterprise Platform's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are pretty good, but not up to the mark.

Regarding Splunk Enterprise Platform's AI capabilities, I feel that its accuracy and reliability of output are still in the nascent stages, although it is pretty good.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Platform for about to three years.

Splunk Enterprise Platform is stable.

Splunk Enterprise Platform's scalability is very good.

The customer support is very good.

I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as an eight. They are able to query and answer most of the questions.

We have used many solutions before, including Sentinel  and Elastic, which we use in combination.

I feel I have seen a return on investment, and my general impression is that it is a great product.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the setup costs and licensing are pretty high.

Before choosing Splunk Enterprise Platform, I evaluated other options including Elastic.

My advice for others looking into using Splunk Enterprise Platform is that it is a great solution, but it is a little expensive. I would rate this review a seven out of ten.

I mainly work on log management and observability for our platforms. We use Splunk Enterprise Platform  for the collection of logs and primarily for the observability of dashboards related to incident management and our application performance.

The feature I appreciate most about Splunk Enterprise Platform is the Search Processing Language, which is very flexible. It allows me to write complex queries and perform statistical analysis to create better dashboards and visualization capabilities. Through this, we can visualize our systems and manage incident management properly.

Our team primarily uses the technical capabilities for log management and observability of our systems and the performance of our applications. Our team operates mainly in the technical domain.

A major factor I dislike about Splunk Enterprise Platform is the cost. Since the cost is based on data ingestion or the volume of data, large logs or large volumes of logs sometimes increase the ROI and overall cost of the product for us. This direct relationship between cost and data ingestion volume is an area I dislike and where there is room for improvement.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Splunk Enterprise Platform overall 8.5 out of 10. The area where it can be improved is mainly the cost. Otherwise, the features and quality of the platform are very good. Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise help reduce MTTR, Mean Time to Resolution, since incident management is faster. Additionally, the visualization and observability of the entire organization infrastructure and application performance are consolidated in one place, as data is collected in a central location. Overall, the features and aspects of Splunk Enterprise Platform are commendable, but the cost aspect could be improved.

I have been using Splunk Enterprise Platform for more than one year.

My impression of the stability of Splunk Enterprise Platform is that the stability is much better, and we can also scale by cluster indices if needed. The stability and scalability of the platform meet our requirements and are functioning properly.

The scalability of Splunk Enterprise Platform is such that we can scale by cluster indexes as needed. The scalability is appropriate to the standards we require.

I have not contacted the technical support or customer support for Splunk Enterprise Platform much because the procurement part was managed by our finance team.

Previously, we were using open-source tools such as Prometheus and Grafana  for our dashboards, visibility, and monitoring. Additionally, while selecting tools, we tried ELK for some time. However, we are currently using Splunk Enterprise Platform.

The initial deployment of Splunk Enterprise Platform is very easy because it was primarily done by our infrastructure team. The deployment was easy, especially since our deployment model is cloud-based. Although there is an on-premise setup available, we are not using that much, but the cloud-based deployment was very straightforward.

For the initial deployment of Splunk Enterprise Platform, two or three people were involved, though I am not entirely certain of the details because the organization was using this tool before I joined.

Granular data access is mainly for controlling data that gets ingested. I understand that granular control over data gives us the ability to restrict how much data we want, thereby helping us reduce the cost of Splunk Cloud.

I am not using the Federated Search feature of Splunk Enterprise Platform because we primarily use SPL queries for our log management and database visualization.

Splunk Enterprise Platform does not require any maintenance on our end since it is a cloud-based system, so I do not think we require any maintenance for that.

My impression of Splunk Enterprise Platform's capability to manage data sovereignty at a petabyte scale within my environment is that our data is collected at a centralized location for all our metrics and logs. Having it in one place helps us for better visualization and data sovereignty because our data is in one location, which reassures me that our data is not being leaked or used by other AI tools or any other third-party applications.

My impression of Splunk Enterprise Platform's approach to managing governance within a private network environment is that governance is managed by the security team. From my experience, the governance and compliance for the data of our organization with Splunk Enterprise Platform follows mainly SOC 2. I am not fully aware of all the details, but I know that it aligns with best practices in the market, which is why our security team has approved it.

I would rate Splunk Enterprise Platform overall 8.5 out of 10.