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Splunk Cloud

Splunk | 1

Reviews from AWS customer

17 AWS reviews

External reviews

68 reviews
from and

External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.


4-star reviews ( Show all reviews )

    Ritesh Vishwakarma

Gives us better buffering performance and lower latency if we use the right components

  • September 06, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

One client wanted their data in a readable format. He was in the UK, but his data center was in the US, so he tried to forward his data to the indexer. Because of the time zones, he faced some time stamping issues. They reached out to us to open a case that got assigned to me.

I learned which US time zone the data center was in and set the time stamps in the future. We changed the preferences to convert it into GMT so that whenever the data is onboarded to the indexes via universal or heavy forwarder, we can fetch the data in real-time.

We primarily use virtualization and deploy in Docker containers. We seldom use any physical servers. It's mostly deployed in a cloud environment or a virtual machine. It's typically Docker but sometimes Azure.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud saved us a lot of money because we're working with databases like MongoDB and Oracle and using Splunk as a sync tool. It has its own indexes that cut costs by 15 to 20 percent. 

It also improves our decision-making process. In one scenario, we compared the client's data from last year to this April and saw the year-on-year profit and loss. We could see which projects were successful. Compared to another SIEM or monitoring tool, it saved us time because the data is presented in a clean, customizable dashboard. 

What is most valuable?

In an enterprise, you need a universal or heavy forwarder. If you don't have that, you need an HSE token or API request call and all the different components. In Splunk Cloud, you just have one instance to search all the data in your index. You don't need to manage it because Splunk handles that. 

If you are using Splunk Enterprise, you need to understand, from A to Z, how the indexes and searches work and where the data is coming from. Splunk Cloud has a beautiful, user-friendly UI that lets you navigate all the settings.

It doesn't matter where the data comes from for integration. The dashboard gives you a brief overview. 

When we're onboarding all that data using heavy forwarders, Splunk gives us better buffering performance and lower latency if we use the right components. If I use a light or universal forwarder, it often doesn't parse on the other end. Our projects use heavy forwarders and put those data into the index services while defining which indexes they should index. We are also micromanaging where that data should be. 

The reporting is good so far. Sometimes, I help my clients improve their user experience. As an engineer, I would suggest that if a solution has back-end compatibility, clients should get out of their comfort zone and customize another app to create a dashboard or something else.

What needs improvement?

First-time users may struggle with the user interface. When I first used Splunk, I entered my username and password. After that, we get a dashboard on the left side with apps. At the top, you can click the gear icon to view the settings. Within those settings, there's a distributed console option with several settings. It's a bit overwhelming for a beginner. The user knows what they want and can search for it in the search bar. If I see several apps, my first instinct is to scroll down to find the app, or perhaps you will find that search and report. That bugged me when I was learning.

Application support is another problem. We created a custom Palo Alto app that isn't fully supported by the latest version of Splunk. We had to downgrade to older versions to use the custom app properly. That was one problem we faced daily with one client. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate Splunk Cloud seven out of 10 for stability. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate Splunk Cloud eight out of 10 for scalability.

How are customer service and support?

I rate Splunk support six out of 10. They're knowledgeable, but their response times are sometimes slow. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

We have Prometheus, but that only monitors Grafana and shows you a dashboard. Splunk is not just monitoring or grabbing data you search for. I've worked with cloud and enterprise. When we started using Splunk Cloud, we used it more like a dashboard to search data. Based on my understanding, I could create applications. 

After moving into the enterprise side, I understood Splunk even more, including its components, bucket lifecycles, and how the indexes and configurations work. It's not simply transferring data from one to another. I can grab data from any system that consists of raw data. Splunk can also identify those data in the timestamp index form. We don't have any other vendors to compare it to. 

How was the initial setup?

Deploying Splunk Cloud Platform is straightforward unless you use an automation tool like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. It takes four to five hours. Installation can take a day in some cases, but it typically can be completed in less than five hours unless you're dealing with more complex data.

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

Splunk Cloud is affordable, depending on your license. I don't know how much it costs exactly, but my colleague said it depends on your licensing and which features you use. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate Splunk Cloud Platform eight out of 10. I would recommend this product. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud


    Lokesh V.

Troubleshooter of Technology

  • August 31, 2024
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Ease of Use and supporting features integration.
What do you dislike about the product?
Charge on queries quantity on commercial versions.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
end to end testing troubleshooter


    Derek Hemsley

Good for data aggregation and correlation for centralized logging and monitoring

  • June 13, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Cloud Platform for data aggregation and correlation for centralized logging and monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped our organization reduce risk and allow for threat investigation to catch potential malicious traffic before it causes damage.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of Splunk Cloud Platform is the ability to correlate events together and combine the data into one event.

The benefits we saw from using Splunk Cloud Platform are the time to detect and the ability to investigate faster.

Our organization monitors multiple cloud environments. Splunk Cloud Platform's direct cloud connection capabilities make data transfer easy.

Splunk Cloud Platform's end-to-end visibility into your cloud-native environment is key for security posture.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped reduce our mean time to resolve by a significant portion.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped improve our organization’s business resilience.

We have seen time to value using Splunk Cloud Platform. We immediately saw time to value after implementing the solution.

The consolidation of tools gives one place to look for logs and events. I wish there were more ways to consolidate the consoles.

Splunk Cloud Platform is easy to use, and users can quickly understand and do pretty much anything that their minds can create.

What needs improvement?

Splunk Cloud Platform should have better integrations with its suite of tools. Splunk Cloud Platform should include a more seamless connection with ES.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution provides good stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

As long as you have money, scaling the solution is easy.

How are customer service and support?

Our direct customer support team is very responsive. However, it's very hit or miss with Splunk tickets and trying to reach out. Most likely, we get escalated because they can't help us. It's very hard to work through issues that need to be resolved quickly via email. The conversations back and forth take a long time, and technical support takes a while to resolve urgent issues.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

The Splunk engagement in the deployment was helpful, but there were many issues after implementing everything. So, it was smooth but with many hiccups.

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

Splunk Cloud Platform is an expensive solution.

What other advice do I have?

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

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)


    reviewer2500101

No infrastructure maintenance frees up a lot of time and improves efficiency

  • June 13, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use it a lot for IT operations. We monitor various services that we manage. 

We do not monitor a multi-cloud environment. We have a single stack. 

How has it helped my organization?

It is very stable. Many things get managed at the backend. The infrastructure is managed by Splunk. We just have to focus on the use cases and the value we can drive from Splunk. Being able to focus only on the outcome of the product is valuable for any organization.

There has not been a significant difference when it comes to the meantime to resolution because it all depends on the use case and how much time it takes to run. However, as an admin, just focusing on giving valuable insights and not having to manage the infrastructure has been the most beneficial. Otherwise, the quality of the use cases is still the same. There is no difference as such.

What is most valuable?

Not having to maintain any infrastructure is valuable. That frees up a lot of time as well.

What needs improvement?

We are on the classic Cloud that is hosted on GCP. There are a lot of functionalities that are missing for Splunk Cloud hosted on GCP but they are available on AWS. Adding more IPs to allow lists and many other functionalities are not supported on Splunk Cloud hosted on GCP. One good example is the ingest action which is not there in Splunk Cloud hosted on GCP. I wish they would add these missing features to the GCP platform.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We definitely have room to scale. In the future, we might scale our environment. The amount of ingestion is going to increase.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate them a seven out of ten based on my experience. There were many instances where we did not receive proper help, so we had to escalate the issue through our account team and our customer success manager.

After the migration, whenever there was any maintenance, there would be an email saying that it was just maintenance. There were not many details about it. Once we started talking about it and giving feedback, they started adding more information. There are still some gaps in the support or the quality of service. From that perspective, I would rate them a seven out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

We migrated to Splunk Cloud Platform from on-prem Splunk Enterprise a year ago. The main reason was to have no infrastructure management on our side. That was the main reason we shifted from Splunk Enterprise to Splunk Cloud Platform.

How was the initial setup?

It was completely a smooth transition. There was a lot of data that we moved from on-premise to cloud. The transition was definitely smooth. The licensing and pricing were handled by the higher management. I have no idea about it, but the entire process of moving the data over was very smooth.

We are using Splunk Cloud hosted on GCP.

What about the implementation team?

We utilized the professional services from Splunk for the migration, but after the migration, we have been taking care of everything.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not look into any other solution. We are totally into Splunk. We wanted a no-infrastructure-management environment and a better solution, so we moved to Splunk Cloud Platform.

What other advice do I have?

Splunk's unified platform has not helped consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools. The only product we use is Splunk Cloud. We are not using any of the other products like ITES, enterprise security, etc. No consolidation is required for us.

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


    Stanley Kmiec

Improves availability and makes infrastructure administration easy

  • June 13, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

We are onboarding everything on it. We have infrastructure, applications, and network-related things on it.

How has it helped my organization?

The availability has improved. There is the ease of upgrades. We are able to show value quicker with some of our add-ons and things like that because of the stability in the base.

It is extremely important to me that Splunk Cloud Platform has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment.

Splunk Cloud Platform has definitely helped reduce our mean time to resolve. It is a little hard to measure. It has at least saved 3% of our time.

Splunk's unified platform has helped consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools. There is ease on resources.

What is most valuable?

There is definitely the ease of the infrastructure administration. It frees up a lot of time.

What needs improvement?

I would love to be able to manage my own apps. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability and scalability have been the main benefits of this solution.

How are customer service and support?

We have had some confusion around some of our requests, but I understand. We have to work through and get proper responses.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

We were using on-prem Splunk.

How was the initial setup?

There was a professional service involved. I came into the team right at the time of the cutover. They were pushed into the cloud because things had gotten so out of control on-prem, so we had to clean that up first, and then finish the migration. It was kind of bumpy, but we got through.

We are using AWS. It is managed by Splunk.

What about the implementation team?

We had Aquila as our partner for help with implementation.

What was our ROI?

We are definitely starting to see an ROI. We have been focused on metrics because we are trying to get very comprehensive and overall monitoring of the environment both from the security standpoint and the infrastructure standpoint.

We have not yet seen any cost efficiencies by switching to Splunk Cloud Platform. We are still maturing it out.

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

As far as the pricing goes, it was what was expected. It is a premium product. There were no surprises there.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not evaluate other solutions. We have always been with Splunk.

What other advice do I have?

We are not monitoring multiple cloud environments, but it seems it would be easy to monitor them.

Overall, I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement, but it has been good.


    reviewer2200662

Can integrate easily with other tools and allow businesses to expand their use cases

  • June 13, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution in my company, and its primary use cases have been related to the log correlation engine. Splunk Cloud Platform can be considered a central ingest point for gathering logs from all over our company's network, after which it is used to take and create reports. Security, detection, dashboards, and similar features are some of the use cases that can be associated with the tool.

How has it helped my organization?

The benefits my company has seen from using the tool would be that it gives you more of a single place to look at rather than having to jump from a bunch of different screens to look at current logs, as well as the ability to correlate data amongst different log sources.

What is most valuable?

Regarding the solution's most valuable features, I think that since many of our company's applications are Splunk-based, they can integrate with other tools within our tech stack, which allows us to expand our use cases.

In our organization, Splunk Cloud Platform provides end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment, and it is a very important area where we need visibility within our environment. It is one of the main tools I use for end-to-end visibility.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped reduce the mean time to resolve. It helps find issues, which can lead to a better mean time to resolve overall. Depending on the detection type, it reduces the mean time to resolve by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent.

My company saw time to value using Splunk Cloud Platform pretty quickly, and we continue to see the value, specifically when we add in new sources and tune-up. In general, it has been pretty quick.

Splunk's unified platform helps consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools since it gives our company a single platform where we can collect logs from all different sources.

What needs improvement?

I think the tool has some scalability issues, especially when used in larger organizations. I feel the searching part gets really slow, which is based on one's resources.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for about six years. In general, I have been a Splunk customer for eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I think the stability is pretty good. I haven't noticed any outages.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I think the scalability could be a little bit better because our company runs into some resource constraints that slow down our searches.

How are customer service and support?

When it comes to the solution's technical support, I would say it all depends on what the request is or who is actually responding to our company's queries. We have had some people who have been great, but we have also had times where we had to escalate some issues to get our tickets looked at by someone from the support team. I rate the technical support a five or six out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

I think the tool has some scalability issues, especially when used in larger organizations. I feel the searching part gets really slow, which is based on one's resources.

How was the initial setup?

The product's initial setup phase was fairly expensive since my company had to get some professional services to help us with the set up of everything. Overall, the tool freed up some manpower, resources, and hours from our personnel and management, so having the tool in our company made sense. Yeah.

The product's deployment phase was easy.

The solution is deployed using the cloud services offered by AWS.

What about the implementation team?

My company had to get some professional services from a reseller named Resultant to help us with the setup of the tool.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I don't remember whether my company had evaluated other products against Splunk Cloud Platform. In the environment where our company made the switch over, I can say that we are happy with our Splunk usage in general. We just wanted a tool that was more resilient and didn't have to worry about the management on the back end.

What other advice do I have?

My organization monitors one cloud environment with the help of Splunk Cloud Platform. The ease or difficulty of monitoring multiple cloud environments is not something that is applicable to my company.

In terms of Splunk Cloud Platform's ability to help improve our organization's business resilience and predict, identify, and solve problems in real time, I would say it is not possible in real-time. The solution gives our company the ability to do more of a retrospective analysis, which helps us with the current backup.

There are not any cost efficiencies I can think of that I have experienced after switching to Splunk Cloud Platform.

I think Splunk Cloud Platform is still probably one of the best tools out there in the market for enterprise organizations.

I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.

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

Amazon Web Services (AWS)


    reviewer2499666

Good reliability snf definitely saved us time

  • June 12, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use it for security investigations and alerting.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are reliability and logging. It's in the cloud so it has more stability and easy maintenance. 

What needs improvement?

The support from the Splunk team is generally good, but sometimes, there's a lack of coordination between our account reps and the hands-on technical people. This misalignment can lead to issues with getting what we need done and what is happening.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for about two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

From what I've seen so far, stability has been great.

How are customer service and support?

The actual technical reps we've had have been fair. I'd rate them a seven on a scale from one to ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

We previously used LogRhythm. We switched to Splunk. It was an on-prem setup, so it was tough to maintain. It wasn't very reliable, and we always had to deal with hardware issues.

How was the initial setup?

I haven't been hands-on with the deployment, but Splunk's deployment has been smooth. We also have Enterprise Security, which has been a little more difficult.

What was our ROI?

We have not calculated in dollars, but it has definitely saved us time.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated other options. I wasn't directly involved in all the decision-making processes, but from a user standpoint, it was the cost and the future possibilities of adding SOAR that made Splunk Cloud Platform seem like the best option for us.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate it an eight out of ten, mainly due to the difficulty we've had with the Enterprise Security side.


    reviewer2499189

Offers good dashboards that show us search or user search activity

  • June 11, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

It's a better pricing model. The main aspect is that we don't have to manage our infrastructure. Since we migrated, we've found we don't have as many outages. 

This allows our admins to focus more on the day-to-day onboarding instead of wasting time dealing with outages.

How has it helped my organization?

Our organization monitors multiple cloud environments. We monitor AWS. We have other logging platforms that monitor our infrastructure as well.

It's very important for our organization that Splunk Cloud Platform has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native provider environments. With the increasing changes in technology, being able to consistently get insights into those new data sources in a quick amount of time is everything.

Moreover, we have seen a reduction in our mean lead time to resolve (MTTR). Our enterprise has some of those dashboards for incidents. Splunk is mainly used to resolve those incidents and identify what's wrong. Over year over year, these times are lower. And Splunk has helped with that. There's other operational things that are probably helping too, Splunk plays a big part, so it is helpful.

What is most valuable?

I like the Splunk Monitor console. I like how Splunk continually updates it with new features. We don't have to do anything on our end, we just get access to that. 

Splunk has some good dashboards that show us search or user search activity. There are some things that could cause the environment to go awry, like skip searches or searches that are more intensive. 

By being able to identify those, we could reach out to those customers and work with them on improving their standard practice. Since moving to SaaS, we're able to focus more on that.

What needs improvement?

There's one specific use case I work with. I work with some Splunk experts, and it lacks workload management rules.

It can identify specific dashboards e.g., or all-time searches. When I try to track back to the user, I don't have additional information within those logs to help me know, "This is the dashboard this guy accessed."

Instead of relying on those particular workload management logs, I have to do an investigation that takes time. It takes too much time when it shouldn't.

For how long have I used the solution?

It's only been a full year so far. We migrated recently.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability has been so far, so good. Data is growing, not just for us but for everyone. From what we've seen, it looks like it's handling it accordingly.

How are customer service and support?

We frequently engage with support now since we have a lot of incidents. They consistently ask for feedback on our support cases. We recently had something that was very urgent. Splunk was able to escalate it accordingly and get back to us with a solution. It means a lot to my management.

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

We've been with Splunk for several years now.

How was the initial setup?

For the cloud, the deployment is easy. 

We just have the standard. We download our packages, upload them via the cloud, upload our apps, and use the App Inspect. 

Before on-prem, we had some CI/CD pipelines to deploy on-prem. Those change calls lasted up to an hour and a half just to verify the change was successful and that everything was coming in as expected. 

Cloud is just uploaded and deployed in a matter of minutes. That's a big plus. It saves us time and a lot of hassle. 

What was our ROI?

We use our valuable time and do not waste effort. We just work on more important things like onboarding new data sources as log data continues to grow.

By being able to have more time to onboard data sources with customers, we provide our company more visibility and value into our entire environment.

What other advice do I have?

I have no major gripes other than some detailed grievances, so I would rate it an eight out of ten. 


    reviewer2499165

Works great for dashboarding, reporting, and alerting

  • June 11, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

We use it for a lot of different things. I primarily use it for monitoring, alerting, and dashboarding.

How has it helped my organization?

It was a slow adoption at first, but as our development teams are learning the tool, we now have our teams making their own metrics for each of the different apps. I work in the web, mobile app, and email area. It provides insights into metrics that are happening and problems when they are happening. We also have alerting.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. It is pretty transparent because we have some on-prem stuff and we have off-prem in the cloud, so we are using both. We are transitioning from on-prem to off-prem. It is seamless because it does not matter from where data comes. When we switch to a new data source, I do not have to reinvent it. We are using AWS.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped reduce our mean time to resolve (MTTR). I get alerts every day. Anytime things are out of kilter, it gives us an alert asking us to better go look and see if something is happening. A lot of times, something is happening. It could be serious. It could be not serious, but we use it a lot for monitoring. Identifying a problem is a lot quicker. Once you know what the problem is, it makes it a lot faster to resolve the problem. That is where different other tools come into play. I believe they now have the APM tool, and we are trying to ramp that up. For us, it is pretty critical that we quickly identify that we are having a problem. It probably makes the resolution 80% faster.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped improve our organization’s business resilience. We manage multiple websites over nine different states. We have millions of users as our members. When we are having a problem, we do not want to impact them.

What is most valuable?

For my purposes, I like the ability to aggregate lots of data from different sources. I like being able to report for management and being able to get alerts on thresholds being out of sync.

What needs improvement?

It is sometimes slow. Some of that has to do with the queries themselves not being efficient, but sometimes it is slow. They changed their model a few years back. It seems to be working better for us as opposed to having some limits that they had.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk since 2019.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have not had any issues with it going down or not performing. It is sometimes slow, but that might not be because of Splunk Cloud. That could be because of our firewalls and other things that lead to Splunk Cloud.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Its scalability is fine. We have ITSI. We have Splunk Enterprise. We have some internal Splunk and external Splunk. Our company at first was weary about putting data on the cloud. We do not have those concerns now.

How are customer service and support?

We have pretty good support. 

It is hard for me to rate them because I don't use their support much. We have a lot of expertise in-house.

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

I have used several old competitors. Computer Associates used to have a tool. New Relic was another tool. We are primarily using Splunk now.

We switched from New Relic. We have had Computer Associates's tool. A problem with these types of tools is they are costly to put in and then not that many people use them. You then have to justify it, so the adoption is the issue.

The setup is way easier for Splunk and the way the data is aggregated is easier. Overall, reporting and dashboarding are easier. A lot of the setup involved such as tagging and so forth is not as cumbersome in Splunk.

With Splunk, looking at our servers and all types of log files is excellent. I am kind of disappointed with our particular infrastructure. We invested all this money in Splunk. We are using it for monitoring, recording, and alerting, but our company has to embrace it for using it for security. We have already bought it. Our security team should be using and leveraging it, but they are not. They are using other tools. Our security team just does not want to use it, and they need a push and need to be shown that we are paying for it. They can still use the tools that they want, but maybe they need to be shown what all these tools can do. We could leverage what we are paying for better. Our management can push our security team and say that we are paying for this, and they should leverage this more or more now.

What about the implementation team?

We had a consultant come in from Splunk and a third party. We did both.

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

I do not know what that is anymore. I have not been involved with that for a couple of years, but I know we are paying a lot.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform at least an eight out of ten. For the things that I do, such as dashboarding, reporting, and alerting, it is great. It does a good job.


    Lakshman Kanuru

Allows to easily monitor multiple cloud environments and offers good resilience to users

  • April 23, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

Splunk Cloud Platform is a product I use since my company has different platforms on Splunk, like Splunk ITSI and Splunk Enterprise Security. Splunk ITSI and Splunk Enterprise Security are the two packages known as paid packages under Splunk Cloud Platform, and my company also has an ad-hoc search head. Splunk ITSI is totally related to the infrastructure monitoring that my company does, and from it, we derive the service analyzers, episodes, and alerts and see if we want to integrate anything with ServiceNow, Jira, or any other monitoring tools we have. The product can be integrated with other tools, while my company can also use its alerting feature and its ability to notify the consumers with particular alerts, so the total infrastructure is covered under SIEM, making it possible to attach to security information. My company also created a couple of use cases, like in the case of continuous resetting of a password more than three or four times, then there will be a security incident that would be created so that if any end user is doing it as malpractice, like, phishing or something, my company can detect it and inform the user that you have crossed the four limits, and there is some attack happening owing to which we need to reset the password. Based on the aforementioned process, SIEM monitoring will be handled through its application. The aforementioned areas consist of the use cases related to the tool, along with a couple of more activities, like onboarding a user onto Splunk, creating apps for them, creating dashboards, creating alerts, and creating a couple of use cases for them as per their requirements.

How has it helped my organization?

In my organization, Splunk Cloud Platform has improved the issue revolving around transactions. If there are any issues with the transactions, then my company notifies the end users that their transactions failed, after which they can fix the issues so that there are no issues with the transaction part, especially regarding the application availability. The tool makes it possible to fix issues without any downtime.

What is most valuable?

I mainly work with Splunk SIEM and Splunk ITSI, and these are the two major products recommended for all consumers. If it is related to security, I recommend Splunk SIEM, and if it is related to infrastructure monitoring, I recommend Splunk ITSI to others. I used to take care of the observability part as well with the aforementioned tools. For observability purposes, I use Splunk-related applications. I also do the onboarding of the data into Splunk with the help of observability functionality.

What needs improvement?

If I focus on the observability part of the product, I see that it is an area that doesn't offer more integrations compared to what Splunk Cloud Platform or Splunk Enterprise offers. When it comes to the integrations with the other platforms, there is a little bit of a lag in the observability part, making it an area where improvements are required.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for 5 years. My company has a partnership with Splunk.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable solution. Cisco has acquired Splunk recently, so I think it will be a more stable product in the coming days.

How are customer service and support?

It takes a lot of time for the support team to resolve issues. In short, it takes a lot of time for Splunk's support team to troubleshoot an issue, meaning they are unable to resolve issues within a certain time frame. I rate the technical support a 6-7 out of 10.

How was the initial setup?

The product's deployment phase was straightforward, especially compared to the ones I have dealt with in the past.

The solution is deployed on a hybrid cloud model.

For deployments starting from scratch, I deal with the documentation part. I prefer to look through Splunk's recommendations on the limits of how much the server configuration should be while trying to meet the configuration requirements of the consumer. In general, I deal with whatever configuration files are needed and how the consumers want to approach it, like if it should be a heavy forwarder or universal forwarder or if they don't want to directly ingest data to the indexer bypassing the heavy forwarder. Basically, I try to understand the consumer requirements before taking care of the deployment part.

For a limited deployment involving four to five servers, only a single person is required. If the deployment involves twenty to thirty servers, the number of people required to deploy the product will have to be increased depending on the requirements, and my company will also have to manage everything. The number of people required for deployment is based on the capacity at which my company plans to do the deployment.

My company has the entire Splunk Enterprise package, and we have many universal forwarders set up at fifty different locations. In around twenty locations, universal forwarders have been set up. My company also has fifteen indexes that directly send data to indexers. My company also has four heavy forwarders that collect information from applications like Azure. My company uses add-ons with the heavy forwarders in Splunk.

What about the implementation team?

I was involved in the product's deployment phase.

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

My company has a license for Splunk Cloud Platform. My company also has a license for Splunk Enterprise. There are two packages that my company has access to when it comes to Splunk, and I am also aware of the configurations and setup phases related to the tool, from scratch to production.

What other advice do I have?

Splunk Cloud Platform has improved our company's incident response time. For example, if any event is ingested into Splunk, within less than a minute, we trigger an incident to the end user based on the assignment group in ServiceNow.

There are many benefits attached to the tool in the areas of machine learning and predictive analysis. In Splunk ITSI, there is predictive analysis, which can be used for protection with the alert capabilities, especially if there is an alert storm coming up. My company can directly detect particular alerts from the trail to the attack and notify the end user about it. With the machine learning toolkit, my company does anomaly detection with the help of Splunk SIEM platform. With Splunk ITSI, my company does predictive analysis. The aforementioned area covers the two different platforms my company uses, along with two different approaches and the tool's machine learning capabilities.

My company interacts with our consumers. For example, if I am a consumer of Azure products, I would want to onboard all the data from Azure, even if it consists of user data. I recommend that more space be set on a particular index so that Azure data can be used. My company has all data related to Azure about its users and the changes if you have a license or if you have Azure Event Hubs, including any other things that it may have. I recommend more space in Azure, but if it is a network-related application like Aruba, I recommend that it has a little bit less space compared to Azure. The scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform can impact our company's data management, though I recommend the space required for a tool based on the use cases.

I am aware of the federated search features in the product. If a search is not running up, then my company needs to check whether any permission related to the search has any issue or if anything is going wrong, after which my company needs to check and fix those searches. I have not used much of the tool's federated search features.

My organization monitors multiple cloud environments with the tool's help. It is easy to monitor multiple cloud environments using the product. For example, if my company takes into account Splunk ITSI with service analyzers, then we define how one service is related to GCP. One service will be under the cloud services offered by Azure, while another service will be related to AWS. My company can divide the services based on locations and KPIs. My company monitors the total locations of the cloud so that we can get more insights from the service breakdown, which is why I recommend the use of Splunk ITSI. I used to work more with Splunk ITSI, a reason why I recommend it to others, as it is easy to understand and handle, even if you have 1,000 or 20,000 applications. With Splunk ITSI service breakdown, it is very easy to handle applications.

The visibility of the tool in multiple environments can be explained with the help of an example, where, if my company considers Splunk Cloud Platform, the visibility will be less compared to what we get from Splunk Enterprise. Splunk Cloud Platform is totally managed by Splunk's support team, so if anyone needs to do anything, my company needs to raise a request for a change in the tool, though we can modify a couple of services, like a couple of applications using ACS, which was introduced by Splunk. With ACS, if you want to update, create a token, or modify anything from the HEC token information, you can do it with the particular services offered by the solution. Considering the aforementioned area, I recommend that 30 percent of the work be done with ACS, and 70 percent of the work needs to seek assistance from Splunk's support team. Our company handles Splunk Enterprise, and we have 100 percent visibility on it compared to Splunk Cloud Platform.

The integration of the product with other services is possible. I have integrated it with ServiceNow, Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, and I can say that it has been okay till now. It is good to integrate Splunk Cloud Platform with other tools. If we take a cloud service like GCP into consideration as an example and say that it is not working properly, then there will be an incident directly assigned to the support team based on the integration with ServiceNow. If you want to notify all the consumers in a scenario where GCP is not working properly through particular notifications with Slack channel particular notifications, then one can inform all the thousand consumers in a particular company about it, and it is possible with a single integration.

My company uses the tool for alert reporting. For example, if the top management of an organization is looking for the availability of websites, especially a couple of websites that are critical to their applications, then my company monitors such applications with the data in the report from the last thirty days or seven days, to ensure that availability of a particular website is 100 percent. If anything goes wrong as per the reports from the previous seven days, then the availability is reduced to 80 or 95 percent, which is based on how much time it was down, and it will be then notified to the consumer or top management, stating that the availability got reduced, and how there is need to fix a couple of applications in the back-end so that the availability can be increased. The top management will be made aware of the things that have been going on for the last seven or forty days. In general, a report is good for notifying the top management or consumers so that they can make decisions or check if their licenses or server capacity needs to be increased. With the alerting report feature, my company can be confident that the top management or consumers know about a particular issue in the tool that we can fix as soon as possible, but there will be a cost involved in doing so every time. If the consumer or top management is aware of the issues in the tool with the help of the alerting report feature, then they can make a decision.

I am currently not aware of how the product has an impact on decision-making.

The product has helped my organization with data compliance and privacy regulations since we were able to set up the terms and conditions with Splunk. In general, it is good when it comes to the terms and conditions revolving around the security part.

Maintenance is required to upgrade the applications, so we need a downtime of no more than fifteen minutes.

The product offers value in terms of resilience. Whenever my company faces difficulties, it is the solution we use for all our monitoring purposes.

In terms of the extensibility of the product, I feel it is a good solution.

Everything is supported by Splunk support, though it may take some time to find and resolve certain issues. If Splunk's support team resolves issues within a certain time frame, I can provide a nine out of ten rating for Splunk's technical team. Splunk Enterprise is totally handled by our company, so I can give it a nine out of ten.

I recommend Splunk Enterprise to others, especially when compared to Splunk Cloud Platform. If any notifications are needed, it can be done with no downtime, and it can even be completed within a week. If we want Splunk's support team to do the same aforementioned procedure for our company, then it may take a little bit more time.

I rate the overall tool a 7-8 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud