What do you like best about the product?

Powerful log analytics tool and solid user interface. Seems to be an industry standard. Widely accepted by the IT and IT security community. Great presence in their market and industry. Knowledgeable sales people that understand the technical and business applications of their product instead of handing it off to their developers / product managers / business analysts to answer more complicated questions.

What do you dislike about the product?

The learning curve for the Spunk querying syntax is somewhat steep. I'm not sure how much the support is really geared towards beginners or those that are not familiar with logging tools. The support that is out there for learning the tool is great but the support that is out there for learning the actual querying syntax is, in my humble opinion, lacking. It might be great for those familiar with querying tools, etc. but for those new to IT tools, management, administration, etc it is not the easiest to pick up. I would recommend looking at the tutorials and youtube videos then finding somebody who is already familiar with the tool and having them walk you through it just for the basic features. That alone would help a bit

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Capturing logs, analytics, indexing, and correlating in real time.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Understand the admin and user requirements, technical understanding, and tangible application. It is a great tool and is used by many but ensure that it actually tailors to your business needs. Specifically, where does Splunk provide value where open source or other free tools cannot provide. Furthermore, if it provides the right support then adopt-ability increases greatly. There are many other free / open source tools, so do you due diligence to understand what you really need and what tools can meet that need. A lot of vendors have value added features or just outright great features, but make sure you answer the following questions: 1) can your users learn and apply this in the needed environments? 2) How long will it take to realize it's value? and 3) can you do without the particular feature, etc.