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Splunk Cloud

Splunk

Reviews from AWS customer

23 AWS reviews

External reviews

65 reviews
from and

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


    reviewer2499573

Helps improve visibility, reduce administrative work, and save costs

  • June 12, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

Our security team uses the Splunk Cloud Platform heavily. We index that data that is relevant to security for over a year. Most of our indexes, we only keep for 30 to 45 days. But for security, we keep it for a year here. It is an essential tool for our security team in investigating incidents and looking at the potential compromises, and exploits, of all those types of things. That's one example.

I'm one of two Splunk Engineers in the organization and almost every department uses Splunk. We create dashboards for different organizations. For example, We have temples all over the world. We produce statistics for the temples about how many people have visited each day, and how many sessions were done in different languages. That type of thing is all done through Splunk dashboards. Our missionary department has over 80,000 missionaries all over the world, statistics about what they are doing and the applications they are using are all done through Splunk.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud Platform helped remove a lot of that administrative work, but also, it's much easier on the cloud for us to ramp up our SVC units if we see more demand and to be able to add more storage to our indexers. That's one thing for us as administrators that helps to be able to ramp it up quickly. When we were using Splunk Enterprise, that was a much more involved process, but now with Splunk Cloud, it's much easier to ramp that up. My partner and I are good at making sure that all of our users are using Splunk efficiently. We give them training regularly to make sure that their queries are well written, that they're not using indexes they shouldn't be, and that they're using the proper commands to be able to get the information they want. We do have to do this periodically because more and more of our users are using Splunk frequently, and we'll have to talk to a Splunk rep to increase our SVCs. For us, as administrators, that's very helpful.

We monitor multiple cloud environments using Splunk Cloud. It's been quite easy for us. We have an in-house Cloud Foundry and we use AWS and Azure quite a bit. We haven't had problems integrating or monitoring with any of those platforms. It's been great for us.

The end-to-end visibility that Splunk Cloud Platform has in our cloud-native environments is important. We do a lot of correlation across the entire enterprise. We need to have good visibility into all of our logs across all of our cloud Platforms, and in-house on-premise stuff, which we're getting with Splunk.

We use a lot of different monitoring tools, not just Splunk. We use Nagios, ThousandEyes, AppDynamics, and Dynatrace. Splunk is an important part of that. It is a mission-critical application for us. The alerts we set up in Splunk are ones we can't do with the other tools. Every one of those tools is a key piece of what we do as a monitoring team, but what we love about Splunk is that we can create alerts that we can't do with the other tools. That has helped us reduce our mean time to resolution.

The Splunk Cloud Platform has helped improve our organization's business resilience. Splunk helps predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time. What we love about Splunk is its flexibility to pull out data that we can't see in other applications or that the commercial office software has not produced itself. But through the logs and being able to adjust it to Splunk and being able to write the queries that we need to, we can pull that data out, and it helps us to be much more efficient in predicting potential problems because we know our applications well and know the red flags to watch for. We can create the alerts needed to predict when something can potentially go down or have problems.

We have seen cost efficiency by switching to the Splunk Cloud Platform. The biggest part for my partner and me is that Splunk Admins saves us time. I used to be the guy who would patch all of our enterprise indexers, servers, and distribution servers. That would take me quite a bit of time. Even though we had automated scripts that would do a lot of that, it still took a fair chunk of time to go out and do the maintenance and patching required. That freed up a lot of our time, made us a lot more efficient, and allowed us to work on other projects we couldn't do before. I do front-end development for some other products, but I didn't have the time before, and switching to Splunk Cloud has freed us up. Being able to ramp up our SVCs and storage is much easier than it was before. We had to spin up virtual servers, provision them, and ensure licensing. With Splunk Cloud, it's much faster and easier. The total cost of ownership has improved.

What is most valuable?

Before we started using Splunk Cloud, we were using Splunk Enterprise. My partner and I were spending quite a bit of our time keeping the servers patched, up to date, and running the way that we wanted them to. Now that's all gone with Splunk Cloud. That has freed up a lot of our time so that I can spend most of our time helping people, learning SPL, and helping them with their dashboards, alerts, and reports. Splunk Cloud has helped us to be able to focus on getting more information out of our data. Whereas before, we were doing mostly administrative stuff. Now we don't have to do that anymore.

What needs improvement?

We're interested in learning more about the new AI features, especially the natural language to SPL conversion. While we jokingly worry these features might replace us, our main focus is helping users understand Splunk and build dashboards. We're curious how these AI features will integrate into our work, how many people will use them, and if there will still be a need for our Splunk expertise. Overall, we're excited to see how AI will impact our work.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Cloud Platform has been extremely stable. In some of the major upgrades, like, when we switched over to version nine there were a few hiccups that caused performance slowdown, but as far as stability, it's been great. In the last year, it's been extremely stable and very performant. It's just in the months after some of the changes over to version nine, we had a few problems, but nothing since then.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have no concerns about scalability. We frequently upgrade the number of SVC units we require. We're using Splunk Cloud enterprise-wide. We're getting more and more departments using Splunk or asking to use it. Everything is on Splunk on a basic level. Security is a big deal. All our virtual servers, cloud environments, and everything that ties into security are already being adjusted to Splunk. As far as the application level, people want to get more information out of their application or data. We don't have problems, questions, or concerns about scalability. We know it's there.

How are customer service and support?

We have a big instance in the cloud, and we have occasionally had a few issues here and there that took some time to resolve. For the most part, the customer service and resolution of issues have been very responsive from Splunk. We just had a handful of issues here and there but for the most part, the support has been good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We have been using Splunk for many years. Before Splunk Cloud, we were using Splunk Enterprise.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment was straightforward because we migrated from Splunk Enterprise on-premises to the Splunk Cloud Platform.

What about the implementation team?

We used an in-house Splunk consultant who worked with us for six to nine months to transition from Enterprise. He was efficient but it was a big process. It took at least six months to fully transition over because of our big footprint.

What was our ROI?

We saw a return on investment when we switched to the cloud platform from Enterprise. We were able to consolidate everything with the cloud.

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

We were involved in the renewal process, and our organization does reviews of all our partnerships that we have every two to three years to ensure they are meeting our needs, there isn't a better solution out there, and we won't save money by going somewhere else. It's usually a four to six-week process when reviewing software and partnerships, and every time we go through Splunk, the review only lasts one day. We love Splunk and we're not switching.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform ten 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)


    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.


    reviewer2499168

Allows app and add-on installations without worrying about accidental breakdowns

  • June 11, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

The Splunk Cloud platform is for anyone who wants to save money and doesn't want to manage an on-prem infrastructure. I like the Cloud platform because we don't have to handle any maintenance. Any server downtime, upgrades, or patches are no longer our responsibility, which is great. That's the biggest advantage of Splunk Cloud.

How has it helped my organization?

Before COVID-19, the Splunk Cloud platform was much more difficult to manage. I've heard it causes a lot of frustration. Thankfully, it's come a long way since then. Now, it's user-friendly and allows app and add-on installations without worrying about accidental breakdowns.

I wouldn't have released Splunk Cloud myself when they did but the shift to remote work during COVID-19 drove everyone to the cloud, making the Splunk Cloud platform a great solution. While the updates focus on features, patches, and maintenance, there's nothing about the Splunk Cloud platform itself that I love other than the fact that we can use it in the cloud without the hassle of any on-prem requirements.

The importance of having one cloud platform depends on an organization's data goals, but at the end of the day, we onboarded the data because it's important. So as long as we have a use case, it's high up there.

Splunk Cloud Platform has improved our mean time to resolve incidents 100 percent. The cloud eliminates the need for upgrades to multi-cluster environments and the risk of errors during configuration, which can cause major problems. While we are not responsible for any Cloud maintenance, Splunk's support is helpful for escalations. Their clear communication about maintenance minimizes the need for their involvement.

While I can't speak to personal cost savings, moving to Splunk Cloud likely saves on storage costs compared to on-premises setups. This is especially valuable because many organizations use Splunk alongside other security products for specific needs. However, some competitors offer better data storage and faster results as add-ons for Splunk. Overall, the biggest cost savings come from eliminating the need for in-house server maintenance, storage management, and future data migrations. This reduces headaches and frees up IT resources, even if the migration itself wasn't a major issue.

What is most valuable?

I like the idea of being able to list the IPs that we want without having to open up a ticket to get it done so that way if anything changes we can add a new IP. The platform itself is the most valuable because if we're using the product, we're paying a lot for it. So we're searching our data and doing the triage we need to with the events. In reality, our biggest benefit of the Splunk Cloud Platform is not having the hassle on-prem.

What needs improvement?

Splunk Cloud's SVC licensing model lacks transparency. Customers are unsure of how SVC consumption translates to costs, and there's no easy way to identify what's driving SVC usage within the platform. While some external applications provide limited insight, Splunk Cloud itself doesn't offer a clear view into SVC consumption. This lack of clarity makes it difficult to explain cost spikes to customers, as the cause could be anything within the platform.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The Splunk Cloud Platform is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have some concerns about the SVC licensing model for deployments under 1 terabyte, and it's separate from Splunk Cloud. The bigger challenge customers face is managing the surge of data and historical information they ingest. This can lead to situations like an admin setting up numerous queries and then leaving, making users hesitant to disable them for fear of breaking something. While this can happen with any product with unchecked admin access, Splunk and Splunk Cloud themselves function as intended for large-scale environments. Ultimately, it's up to the customer to manage their Splunk instance effectively.

How are customer service and support?

Many people complain about back-and-forth interactions with Splunk support. It feels like a repetitive loop of explaining the problem, being asked for information and questioning why it's needed. There's frustration on both sides: support needs details to diagnose the issue, while users might feel it's a simple problem and supplying extra information is unnecessary. This can be true for any customer support experience.

How was the initial setup?

Splunk Cloud deployment complexity varies by use case. Starting fresh is simple: install, configure, and point data to the cloud. However, migrating from on-premises to the cloud with existing data can be complex. Deciding what data to migrate and the migration process itself adds significant challenges, although these are likely to become easier over time.

What was our ROI?

Splunk Cloud's value is clear: it eliminates maintenance headaches and simplifies connection, offering a hassle-free experience.

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

The lack of transparency around the SVC licensing makes it difficult to explain the costs to our clients.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate the Splunk Cloud Platform nine out of ten. The rating is not because of customer service. I am strictly looking at the product. I've worked with it for seven years. I've been on over 70 engagements with other customers over those years, and I rarely find a use case that a customer can't solve when it comes to an architect-type scenario, which is great. It's the same thing for data. For the most part, if you know you have data and can get it written down to a file, you can adjust it, which is phenomenal. The on-prem infrastructure consists of only 12 CPUs and 12 RAM if it's hardware, and then you double it if it's virtual. Overall that's very inexpensive to stand up major components. I'm not including storage or any other sizing that can get more complicated. Overall, it doesn't ask much from actual servers if you want to host it on-prem. Even managing it yourself on-prem, is not terrible. The commands are still there, the resources are there to do it yourself. You have community groups out there that help you with questions. There are tons of providers out there that can get you from point A to point B.

I have always used Splunk but I am open to learning Chronicle soon depending on industry trends. While I believe Splunk remains the top SIEM tool. According to Gartner, competitors like Azure and Oracle are emerging. However, I have not needed to look for other solutions.


    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.


    reviewer2491965

Excellent reporting and dashboarding, but it is expensive

  • June 04, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We mainly use it for the purposes of analyzing application logs to get a bit of understanding of what is normal application performance and then use that to highlight errors and inconsistencies when they occur.

How has it helped my organization?

Resilience is incredibly important to us. We are in the medical field. It is insurance. When people are using our service, we should be able to provide that. Having that resilience is key for us because we are helping people. The resilience that Splunk offers has been valuable in that regard. There is peace of mind for us and our customers.

We have multiple cloud vendors that are being utilized in Splunk. It has been useful. Splunk is able to handle a lot of things out of the box. There is a good bit of value in being able to make sense of multiple types of logs in one environment and being able to cross-reference them. It has just taken a lot of effort out of that.

We have integrated it with other tools. At the moment, it has been with Cribl as a pipeline tool so that we can be agnostic with Splunk in some regards. Cribl handles the logs being sent to Splunk, and then from there, if there is anywhere else where we want to send them, Cribl can handle that too. That has been our main integration. The ease of integration varies. Splunk offers out-of-the-box support for some tools and applications. Integration with them has been quite simple. Other things have been a bit more difficult. Integration can be more difficult if it does not have a Splunk base, but there is a good range of things that are available out of the box.

Its reporting has been excellent. We have integrated it with tools like ServiceNow, so we are able to create an instance for teams and integrate it with our NOC. The reporting has been incredibly valuable.

I come from a monitoring background. I knew from the get-go the value that we could get from Splunk, but we actually started to see its value once we started enforcing logging standards. It made it very easy for us to validate if something was or was not following our standards.

It has been great from the compliance perspective. It began to show value to some of our customers when they were able to search multiple applications because of the standards and compliance built into it.

It has had an impact on the decision-making processes in our organization. It has been mainly around compliance. Given it is a financial and medical sector, decisions have been made around what information we are storing in the logs and how we are managing the data that comes directly from Splunk.

It has been good for helping our organization access data for compliance and privacy regulations. It has been useful for pinpointing things. We are able to ensure that we are abiding by those standards. It has been incredibly useful in that space.

What is most valuable?

Dashboarding has been very powerful. I work with a lot of different customers, so being able to tailor the data for different customers has been valuable. I am able to make visuals and have reports where they can self-serve.

What needs improvement?

It would be nice to see more comparisons between Splunk and other log management tools. There are some legacy tools that people are often coming off. It will ease the transition if you are coming off a Windows LogViewer or any other logging tool. Splunk could offer more advice on how to transition into it or onboard it.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have not had any issues related to stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This is outside of my department, but it seems like it would be easy to scale up. However, there is a cost concern. That always seems to be the linchpin when people discuss Splunk. It comes at a cost.

When it comes to extensibility, they make it relatively simple, but it is an expensive tool. There are always going to be conversations that need to be had.

How are customer service and support?

The quality of the answer has been good. We have had to leverage the support only a small number of times. We found the actual portal to get support difficult. Some members of the team were not able to raise certain types of requests. However, when we got through to support, we had no issues.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

Prior to Splunk, we had a mixture of things. LogViewer and Graylog were used. Some folks had their logs locally. There was not one central system.

I was not directly involved in decision-making, but some of the things that I called out as useful were the analytical tools that Splunk offers. We can very quickly get to the root cause by using its query language. It provides a lot of power with little effort. That is what initially drew me to it.

Moving to Splunk allowed standardization. That is the key. It does not matter which part of the company you are from. Splunk has given us a mechanism to say that we expect the logs to look like this, and we all are going to abide by that. It has made standardization a lot easier. Previously, you would not know what you were getting while dealing with a logging problem.

How was the initial setup?

I was involved in its deployment only in a small cluster. I was mainly involved in setting up standards around logging. It was challenging. It was dense, but it was manageable. The feature set of Splunk allowed us to know what we could or could not do.

The main part of maintenance is the ingestion of new logs. New teams and applications get stood up every day, or a new cloud vendor comes in, so there is some maintenance involved there.

What about the implementation team?

We had Splunk technical support. We had a mixture of people from other departments. We had some folks from security, and we had some folks from operations. There were 15 regular faces and 2 Splunk contractors. We involved other teams on an ad hoc basis, but the core team had 15 people.

Overall, we had 20 to 30 people who directly worked with Splunk in some way or for some period of time. We also had to involve all of the teams to get their feedback and educate them on how to use Splunk.

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

I do not personally deal with that side, but from discussions, I know that it is one of the more expensive tools. I do not have anything to compare it with.

What other advice do I have?

New users should focus on the Splunk free courses. They are an excellent resource. If you are a customer, you should take up the search and reporting classes. That is probably going to be what 99% of people are using it for day to day. If you are a sysadmin user or someone setting up the instance, there are free classes for managing licenses and ingesting data. I would highly recommend them. The free classes are a great start, and if you think it would be valuable, take some of the paid classes as well. They are incredibly detailed.

When it comes to security, we definitely have a stricter attitude when things are going to the cloud because they are not fully in our control. Going to the cloud is always a little bit scary, but we have put in a refined approach for the data going into Splunk.

I have not made much use of federated search. I have come across it, but it is not something I have leveraged.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. What it does, it does well, but I do have qualms with it here and there. There are obvious features that are missing from time to time, but I am happy with what is there.


    Ian Gatundu

It improves our visibility and decision-making while helping us meet compliance standards

  • May 01, 2024
  • Review from a verified AWS customer

What is our primary use case?

We use Splunk Cloud Platform to ingest data from on-prem environments. Most people have Splunk Enterprise Security running on a server, but Splunk developed the Splunk Cloud Platform to ingest the data into the cloud. It works like Splunk Enterprise, but you must download apps to get some features. Our clients are mostly large enterprises in the financial industry.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud Platform improves our visibility and decision-making. Splunk helps us meet compliance standards. It's certified for multiple standards, such as PCI, GDPR, and HIPAA.

What is most valuable?

The Cloud Platform interface is cleaner than Splunk Enterprise's monitoring console. You can easily understand what's happening with your indexes. It's more refined than Splunk Enterprise's console, but they have the same feel and function.

It's easy to monitor multiple cloud environments because you can create custom dashboards for any use case you may have. It offers good visibility because it integrates with the ITSI app, providing a clear overview of your environment.

Integrating Splunk with other components on the cloud and network resources is effortless because it can collect data from various sources, including stored data from long-term storage.

Splunk's reporting offers a good visualization of your data. You can visualize the statistics based on your searches. It produces some helpful graphs that enable you to easily compare what's happening in your search. It's very comprehensive.

What needs improvement?

The only disadvantage of Splunk Cloud compared to Splunk Enterprise Security is that you only have two options for long-term storage: AWS S3 Buckets and GCP.

For how long have I used the solution?

We started using Splunk Cloud Platform in January 2024, so it has only been a few months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate Splunk Cloud 10 out of 10 for stability. Okay. Splunk is trying to push more people to the cloud, so they've made it really stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate Splunk 10 out of 10 for scalability. Scalability depends on whether your on-prem deployment is stable and deployed properly, as the Splunk Cloud Platform is an extension of Splunk Enterprise Security. It's easy to build another use case. or add servers, so I feel it's highly scalable.

How are customer service and support?

I rate Splunk support nine out of 10. We provide frontline support to our clients, but we periodically pass them on to the vendor.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We previously used IBM and Fortinet. We prefer Splunk because of its integration. You can integrate multiple solutions and customize it for your environment depending on your use case.

How was the initial setup?

Deploying Splunk Cloud Platform is pretty straightforward once you have the enterprise environment set up on-prem. You download the cloud app and extension. The deployment time depends on the size of your environment. It takes about a day for a small environment. A large-scale deployment can take up to a week if you have multiple tiers and a disaster-recovery site.

After deployment, the product requires continuous engagement with the Splunk team. You must continue to fine-tune it to ensure everything runs smoothly. However, there isn't much maintenance once it is tuned and deployed properly.

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

Splunk is a bit more expensive than some solutions, but customers can derive more value from it due to the features it has.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Splunk Cloud Platform nine out of 10. I recommend ingesting data into the cloud if possible. Even if you have an on-prem environment, it still helps to ingest data into the cloud.


    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.


    reviewer2272479

Integrates seamlessly, improves security posture, and provides visibility

  • April 17, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

To gain deep visibility into our entire cloud infrastructure, we deployed the Splunk Cloud Platform. This tool allows us to monitor, analyze, and investigate all aspects of our cloud environment.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud Platform integrates seamlessly with other systems, including Slack. This allows us to receive real-time alerts triggered within the tool. We can then analyze the output and take timely action to resolve the issue, ensuring continued security.

Splunk Cloud Platform improved our security posture. We could easily and efficiently obtain detailed analyses of any log, including UPC flow logs and others, promptly. The benefits of Splunk Cloud Platform were visible within two days.

Splunk Cloud Platform does a good job helping to maintain the complaints and privacy regulations within our infrastructure.

Splunk Cloud Platform excels at correlating data from a wide range of sources, including applications, websites, and servers. It efficiently handles the challenge of managing large volumes of data. This has secured our data and demonstrably improved our security posture.

What is most valuable?

The ability to correlate data and then present it in a meaningful and valuable way is crucial. Splunk offered this functionality, providing us with insights into threats, vulnerabilities, and all the identity information we fed into it. We sought a SIEM tool because we lacked a solution that could effectively analyze recent data. We needed a tool that could not only ingest our data but also correlate it and present it in an easily understandable format.

What needs improvement?

The cost of Splunk Cloud Platform is high and has room for improvement.

The current visuals on the dashboard could be more impactful.

For how long have I used the solution?

We conducted a POC of Splunk Cloud Platform 6 months back.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

During our POC, I did not encounter any stability issues with the Splunk Cloud Platform.

I would rate the resilience offered by Splunk Cloud Platform 8 out of 10.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate the scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform 9 out of 10.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was straightforward. Two people were required for the deployment.

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

The Splunk Cloud Platform is expensive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Splunk Cloud Platform performed well in the POC but the cost was higher than other tools.

We chose Palo Alto Networks over Splunk due to its combined advantage of cost-effectiveness and superior threat analysis capabilities.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform eight out of ten.


    ShubhamSharma6

Offers real-time monitoring, seamless integration, and improves security posture

  • March 20, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We leverage the Splunk Cloud Platform for log ingestion. This allows us to create dashboards, alerts, and reports from security and application log data.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud Platform offers real-time monitoring capabilities. It continuously ingests data from various sources, allowing us to track its flow. We can set up alerts to be notified of any anomalies, such as spikes in CPU or memory usage. These alerts can be configured to trigger email notifications, keeping us informed of potential issues. Additionally, Splunk Cloud Platform provides real-time dashboards that visualize the data as it's collected.

The federated search feature is useful for our cybersecurity team to complete their log analysis.

Splunk Cloud Platform offers seamless integration with other systems and applications. This is achieved through apps and add-ons developed by Splunk.

Splunk is a good reporting tool. It allows us to generate reports and attach them to emails in CSV or PDF format.

Splunk Cloud Platform has been instrumental in helping our cybersecurity team continuously monitor our data for anomalies and attacks. Its usefulness extends beyond security, though. Teams that ingest their logs into Splunk can monitor various services. If a service goes down, Splunk will trigger an alert. Splunk offers a robust monitoring suite, including dashboards, alerts, and reports. We can monitor system resources like memory and CPU consumption, application logs, Azure logs, and even Office 365 logs. For example, Splunk can reveal who sent emails, who participated in group email threads, and who added or removed members from Active Directory groups. This audit log capability allows us to investigate activity even months or years later. Splunk provides a wide range of use cases for our organization. We noticed these benefits as soon as Splunk started ingesting data.

Splunk has improved our decision-making process thanks to its clear dashboards that help us analyze information and make informed choices.

Splunk has been valuable as a compliance tool because it centralizes log ingestion. Any tool generating logs should be configured to send them to Splunk. This allows us to easily identify compliant applications – those whose logs are collected. Conversely, uncollected logs raise security concerns, as they represent a potential attack surface.

Splunk has significantly improved our organization's security posture. As a primary security tool, Splunk allows us to collect application logs, monitor activity for potential attacks, and conduct searches to identify suspicious behavior.

What is most valuable?

I like that Splunk Cloud Platform is managed by the vendor.

I like the Cloud monitoring console feature.

I like the support for all the apps and add-ons.

What needs improvement?

Splunk currently manages the components, which restricts our ability to access them directly. I would like to be granted read access to be able to review the components.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for one and a half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The Splunk Cloud Platform is stable as long as we perform proper maintenance to prevent bugs.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This system is very scalable. That means it can be easily adapted to accommodate our needs. We can increase the number of licenses we use, or add more resources like CPU and memory. We can also request additional components, such as adding more user accounts if our team grows from four to eight members. Overall, the scalability of this system is a major advantage.

I would rate the scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform nine out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

Splunk Cloud Platform offers excellent technical support that is both knowledgeable and responsive.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward but it takes a month or two to complete because of the applications that need to be onboarded.

We first need to calculate the amount of data we need to ingest. Then, based on that amount, we can plan how much data we need to onboard and what components we'll need.

Two experienced people were involved in the deployment.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was completed in-house.

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

Splunk Cloud Platform is more expensive than some of its competitors, but it offers a wider range of features.

What other advice do I have?

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

Splunk Cloud Platform is deployed in multiple locations.

Splunk Cloud Platform requires maintenance.

I recommend the Splunk Cloud Platform to others.

If you're using cloud services, Splunk Cloud Platform is a good option. It minimizes management overhead for you since Splunk handles the underlying infrastructure. Splunk Enterprise however requires more resources to manage.


    Dinesh Elumalai

Helps to improve our incident response time, provides multiple search modes, and is stable

  • March 19, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

My manager typically requests dashboards, alerts, and scheduled reports. Based on their specific requirements, I create reports and dashboards that visualize the data. We leverage the Splunk Cloud Platform to fulfill these needs.

Additionally, my teammates may approach me for insights. I analyze the data and provide them with these insights, which they then use for team meetings and further data analysis. This ultimately helps them make informed decisions.

How has it helped my organization?

Splunk Cloud Platform improves our incident response time by enabling the retrieval of large data volumes. The platform offers impressive search speeds, and we don't need additional SQL commands to optimize response times.

We saw immediate benefits from the Splunk Cloud Platform. Being able to access and analyze logs provided valuable insights.

Splunk's impact on decision-making is significant. I have access to all the data I need, and it is always reliable.

What is most valuable?

Splunk Cloud Platform's search modes are a powerful feature. There are 3 main modes: Fast, Verbose, and Smart. These modes allow us to customize our search based on our needs, which can significantly improve our response time.

What needs improvement?

Splunk Cloud Platform's dashboard could benefit from some improvements. While it functions adequately, it appears very minimalistic. It's built using a simple XML format, and while newer dashboard options have been released, it still lacks the visual capabilities of tools like Power BI and Tableau. While I understand these are different platforms, having a more powerful dashboard option for the Splunk Cloud Platform would be valuable.

There is a lack of comprehensive learning materials offered by Splunk to prepare for their certifications.

Splunk uses SQL as its search language. One challenge I've encountered is with subsearches used in joins. These subsearches can only handle a maximum of 50,000 entries. If our data set is larger, we won't be able to join it using a subsearch. This limitation has been a significant obstacle for me. I've searched the Splunk community forums, and even reached out to my colleagues and seniors for a solution, but haven't found a definitive answer yet.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for 2 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is reliable. In my experience working with virtual machines, any search lags are likely due to the VMs themselves, not Splunk.

I would rate the stability 8 out of 10.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Cloud Platform is horizontal scaling. So it is easy to scale based on the data we are using.

I would rate the scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform 9 out of 10.

How was the initial setup?

Deploying Splunk Cloud Platform requires knowledge of the Splunk architecture, the deployment server, and the components.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on investment.

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

The certifications are costly.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform 8 out of 10.

The maintenance required is minimal.

The resilience of Splunk is good.

I recommend the product.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a powerful tool for handling big data. To get the most out of it, understanding both the developer and administrator sides is beneficial. The platform offers broad compatibility with various technologies and allows for easy scaling to accommodate your needs.