I used Splunk Cloud Platform for fraud detection. The first thing is fraud detection, and the second thing is understanding data better because of the data visualization that it has. The display that it has compared to a simple type of visualization is much clearer compared to any kind of thing you might notice on a super dense Wireshark.

Data Visualization and IT Alerting and Incident Management are the main valuable features, primarily to get a better idea of what's going on.

When you do data reporting using Splunk Cloud Platform, because you have everything in front of you and it's so detailed and easy to read once you have the data. Another thing that makes it clear is because of the amount of evidence you have in front of you, the data is a lot more valuable. It's less of a human claim and more of evidence presented in front of you when you're trying to make any kind of claim on a certain thing going on.

I really do like about Splunk Cloud Platform the real-time alert where you can search for anything and the data is still stored there because at the end of the day, we are finally in a generation of cloud where everything is stored on a cloud platform to the point that you can search anything, as long as you do it in the appropriate way, you will find the results. It's in a good visual status with good visibility. I appreciate this feature.

To be honest, I don't think it's beginner-friendly. It takes time and multiple meetings to actually understand how to create different types of alerts or how to search for them. It's quite similar to how you might search on SQL, but that's asking another set of skills to have. I know there are tutorials on the website, but I feel if they rolled out more free courses on such things that provide a link to a free course for beginner training, I feel people would be interested in it.

I ended up getting access around three to four months back. I was part of a team that was using it, so we got on a call together while I was observing them and using it while giving my input for a project.

I haven't really faced much of it, but my usage was pretty less intensive, so I can't really talk about it for everyone. From my perspective, because of my light amount of research and light usage of it, I would say it's been pretty good. I haven't experienced any stability issues.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a good tool, but it's not the easiest to transfer between different teams because there's a lot of training involved in it. While I do the tool and I do feel it's really useful, if you ever notice in this current industry, people are wanting employees to learn Splunk Cloud Platform, or at least they want applicants who apply for a certain role to have known Splunk Cloud Platform because of not only how new it is or how recent it is after the cloud integration, but also just that it takes time to learn and takes time to be efficient at it.

When you work in a corporation, you have people dedicated just for that.

I've used Splunk Cloud Platform very briefly, not too much. I use ServiceNow, Confluence for documentation, and Keyfactor for generating certificates.

It's kind of hard for me to say because I came from a corporation where Splunk Cloud Platform was already a part of the user group where I got access to it, so I didn't have to do any of that.

Any IT person would rather use the command prompt. Using a simple command prompt and trying to see based on the elevated access they have, you can always check what's going on. Wireshark itself is a really good tool and a really good alternative to have any kind of packet capture and read through the data to understand what's going on.

Splunk Cloud Platform is different because it offers real-time alert. Wireshark is something that you have to let things be and then later catch and see, while Splunk Cloud Platform updates on its own. It has a lot better visuals overall.

Regarding whether Splunk Cloud Platform's ingest and visualization features have helped improve data reporting and the overall alerting mechanisms, I haven't had the chance to use it for myself, but from the time when I was researching them for the project that I was working on, it seemed to be really effective in at least the fraud department of the team to understand any type of price alerts when something is going on.

Regarding how easy or difficult it was for me to learn how to use it, I would say on a scale of easy with one being the easiest and ten being the hardest, I would say it was around a four or five. I've used other tools before, and I've used other things such as Wireshark and some others a lot before, so I had a much better grasp than a lot of beginners might have. Recently in a meeting where we were trying to teach a beginner about this, the main person who uses it had to go through multiple rounds of meetings to show them how to use it. While watching that, I realized the gap in knowledge between someone who's in IT for years versus someone who's trying to be more hands-on but is unfamiliar with the tool.

We use Splunk Cloud Platform for security and want to implement it as a SIEM solution. We also want to replace our old legacy SIEM solution because we are adopting a cloud solution instead of an on-premises solution. Another use case is that we want to use this tool in our managed service offering. We do not use the solution to resell licenses to our customers, but rather to provide services to them. We appreciate the powerful integration that Splunk Cloud Platform offers, making it easy to integrate with any sources and any data. It is able to handle data that resides in an S3 bucket or elsewhere, not just ingested directly into the SIEM itself. We are also looking at Splunk Cloud Platform's strategy, which is very interesting because of the integration they will have regarding Agentic AI and automation. A unique solution for orchestration and automation, called SOAR in cybersecurity, combined with SIEM in a unique platform is a very interesting strategy from our point of view.

It is Enterprise Security in the cloud. This is a cloud solution.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a very mature solution and an enterprise-grade solution that brings the work we have to do with customers to an enterprise-grade level. It is something that we can manage from a single pane, and it is quite easy to deploy. I see a benefit that is not strictly related to the features that Splunk Cloud Platform offers, but it depends on the company belonging to Cisco now because we are a Cisco partner and Splunk Cloud Platform is a pillar, a vertical technology in the security area of the partnership. The benefit of partnering with Splunk Cloud Platform falls into the Cisco partnership and the benefits we can have in this important partnership we have as a company.

Compared to my previous situation, the first benefit of this solution is the speed and the effort reduction in terms of onboarding new customers and maintaining the entire platform. I will not have any more effort for system upgrades and infrastructure maintenance. This is one of the biggest benefits I can have from the solution. I save a lot of money because I do not have to spend resources anymore to maintain and operate the infrastructure and the systems.

I think it is really effective, and we are still at the beginning. The capability to search for insights is very powerful and also supported by AI and machine learning. The capabilities are increasing day by day, and new features are being released and will be released soon.

I am not able to answer right now, but I am confident they will be able to predict a trend because they promise they are able to do this using machine learning algorithms and Agentic AI features. They say they will be able to predict the behavior of your network or your infrastructure. I am really confident about this, and I hope it will be true because I need this.

There is something that they say will be improved, and I am still waiting for it. This is the Agentic AI elements inside the platform that I mentioned before. There is something present today, but the full feature is not released yet. From my point of view, it is a bit late. It is okay for me because we are adopting it and we can work on this, and it is acceptable for my timing. However, from a market perspective, they are a bit late. Competitors in some cases are earlier adopters. But I am sure they will release a very powerful tool, as per the Cisco approach. They want to win when they start doing something, and I am confident they will release a very powerful tool.

I have been working with it for one month.

It is still a bit early to answer. We have just seen it on paper, and we have to check it.

In my previous experience, I had enterprise security, but on-premises a few years ago, three years ago. It was integrated with another SOAR from another vendor.

It is something that we can manage from a single pane. It is quite easy to deploy.

Compared to my situation, it does not have any meaning because I have something legacy now. However, it is a good price on the market. It depends because if you look at the list price, it is a bit expensive from my point of view. But once you are in the partnership with Splunk Cloud Platform and with Cisco, you can have good discounts, you can make the deal and discuss, and they are willing to help you as a partner in finding the solution and finding your target. So it is good from my point of view. But if you look at the list price, it is expensive.

We evaluated QRadar, FortiSIEM, and Palo Alto SIEM. We chose Splunk Cloud Platform because of a combination of different aspects, not just for price or features. It is the whole combination of the features, the benefits, the cost, the partnership, and there is no one aspect leading the choice. It is a mix and a combination.

Today, we are working with the SIEM solution, which is quite a legacy term. Saying SIEM is not really effective. It is the Enterprise Security solution, and we are now in the process to implement it. We are adopting the solution and are at the beginning. We have studied a lot, we are training people, and we are changing and modifying our process as per what the technology allows us to do. We are also evaluating the observability solution. We are working on two different paths, and one is at a more mature stage, while the other one is at an evaluation stage.

We are setting up alerts as expected.

We are integrating Splunk Cloud Platform SIEM solution with our SOAR solution, which is today from another vendor and not Splunk Cloud Platform. Then we will see tomorrow what we want to do if we want to use the unique platform, the unique Splunk Cloud Platform with SOAR, Agentic AI, SOC automation, and everything, or if we want to keep using our actual SOAR. We are integrating Splunk Cloud Platform with this SOAR.

My recommendation is to look at the future and look at the strategy. Do not look at the features today but look at the features tomorrow and not just at the technical features but at the whole strategy to integrate in one single platform all the capabilities that a SIEM solution or a log gathering solution might have. Putting together orchestration, observability, security, this kind of strategy is what an integrator should evaluate in my opinion.

I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

The main use cases for Splunk Cloud Platform include data collection, parsing activities, use case building, data ingestion, and creating dashboards and reports. My clients use it for similar purposes.

The best thing about Splunk Cloud Platform is that you can bring any data and store it in one place. You can build meaningful insights from it, have the same data ingested, create beautiful insights, have alerting done on it, and have dashboards and reports built on top of it.

Splunk Cloud Platform's ingest and visualization features do not bind you with a limitation in the volume you want to ingest. Since we are using the compute-based licensing feature of Splunk Cloud Platform, there is no limitation to the volume of data we ingest on the platform. All Splunk Cloud Platform instances are also Smart Store supported, so that eases storage utilization concerns.

One of the best advantages of using Splunk Cloud Platform is that there are lots of proactive alert notifications from Splunk support if anything goes down on the infrastructure end or if there is anything wrong with your environment. Splunk support is on top of things, notifying you beforehand if something is going wrong and that their team is already aware and working on a fix.

I don't see any new requirements in terms of improvements for Splunk Cloud Platform at this time. Splunk's dashboarding, reporting, and visualizations are evolving at a larger scale with the new Splunk Dashboard Studio in place. There were some limitations with the classic dashboard where you had to be aware of different HTML, CSS, and custom JavaScript for better visualizations. That's being migrated towards Splunk Dashboard Studio, which is evolving at a great pace, providing similar functionalities. I have not faced any current challenges regarding Splunk Cloud Platform's limitations. I still think, however, that better configuration and customization options for workload management could be enhanced, but that applies to Splunk Enterprise as well. It's just my understanding and what I foresee, but I'm not sure if it will be a priority right now, as even without workload management, a lot can be done, and the product team might have a different roadmap.

I have been working with Splunk Cloud Platform for almost six years.

My feedback remains that you have your designated account manager who helps navigate all the cases. Sometimes, the support team may not be fully knowledgeable about the challenge you face, but through their internal escalation structure, they manage to find viable solutions sooner or later or provide updates on when issues will be fixed. I think their support is pretty good on that part.

The best thing about the initial setup process of Splunk Cloud Platform is that you don't have to deploy your own Splunk Cloud Platform deployment; Splunk handles it for you. For the on-premises setup, you do need the initial configuration for end devices to send logs to Splunk Cloud Platform, but it's straightforward. It's just one package that you install on your end device, and after restarting, everything is sorted. There is no hassle in configuring Splunk Cloud Platform or getting on-premises devices to send data to it.

We do use Splunk Cloud Platform's alerting mechanism. We have set up hundreds and thousands of alerts for different use cases. For example, if any of the data sources stop the ingestion or the volume has been relatively quite down, we have set up alerting for that. It creates a ServiceNow incident that falls under our team's responsibility and sends an email as a notification that this alert has been triggered, such as when XYZ feed has gone down or the data from XYZ feed has decreased up to 80% or 70%, whatever the threshold set. We definitely use all the different alerting mechanisms and alert actions provided by Splunk Cloud Platform.

Whenever we see a situation where we don't want to be reactive, we attempt to do a predictive analysis of the data ingested in our Splunk Cloud Platform. This analysis depends on an alert-to-alert basis. For instance, when talking about a data source going down, if the situation arises, we should be triggered at a threshold of around 80% decrease. In that situation, we keep a buffer of 10% and alert ourselves to notify at a 70% decrease in the feed so that we can take preemptive measures to ensure that the feed comes back online before the situation escalates.

In terms of machine learning, we are using the Splunk-supported machine learning toolkit that also has new features for artificial intelligence. We do use them for outlier detection and predictive analysis in terms of different alerting we have enabled in our environment.

To predict trends in our data, the example I shared previously involves understanding if the volume is going down or not. We do this using the machine learning toolkit itself. We have our data ingested into Splunk Cloud Platform, and each index and source type has some dedicated volume getting ingested daily. We create an average of the total volume ingested over the past 60 days, 45 days, and 90 days, and then we identify the volume ingested yesterday. We compare it with the average of the last 45 days and try to detect any deviation. All of this is part of the machine learning toolkit application itself. That's how predictive analysis and outlier detection work, and we're using that in our daily operations as well.

With different vendors, there is no problem having Splunk Cloud Platform integrated with them. For example, we already have our alerting enabled so that whenever any alert gets triggered, an incident is created in ServiceNow. I have also worked on integrating Jira and other different Atlassian products with Splunk Cloud Platform. It's user-friendly and straightforward to integrate Splunk Cloud Platform with different vendors without much issue.

For any organizations looking to configure Splunk Cloud Platform, I believe it's a simple process. It's just important to stick to the fundamentals and understand how Splunk Cloud Platform operates. The documentation is quite clear. One notable advantage of Splunk Cloud Platform is the Ingest Processor and Edge Processor, which help optimize data before feeding into Splunk Cloud Platform. We've seen a reduction of around 40% to 60% in the total volume ingested using efficient data pipelines. We provide services for optimizing data pipelines and feeds, and those tools can be quite helpful. But if you're looking to configure Splunk Cloud Platform for on-premises servers, downloading the universal forwarder package from the Splunk Cloud Platform search head is all you need.

I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

Splunk Cloud Platform is used as a way for companies to enhance their cybersecurity and ensure security. In cybersecurity, it is important to protect against all malwares, and the platform is effective in searching vulnerabilities or searching threats.

Splunk Cloud Platform's ingest and visualization features help with data reporting. The platform's alerting mechanism is valuable, as there is software that makes alarms in case of attacks. Splunk Cloud Platform is used as a way for companies to enhance their cybersecurity as a question of security to ensure the security.

I think that Splunk Cloud Platform is good, and I rate it seven or eight.

We have worked with Splunk Cloud Platform for approximately three years. We have also been working with Splunk Observability Cloud for approximately three years.

Splunk Cloud Platform is a good platform for us.

The technical support of Splunk is good as well, and they are helpful.

Implementation has some benefit for the company.

We think that the price of the product is quite reasonable.

We have clients that use Splunk, but we do not use Splunk ourselves. As a person with deployment experience, I find it difficult to answer the question about implementation because we are obliged to have a platform. There are many platforms, and the implementation is not simple, but we have no special difficulties with Splunk. We think that integration of Splunk Cloud Platform with third-party tools is easy to implement.

My major use case for Splunk Cloud Platform is for SOC, SIEM mostly.

What I like about Splunk Cloud Platform is the easy reading of the dashboards and finding the data, which brought me the biggest benefits.

The alerting mechanism in Splunk Cloud Platform is customizable, so we could adapt it to our needs and assign the right priorities and based on this, define the action.

Visualization features and ingesting in Splunk Cloud Platform helped to improve my data reporting, but that was also a different team that was providing the log ingestion.

Other features that were really great in Splunk Cloud Platform include real-life monitoring, so we could have logs right away, and parsing was fine, so when it was correctly ingested and Splunk Cloud Platform parsed it correctly, then we had no issues with receiving the correct alerts.

Splunk Cloud Platform could improve in how quickly it reacts to users reporting issues.

Splunk Cloud Platform can be complex depending on the log source in terms of deployment.

I used Splunk Cloud Platform for seven years.

Splunk Cloud Platform was stable, and I did not see any performance issues or downtime, although it happened; the issue was that we had to really fine-tune the log quality so that it would not be ingested too much and handled for nothing.

Regarding the scalability of Splunk Cloud Platform, I would say it is scalable, but maybe the pricing may affect the scalability because it may not be that beneficial to onboard too many log sources if they generate too many false positives and then you reach over the limit of the license.

I would rate the technical support for Splunk Cloud Platform probably a three, because there was some support, but I remember that we were using our proxy company to submit it for us because they were bigger and maybe more convincing to Splunk.

The biggest issue during deployment of Splunk Cloud Platform was correct log parsing.

I can describe the impact of integration with third-party solutions in Splunk Cloud Platform as limited experience since I was the only one on the receiving end of it, and I was not integrating it with any solutions or with any other vendors; we also had the company who was supporting us in the configuration part, so we didn't even have to do it fully by ourselves.

I don't see ROI with Splunk Cloud Platform, such as time saving or money saving because I'm security operations, so I don't think in management terms.

I have about the same amount of experience in this domain with SOC solutions, as I haven't worked with SOC SIEM solutions such as Splunk Cloud Platform before, so it's the same. My overall review rating for Splunk Cloud Platform is 8.

Currently, I am working with Splunk Cloud Platform and other things for my clients.

I have been working with Splunk Cloud Platform for around 2 years now while integrating it.

What I appreciate about Splunk Cloud Platform is that it's an AI-driven SIEM platform, and for data fusion stock, we require Splunk Cloud Platform because none other than Splunk Cloud Platform can have this data-driven stock implemented; it allows you to get into the data repository.

The real-time search capability of this product enhances operational decision-making, and it's very convincing; this aspect is very convincing from Splunk Cloud Platform's side.

The disadvantage of Splunk Cloud Platform is that its integration process should be improved.

The challenges I have encountered while integrating Splunk Cloud Platform include that integration is a bit difficult due to the coding required for the integrations.

I have been working with Splunk Cloud Platform for around 2 years now while integrating it.

I would say that it was a bit difficult to deploy Splunk Cloud Platform; the user interface is easy, but deployment is difficult because it needs coding to integrate things.

I think it's a scalable solution; it's pretty much scalable.

I can rate the technical support of Splunk Cloud Platform as eight; they are quite helpful.

We are system integrators, but the client chose another vendor instead of NNTT.

The deployment took around 3 to 4 months.

Three people took part in deployment from my side.

It was indeed a huge deployment; it was one of the banks in Pakistan, so we required three resources to get it done.

Splunk Cloud Platform has impacted operational costs; it's a bit expensive, but it provides value for money.

If I were to rate the price for the product from 1 to 10, I would rate it nine.

I am currently working with the solution, but I need to know from which NNTT.

The interface is okay; its interface is good, and user interface is good.

I would recommend Splunk Cloud Platform to other users and organizations because it adds value to the organization; you can do different things with it because it's a pure analytical tool, not only a SIEM tool.

I am mostly focused on Splunk Cloud Platform because I chose this vendor due to the feature set that was offered by Splunk Cloud Platform; it was not being offered by any other vendor.

Splunk Cloud Platform is the vendor I am referring to, not NNTT.

Maintenance for Splunk Cloud Platform has been done manually, not automatically.

Usually, one person takes part in maintenance.

Regarding the number of users for Splunk Cloud Platform, it involves discussing the number of organizations or the number of people working in those organizations.

In general, I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a nine.

I use the Splunk Cloud Platform for security monitoring. My company is a technology company with over 40,000 employees.

The Splunk Cloud Platform offers easy data ingestion and a user-friendly interface for product teams, particularly for straightforward log shipping.

Splunk Cloud Platform offers easy integration due to its robust and well-documented APIs. These allow seamless integration into existing pipelines and other products and the flexibility to create custom integrations as needed.

Splunk Cloud Platform helps access data for compliance and privacy regulations. While some manual work remains, it assists with meeting compliance and regulatory requirements, especially regarding logging, reporting, and monitoring, solidifying its position as the industry standard.

The most valuable feature of Splunk Cloud Platform is its robustness and ability to ingest logs.

Splunk Cloud Platform needs improvement in its security offerings, specifically in cybersecurity. It has not kept pace with competitors over recent years, and integration with the Cisco ecosystem after Cisco's acquisition of Splunk has also been slow. The product should incorporate more readily available features, especially in security monitoring.

The federated search feature is costly.

Extracting meaningful insights beyond essential log data proves challenging due to the product's reliance on manual processes. Users must manually configure detections, develop logic for insights, and manage dashboards. While the product boasts numerous out-of-the-box capabilities, these often require extensive modification to align with specific user needs, limiting their practical applicability.

Splunk Cloud Platform doesn't inherently provide visibility as a standalone product. It's a platform for building custom visibility solutions. We need to feed it data and then write logic to define what insights we want to extract. While pre-built solutions might be available in the marketplace, Splunk doesn't offer out-of-the-box visibility. If we know our requirements, we can utilize code and research to create custom dashboards, but it requires effort and expertise.

The pre-built reports in Splunk Cloud Platform are generic and require manual adjustments to extract specific, granular information, which requires the user to be knowledgeable.

I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for over ten years.

The customer service and support for Splunk Cloud Platform are mediocre and often hit or miss. Premium support is costly and may not always provide a satisfactory experience, as even the support engineers can sometimes be stumped.

The initial setup of the Splunk Cloud Platform is straightforward. Professional services are available to assist in deployment, including setting up Splunk forwarders and building data models. With adequate support, full deployment can be efficiently achieved.

Full deployment is a lengthy process, but achieving 50 percent deployment can be achieved within one to two quarters.

Deploying Splunk Cloud may require different resources depending on the size of the data ingested daily. Two to three people may be sufficient for smaller terabyte ingestion, whereas a team of four to five might be needed for larger ingestion.

The return on investment with Splunk Cloud Platform has been poor. There is a significant possibility we will be replacing it in the next quarter or two.

Splunk Cloud is considered too expensive, with its two product offerings both being costly. I would rate the cost an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly.

Splunk Cloud Platform is not impacting a lot of decisions. But if we write very good reports and dashboards, then we can derive insights from them for leadership to make concrete decisions on. So we have to do the legwork to get that output.

While Splunk Cloud Platform may not be a significant factor in decision-making, generating high-quality reports and dashboards can provide valuable insights for leadership to take concrete action. However, we must dedicate ourselves to the necessary work to produce those impactful outputs.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a five out of ten due to its gradual decline over the last few years. While I would have rated it an eight out of ten four years ago, its performance and features have deteriorated, leading to my current lower rating.

My primary use case is for monitoring security logs and system logs. Apart from that, we create monitoring alerts and dashboards.

We also use it for Splunk application configuration, troubleshooting, and server patching. We have many other operations.

Integration with other systems and applications in the environment is easy. For example, we have Fortinet analyzer. We have to pull the logs from network devices into Splunk. We use Cribl pipeline.

For Cribl pipeline, we get that data to the Splunk syslog servers. From Splunk syslog servers, we're getting it into the indexes.

According to the license, suppose we have to onboard thousands of servers. Suppose a scenario, for thousands of servers, the user or client requires only specific events. So for that, we use props and cons and regex for specific events. And only specific events will be calculated in the license. That will consume the license also.

The incident response time depends on the query and alert configuration, and also on the environment and how the logs are streamed. By analyzing these factors, it takes a maximum of one to two days for one incident.

Alert scheduling, dashboard creation, and log monitoring are the most valuable features.

Federated search depends on the data we pull. We have three types of searches. We use federated search for long-running queries.

We have, like, 20% of MacBook Cloud environment. It is easy to monitor multiple cloud environments, but there are some onboarding challenges. We are onboarding from the back end and also using Hacktoken. Apart from that, we get data to Splunk using Cripple pipelines from Syslog servers.

Reporting is like this: if critical data is used by the client, we send it to the data user according to the schedule.

For log monitoring, we can definitely suggest Splunk is a good tool. And it helps with decision making processes.

For monitoring security logs, it's the best tool.

I use Splunk Cloud. Previously, I used Splunk Enterprise, but after that, we migrated to Splunk Cloud.

I have been using Splunk Cloud for more than three years.

It is a stable product. Right now, we are migrating from Datadog to Splunk, so I guess that's why Splunk is better than other tools.

It's deployed across multiple locations.

It does require maintenance. It depends on what Splunk vendor is being used.

The pricing depends on the logs and how many logs we monitor. On a daily basis, it depends on the events. Those licenses will be calculated in Splunk Cloud.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten, with ten being best.

All the features for log monitoring, security, alerting, indexing of the data, parsing of the data are good. That feature makes sense and is helpful to everyone.

I would recommend it to others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I rate Splunk Cloud seven out of 10 for stability.

I rate Splunk Cloud eight out of 10 for scalability.

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

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.

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.

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.

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