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Splunk Cloud [Private Offer Only]

Carahsoft Technology Corp.

Reviews from AWS customer

23 AWS reviews

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4-star reviews ( Show all reviews )

    reviewer2500032

Saves millions a year and gets the required data in faster

  • June 13, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We pull in information from cloud resources like AWS and Azure, and we just recently got into GCP. Just pulling data directly from there was a little bit easier than trying to do it from on-prem. We can now do that a little easily.

We have a lot of cases where business units that were not even in Splunk got compromised for whatever reason. We could get security logs from those and import them directly, more quickly, and easily with Splunk Cloud. We have had several use cases directly with that. In our company, we do not monitor logs from laptops. We have had issues with users getting compromised on our laptops. We could get the data logs from there.

I also use it to monitor my universal forwarders so that I can see what versions they are on. We had CVEs coming out on the universal forwarders. We had to replace them. I have dashboards to keep track of our progress as we are migrating and upgrading all those agents.

The biggest, heaviest use of Splunk Cloud Platform for us right now is people going and looking at our firewall logs to find the denies and to find out which firewall is being blocked. We are a medium-sized company. We are so segmented with all the PCI and SOC 2 compliance audits that we have. We have segmented everything. We have so many firewalls that there is always another firewall down the line that is blocking. The firewall team is in there every day and all day long, and then we have other teams that go in there to see if the issue that they are having with their app is a firewall issue or not.

How has it helped my organization?

I have done health checks several times now, and those have been very valuable in getting more information about what is going on in my platform. There are also recommendations on what is going on in my environment. Sometimes when it says something, I already know that, and when I explain why, it knows that I am aware of it. It knows that it has to be that way for compliance reasons or there are certain break glass accounts that we have to have in case our Okta is offline. It points out things like that.

One of the things we had to do was find out how much Splunk on-prem was costing us because we had so many different groups. We had the storage group, and then we had the hardware team. The indexers and the search heads were physicals. That was being handled by the data center teams, which bought all the hardware, and then we had the virtual servers. Everything else was virtual. That was still owned by us, which is fine, but then we had storage, so we did not know the full cost. As I am trying to migrate from one data center to another, the teams do not want to buy. They do not want to migrate hardware. They want to buy new hardware, which, of course, is a cost to their department. They are a group but not our group, so we wanted to go to Splunk Cloud. We had to first find out how much the total cost of Splunk was for our company so that we could show that moving to Splunk Cloud was going to save the company money, which it did. It saved at least a million dollars a year. We are oversized in some areas, and we are running pretty close in the other areas. It is saving us money in the long term.

We monitor multiple cloud environments. We have data in multiple clouds. We have AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as our own on-premise that is technically a cloud or our own personal private cloud. We are a cloud customer for our clients. We are in four different environments. It has been fairly simple to monitor multiple cloud environments using Splunk Cloud Platform. The documentation and the TAs have been updated and tell you which piece is what. You see no difference between a client ID, tenant ID, a secret, a key, and the tokens. That has been very handy. We had an incident where there was an S3 bucket somewhere, and one of our teams was unable to communicate with the Cloud Infrastructure team. It was set up as a file share only instead of another type, which was not available in the TA. That was not an option, so that became a challenge. We had to work with them, and they basically had to rebuild that bucket because you cannot just add it as a function to that bucket. They made a whole new bucket and put the logs in there. That was a challenge, but other than that, it has been very smooth and easy. We have had teams that had incidents. They took all the data and put it into an S3 bucket, and it took that right in.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped reduce our mean time to resolve because they can get the data in faster. I have even automated things. We have a Python script. I can take CSV files and send them to the endpoint and just pop them with all the data they need to do their evaluations, such as if they went to bad sites. They can see all that information. I can get that in quickly. With on-prem, I could do that, but it had to run through so many hoops because of the PCI requirements that our company has. It is still PCI-compliant, but it is just so much easier to work with. I know we have had mean times of 60 days. We are reducing it to one or two weeks now, so it is getting a lot better.

Splunk Cloud Platform has helped improve our organization’s business resilience. That was something with which I have had issues with the on-prem. I have had issues with an index. It could be a hardware issue, a software issue, or an OS issue. By having Splunk Cloud Platform, everything has been a lot more stable. I do not have as many worries or problems there. I have fewer things. I can even troubleshoot on my side if it is a heavy forwarder. That is on me, but there are a whole lot fewer things to look at and worry about. It took away a lot of headaches.

In terms of Splunk’s ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time, real-time is a touchy word because being real-time means you are indexing directly. There are a few people in my company who have or are allowed real-time access, but it is pretty close. It is pretty much within seconds. You have access to all that data, so it has been handy. I had to explain to the teams how searches work in the background. If you are running a search every 5 minutes, it sounds great, but if there is any kind of delay in the data, you can miss something, so 15 minutes is a little better, but still, you are seeing things within minutes and getting alert about them. We connect to Microsoft Teams and Slack. We are sending things to ServiceNow for the monitoring team. It is 24/7, so if they need something to watch 24/7, there is a group. They are now tied into ServiceNow, so they can get all that data right there in one place for that team, pulling it from different monitoring tools besides Splunk. It is handy to be able to just pop it all in there quickly.

The firewall stuff is huge. Everybody is in there. All day long, people are hitting that dashboard searching for firewall blocks or denies. Sometimes, they access it just to see if it is connecting because we do drop a lot of data. A great thing about Splunk is that we can drop some of the data if we need to when it is ingesting. We do not keep all the connects, but we can see whenever a connection is closed. We can see that the connection had been made successfully and then closed. We are able to see that one way or the other. We can see whether things are being blocked or it is able to connect. That information is handy now. We have a complex network, and there are times when we have routing issues. We can see that there is no route in the logs and say that it is a routing issue. They then bring the network team. The firewall is the front point for all that, but the network team has to work closely.

What is most valuable?

Just the fact that it is cloud-based is valuable. We are still on the classic one. I am waiting for the VE to come to the GCP. That is where our stack is. It is in GCP. They say it is coming somewhat soon. We will see when that is.

There is the flexibility of not having to manage all the indexes and searches myself. I was doing that with on-prem before. That was quite a bit of work. When you have an issue with an upgrade, you have to upgrade all of that. They are handling that on the backend now. I still have to do my heavy forwarders and my deployment servers, but it is a much lighter load for me on my end as an admin.

What needs improvement?

For one of the areas I am working on right now, they did an update this week which gave me back something. It was a feature that I have been using, but they took it away last conference. They just gave it back to me now, and I had to go through the setup again to make it work with our Okta. We have had issues with the maintenance windows. Sometimes I get informed about those at the last minute. They are getting better about informing us when they are going to do maintenance, but there were times when they did maintenance, and then I came in the next day and something was broken. They have gotten a lot better about that. I am still working on a couple of issues. They have cases open for them, so they know about them. They are working on them. The communication is getting better. That was an area that had a lot of feedback. I can see that they are accepting the feedback and taking it to heart, which is great.

Some of the Victoria Experience that was rolled out is not yet fully everywhere.

The AI assistant is going to be good, but we are on GCP, so I am worried about how fast it is going to get rolled out and if it is going to be nine months late for the GCP customers or not. That would be a bad thing because that would put a black eye on the whole marketing part of that. The same thing is with the Victoria Experience. They already have a black eye on that one. It has been two years since it came out and they still do not have it on GCP, so they need to get that fixed up. I would like to see the AI assistant feature as it rolls out. That helps with me wanting to roll out ITSI and the O11y suite with them bringing that AI assistant over there. I have teams right now that hit me up. They have been using some kind of AI assistant. We have Microsoft CoPilot. It is allowed in our company now. They tell us not to use ChatGPT right now because it is not approved for whatever reason. I have had some of our people hit me up who are not Splunk users but they have access to some dashboards and want to do a little bit of searching. If they use generic AI to find out how to do a generic Splunk search, it is not going to work in my environment at all. They will wonder why this is not working. That is because the AI does not know our environment. It will be handy to have an AI assistant that knows our environment.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been quite stable. The fact that we are on GCP has been causing some pain. That is the only thing.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

That has been very nice. When we renewed our last contract, we had seen that our long-term storage or archive storage was not enough, so we had increased it. It is nice to have enough visibility. It tells you that you are getting close to over or you are over, so you can see where you are. The new improved monitoring console that just came out has more information in there for that. That to me is even more valuable, so I am happy to see the new console they have released.

How are customer service and support?

For the most part, their technical support has been pretty handy. Sometimes you get someone a little bit newer, and they may ask some basic questions because they do not know our knowledge level. If we are putting a case in, we have already tested steps a, b, and c. We have already tested all those, and we already know. We would not put the case in otherwise. However, in some of the cases, you get in there, and they immediately bump it up to the next level. They can recognize and see quickly that it is a problem, and they are able to bump it up. I like the fact that they are able to do that somewhat quickly and escalate things a little faster than in the past when we were on-prem. With us being on Splunk Cloud, they are able to see the issues faster and verify them faster. I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten. They are doing pretty well.

When it comes to customer service, the only issue we have seen is that they changed the sales team three times in the last two years. That has been frustrating. I meet them all at Splunk conferences, and I feel like half the Splunk people there know who I am because they have been our support team for some reason or another. Their teams are great, but it takes time. There is a transition time for them to get everything moved from one person to another because they have to finish up the team that they were with while adding in the new team that they are moving to. I understand that it takes time, but it is getting frustrating on our side. They can give us at least a year before they switch the team again.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We had used Enterprise Security before, but one team was using Splunk core with their own built-up dashboards and other things. They were not using the Enterprise Security pieces and parts specific to that, so we decided to not use that temporarily, but it might return because whatever they have switched to is not particularly helpful. It is not as helpful as we were hoping.

How was the initial setup?

We worked with a third-party provider. We were in a bit of a hurry to get it done. We were able to do it quickly.

Because we were getting GCP, we were getting help from Google, and they ended up paying for the service provider who was helping us migrate. We paid for it upfront, but then Google paid it back to us as a part of the contract we had with them. The good news was that we were able to get it done quickly, but it was quite a rush to do that. It went fairly smoothly. There were a few blocks, but we were able to migrate.

It took us a full six months to move from on-prem to cloud. Moving the data took me a couple of days, but getting everything fully migrated and tested and making sure that all the teams were fully in there took a full six months, which for our company was pretty much lightning speed. It normally takes two to three years or something like that.

What about the implementation team?

We had a Splunk partner called TekStream.

What was our ROI?

We are seeing cost efficiencies with the move from on-prem to the cloud. We found out how much on-prem was costing us. It is not just the cost of the storage or the hardware. There is also the cost of the time of those people who do the setups of all that. We definitely saved quite a bit of money.

We have greatly seen an ROI. We have been able to add more and more data that we were dropping before because we did not have the license. We started opening that up. We have some more events from Windows event logs and some more things related to the firewall. We do not have to drop all that. We can bring some of that in now.

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

We were on ingest. We were on-prem, and when we switched to the cloud, we went to an SVC model, and that has been a huge help. We are now able to ingest more data than before. I was known as Doctor No because I had to say no so many times because we were on an ingest model and we were maxed out. I am not that way anymore. A lot of times, our use cases are one-shot because security needs the data. With our SVC model, we do not worry about it as much. I know that it is saving us huge amounts of money because of the SVC model.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Unfortunately, we did not evaluate any other tools, and that was the issue. We were handed down a tool to use, and that is something that our team did not like, and we have made that very clear. That is why we say that Enterprise Security might come back. We will see.

What other advice do I have?

End-to-end visibility is something that we are working on. I have talked with the Gigamon vendor. We have Gigamon to do packet captures, but we want the metadata from that to come into Splunk so that we have longer retention times at least on some of that metadata. We do not necessarily have the package, and that is okay, but we can at least see the trending of some of the things a little bit longer than we are currently. It gives more visibility to more teams. I have 350 users in my Splunk Cloud Platform. On the network side, we have the network teams with 20 to 30 people looking at things over there, so it gives visibility into more of the organization. That is one of the big benefits. We can see the network layer and then all the way up to the App layer. When we want to get the O11y suite, we already have AppDynamics. We will be integrating that pretty soon. It will probably be the next month when we get that integrated in. The other piece is going to be getting the network cleared up. We are also seeing issues with GCP with some applications that we have migrated there. We will be able to see whether it is a slowdown in the cloud provider or not. Having this visibility and the end-to-end data and being able to correlate it is pretty helpful.

Splunk's unified platform can help consolidate networking, security, and IT observability tools. That is what we are working towards, and that is exactly what we are hoping for. I am hoping to bring in ITSI and the O11y suite. We already have AppDynamics. We are going to be able to pull that in which will start helping with that full visibility, but to fully integrate that, I am going to bring the O11y suite as well because eventually, I see AppDynamics moving in that direction.

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform a nine out of ten because it is very good. It is pretty stable.


    Stanley Kmiec

Improves availability and makes infrastructure administration easy

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

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Splunk Cloud Platform for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

We were using on-prem Splunk.

How was the initial setup?

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

We are using AWS. It is managed by Splunk.

What about the implementation team?

We had Aquila as our partner for help with implementation.

What was our ROI?

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

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

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

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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


    reviewer2200662

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

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

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

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

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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

The product's deployment phase was easy.

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

What about the implementation team?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon Web Services (AWS)


    reviewer1901115

Has good analysis and visualization features and saves costs and time

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

What is our primary use case?

We use the Splunk Cloud Platform to log all the network devices, whether it's switches, routers, firewalls, wireless controllers, wireless access points, and applications such as MuleSoft or Adobe AEM. 

How has it helped my organization?

The team I manage is small and we don't have much time to maintain the on-prem infrastructure with patches and updates. With Splunk Cloud, we don't have to worry about patches or upgrades. It's always up to date with the latest and greatest features. That's the biggest benefit for us so far. It saves us time and headaches that come along with all the upgrades, patching, and administration of the Platform in general.

Splunk Cloud Platform has more features than the on-premise Splunk Enterprise version that we previously used. My team seems to like the GUI better.

Splunk Cloud Platform's ability to provide end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment is extremely important because we don't have any tool that has that feature.

It has sped up our mean time to resolve by 40 to 50 percent compared to the on-premise version of Splunk.

Our on-premises setup used an outdated Splunk version on aging Red Hat seven hardware. Upgrading would have required new Red Hat eight systems and consultant deployment expertise. By going to the cloud, we don't have to worry about hiring consultants or upgrades. That saved us time and money. The pricing that we were given was the same as renewing our maintenance and support for our on-prem version. So it was a no-brainer decision.

As soon as we migrated, my team liked the GUI because it made them more efficient. There are more functions and features that are not available with the on-premise version of Splunk.

What is most valuable?

We use Splunk Cloud primarily as a troubleshooting tool, so the most valuable features are the analysis and visualization.

What needs improvement?

Areas of improvement for Splunk Cloud Platform are difficult to say because we're still learning about the platform. I want to have the ability to process the ingestion before it is sent to the back end and Splunk just announced that the feature is coming, so now it just needs to be released.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the Splunk Cloud Platform for three months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Splunk Cloud Platform is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Splunk Cloud Platform is easily scaled on the cloud.

How are customer service and support?

The few times we reached out to technical support, they were helpful and able to address the issues.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We previously used Splunk Enterprise and wanted to stick with Splunk because we feel it is the best product. So switching to the Splunk Cloud Platform was an easy decision for us.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment was not difficult. We had consultants helping us. We thought it was going to take three weeks to migrate from on-premises to the Cloud, and it took half that time. It was a lot easier than we anticipated. And we were able to do most of the work ourselves without using the consultants.

What about the implementation team?

We used Bitzios Consulting to help us with the implementation.

What was our ROI?

By moving to the Splunk Cloud Platform we saved on having to hire consultants to build a new environment and install it on-premises.

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

The price for Splunk Cloud Platform is the same as our maintenance costs for Splunk Enterprise on-premises.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Splunk Cloud Platform nine out of ten. Splunk Cloud offers several advantages in terms of ease of use. Since it's cloud-based, there's no need to worry about infrastructure maintenance, availability, or scalability. New features are automatically available, eliminating the need for manual upgrades and potential downtime that can occur with on-premise installations.

We have AWS and GCP but are using the Splunk Cloud Platform to monitor only the AWS for now.

While we currently use Splunk Cloud, we don't have Splunk security. We plan on implementing Splunk security and that's also going to integrate with all of our Cisco equipment. For now, I can't say that Splunk's unified platform has helped consolidate networking, security, and IT observability, but soon, it will because we'll be able to have one source, one point of reference for all of our logging and security information instead of managing separate tools for different tasks. Once we implement Splunk Security, it will be one single pane of glass where we will have everything.

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)


    reviewer2499666

Good reliability snf definitely saved us time

  • June 12, 2024
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

What is our primary use case?

We use it for security investigations and alerting.

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for about two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What was our ROI?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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


    reviewer2499189

Offers good dashboards that show us search or user search activity

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

What is our primary use case?

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

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

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

We've been with Splunk for several years now.

How was the initial setup?

For the cloud, the deployment is easy.

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

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

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

What was our ROI?

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

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

What other advice do I have?

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


    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.


    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.