Splunk Enterprise

Splunk: A Monitoring Tool for all your needs

Comments: If i have put a word it would say "Fantastic". The functionalities Splunk provides eases team to manage/monitor their IT infrastructure and internal application you will be well aware about the performance of your applications. Setup alerting and take necessary actions in stipulated time to overcome all the issues which may affect your application performance.

Pros:

Splunk offers various features whether you need to setup monitoring on your server, application logs based on logs ingestion set alerts so that teams got notified on real time and take actions accordingly. In this way, it helps to monitor application which are mission critical. You can make dashboards in Splunk where you can configure various components such indexes, data inputs and schedule reports as well. To achieve additional functionalities we can install third party apps as well such as AWS Add on for cloud watch log ingestion.

Cons:

From Admin perspective, I found user access management a little difficult. The roles of access management becomes complicated because some time the config files for that didn't came very handy. Other then that I think all in all Splunk provides fulfill all of the requirements.

Splunk Enterprise, not just a SIEM

Comments: We have been using Splunk Enterprise, ES, ITSI, and other Splunk parts for 6+ years in production. This has helped us reduce staff in some cases, increase response time in most cases, and allow non-IT teams to get data and metrics in a fast efficient way.

Pros:

The versatility is amazing. The same data in logs, such as IIS, can be used for Security, Application performance, and even error handling. This allows us to use one log to help multiple teams. This is just one example.

Cons:

Start up takes someone who has had some training. While searching and output is easy, its the onboarding of custom apps that takes the know how.

Alternatives Considered: LogRhythm Log Management and Sumo Logic

Reasons for Switching to Splunk Enterprise: Versatility with custom applications we create in house.

Best friend for debugging

Comments: Splunk basically makes debugging and monitoring easier and touch less. I can easily debug by starring the rolling logs from different instances in single screen.
I can monitor multiple components and multiple metrics, without running commands manually with custom plugins.

Pros:

Splunk comes with lot of in-built templates for each and every feature like log visualisation, dashboarding, traces,etc This makes the developers life lot easier. I can't think of any other logging tool that is snappy as well as accurate. I love the fact how easily I can plug it in my docker-compose to push container logs.

Cons:

Even though, it offers numerous features for different needs, each feature has its own learning curve. For instance log visualisation needs querying skills, which may be in natural language but it takes bit of time to get familiar.

Spunk Review

Pros:

It allows me to bring a lot of information into one friendly view. It's a great security audit tool.

Cons:

It has limited functionality. It is a very memory intensive system. It does not integrate with Lennox.

The most expensive tool, requiring highly-skilled employees, capable of limitless value

Comments: Splunk's SPL is a flexible, straight forward query-language with aspects of SQL, R, Python, and Bash. The fact that an analyst can learn to be an engineer through using the platform provides ease of growth. It is unmatched in its automation to make data actionable, while providing reporting and visualization capabilities.

Pros:

Splunk is provides a single tool for log aggregation, log analysis, and visualizations. Threat hunting, applying threat intelligence, and incident response are easily repeatable; pushing organizations to proactive security processes.

Cons:

Splunk is expensive, especially when an organizations is exploring and building new security or data use cases. It also requires a lot of engineering maintenance, making the quality of the data highly-dependent on the skill(s) of those supporting it. Many organizations do not maximize its benefit because it is poorly managed or supported by low-skilled employees.

Alternatives Considered: Elastic Stack

Reasons for Switching to Splunk Enterprise: Splunk scales in all aspects except price. Organizations that are serious about security and SIEM tools will see the value in their investment almost immediately. The insights from the analytics and development capabilities are not available in other tools with this level of ease.