Splunk Enterprise Reviews

Pros

The system is highly intuitive to use. It is faster than other solutions I've used on the market and has a huge library of 3rd party plugins to get more from the system. It is easy to create scheduled searches, dashboards, reports etc. but there are a number of additional plugins (at an extra cost) to help with security, single pane of glass and metric collection.

Cons

It offers challenges for a decentralized working model. Where Splunk is centrally managed, it is easy to ensure that best practices are maintained. Where the system is opened up for an entire department to utilize and on-board their logs, it becomes more difficult. However, with some creative thinking and good process, this issue can be overcome.

Pros

Splunk makes it easy to search through various data including logs. In the past I have had to pour through logs in order to find the one lines among the 100 of thousands of lines. Splunk allows me to search through those logs in a matter of seconds vs the hours it used to take.

Cons

Most of enterprise setup is done through the command line. It would be nice to have cluster configuration (index creation) as part of the UI.

Pros

Several of our applications are distributed across multiple systems. It is the same software running on each server but doing the same job for different users. Each server would generate its own log files. When things went wrong, we used Splunk to be able to see what was going on on each server. Click a few buttons and you get two logs from two different servers listed together coordinated by time. But that leads you to discover that the issue came from a separate upstream or downstream server, then bring in those logs too . . . all coordinated by time. Don't get me wrong, the IT guys love these tools for their own enterprise reasons, but as a server stack developer, this was a resource I used OFTEN.

Cons

I never fully grokked their SQL like language. I could do basic things daily without issue. However, I often had to hit the documentation to do anything more than a simple "find this" query.

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.

Pros

The ability to use this software for security operations, data analysis, creating dashboards, generating tickets and everything else

Cons

Splunk uses its own SPL, which is not very easy to learn. However, there are lots of documentation that Splunk provides to its customers. There is paid training available which is useful for beginners to learn.

Pros

Splunk is very easy to use due to high community support and many video tutorials available online for new users to learn.
Functionalities are robust and simple to use. Data retrieval and visualisation is nice and easy if you know the right querying process.
Machine Learning supports enhances performance for the cloud, especially. It collect wide variety of data and still it amaze you the way it retrievs it.

Cons

There are many tools available in market which are potential competitors of this tool and that too at reasonable pricing. Splunk offers more functionalities but costs you too much if you look at the work it does.
Complex queries may require large CPU usage and may even freeze or atleast slow down the system for a while. Need to be specific while querying the data.

Pros

log analysis, text patterns, statistics and graphing

Cons

Too much of programming, not easy for laymans to write queries.

Pros

As a software engineer, Splunk helps me debug issues in my microservice applications. The Splunk forwarders are efficient and quickly collect logging from multiple server instances. The timestamp resolution is precise making it easier to track down race conditions. The reporting and pivot tables are powerful ways to visualize frequency of api calls once you learn the syntax.

Cons

Splunk forwarders that collect the data from applications can sometimes hang and need to be restarted. The amount of traffic that can be collected has maximum caps based on your subscription.

Pros

A very effective log analyzer and the part I love most is the infrastructure monitoring. A proactive monitor and alert generator for our Critical Production Environment.

Cons

If SPLUNK enable SQL alongwith its own SPL so the generic users would have been able to work more better.

Pros

Splunk is great in terms of the speed of fetching records and also very useful UI elements which helps to analyze the record faster. The tool is so user friendly that anyone can start working on the tool easily and so much capabilities that experts can also bring a lot of values after segregating the records.

Cons

The technical team is okay to see the records in the JSON format. But sometimes the functional users ae not comfortable with the JSON data. They need technical assistance.

Pros

- Free to use for small 500MB or less daily ingress, quite nice for small use cases and learning
- No development work required to deploy and provide value.
- Deployment flexibility: client agents are available to use, or clientless configurations for multiple OS platforms. It's also very easy to deploy, not just flexible. its a very simple affair.
- Segmentation of logs: You can create separate instances of of logs to aggregate, based on organization needs. And those instances can have their own individual storage policies to optimize consumption of storage resources.
- Configuration design: Thoughtful and mature documentation and design of the application regarding enterprise-class scaling on network storage.
-POWERFUL tools: The user interface lends itself to learning more about your organization from the logs you collect, through metrics of trends of the logs being gathered. There are also specific modules/add-ons for popular applications to provide more value and event-based monitoring, all without having to develop in-house dashboards and intelligence of those logs.
- Customization: You can create your own queries of logs, and event-based alerts.
- Web-based GUI that clean is powerful
- Sales/Technical Reps are top notch in fielding questions and evaluating environment for deployment. They were extremely helpful in helping our organization develop procedures and scaling our environment for expansion with our existing infrastructure.

Cons

- Price: This product is not free for more than the minimal use. Pricing can be very expensive, relative to open source offerings. That is the trade-off you pay for not having in-house development of open source offerings. As this product is priced based on gigabytes of indexed logs, it is important to understand the scope of licensing necessary for your environment to determine if it is a good fit for your organization.
- Watch your saved queries and hardware resources: Users have the ability to create and save queries. Like in database queries, some are more efficient than others. Large inefficient queries can be very resource-intensive. If you notice slowness in day-to-day queries, or navigation in the UI, or resource use in contention, keep an eye on saved queries and user practices.

Pros

Splunk Enterprise is best tool to analyze the data based on different visualization. It help us to lookup distributed logs for micro-services . It enables field based lookup. For complex logging, we can use search query using expression. We can create multiple reports/charts for visualization such as a pie or bar chart for our data. Best feature what i like , We can visualize our search results and share them with others using dashboard panels. If Already have a dashboard, we can add a new panel from a report, clone from another dashboard, or add a prebuilt panel. Fully customization available. Interfaces is very flexible. We export it in different formats, or refresh it to visualize the newest data. Online Support is available through different community.

Cons

Search query builder is fully based on technical. for Non technical users, its really difficult to lookup logs. Sometimes, error thrown by query builder is more difficult to understand. Deep Learning is required to use splunk for production data. For Large application installation, it need to manage more.

Pros

Splunk allows us to see exactly what is going on in production! I work on commerce for a fortune 100 company, and we use Splunk to monitor our apps in real time. Splunk gives you the ability to perform queries like you would with SQL against your log statements in real time. You will learn that you can place strategic log statements in your code that allows you to identify situations in production and be proactive at solving them. For example, you can log your customer's session cookie ID, and track any given customer's activity on your website via your app logs. It gives you dials and charting capabilities to monitor even the slightest drops in customer activities due to flaws in code or slowing network calls.

Cons

PRICE. The software is so powerful, and they seem to leverage this in the pricing of the licenses.

Pros

Splunk Visually represents the logs mainly from production servers in the web UI .

People who Usually has no access to logs in production servers, will access the logs through splunk UI with very simplified and friendly search query.

It has lot of features like you can query for particular date and time range with specific characters. The search engine is very fast which will bring the query response effectively.

we can access all types of logs including XML and JSON.

we can create a custom dashboard with custom query for each projects and can relatively trigger the email to the support team in case of any issues.

This tool is boon for production support team in any enterprise company.

Cons

Licensing cost is quite higher for enterprise usage.

Query response time will be slow when you are searching for relatively longer history(Eg. 3 months old data)

Pros

Splunk is more than a tool or a product, it is a big data platform. Splunk can be used as a simple log aggregator all the way to a Big Data engine to find efficiency in operations of the Internet of Things. Splunk is less about its abilities, and more about your imagination about what you can do with Splunk. That is the beauty of the platform. Splunk shines in providing operational intelligence about systems and processes. Finding out how your systems are operating, how your processes are functioning leads to quick resolution of problems and points to where budgets are best spent.

Cons

Splunk is deceptively easy to set up and use. But like learning to play chess, you can learn the moves in half an hour, but take a lifetime to master. Splunk quickly provides value, but requires imagination and creativity as well as wide ranging knowledge of systems and processes to move to the next level. Not every organization needs that kind of talent to get a great return from Splunk, but the companies who compete and win will.

Pros

1) Accepts multiple data formats like CSV, JSON, XML
2) Does the hard work for us i.e converting machine data to a human-readable format.
3) Can create customized alerts to serve our business purpose.
4) Searching on the based on queries is pretty simple.
5) We can create dashboards to analyze and visualize our search results.
6) Can export the log content to our Personal computers.
7) Setting up plugins and integrating with any tool that needs monitoring is pretty easy.
8) Technical support for the Splunk is very quick as they have a dedicated staff for that.

Cons

I did not find any flaws with this software.

Pros

We use this tool primarily as a repository for syslog messages for infrastructure. It allows us to quickly analyze the logs and patterns to determine issues based on patterns. In addition it alerts very well from text based trigger alerts. These features are very easy to use and dependable.

Cons

I do not have any cons for this software. Mainly as a user it does exactly what I need it to do with no overhead and confusing interfaces.

Pros

Integrates with almost all the software seamlessly..where there is a software application that produces log, splunk can be easily integrated.
Gives very powerful insights into the logs
Alerts can be setup on the logs, and notifications sent out which is great again for managing the health of your application

Cons

The query language, though powerful, has a learning curve. Particularly as one goes towards complex queries. If it could be made closer to natural language, it would be so much smoother to learn. Hope that will happen sometime in future.

Pros

Fast consolidation of disparate logs in an easy to search way for troubleshooting. I can find problems within my organization very quickly. Sales team was very responsive in getting me a trial license to estimate my needs.

Cons

Set up takes some time and planning. The Licensing scheme can be pretty expensive and until you've got it up and running it can be hard to estimate how much license you need.

Pros

The power of it. It's a very good tool that does amazing things. Nothing comes close to it. We used it for full view of data, full transaction. Security appliance consolidation.

Cons

There is a learning curve and a new language you have to learn, but it's intuitive and you can pick it up pretty quickly.

Pros

I'm not sure from where to start in this case.

We use splunk for many things but mostly to analyze the traffic on the network / firewalls. It provides us with a nice overview of what's going on. It makes it very easy to spot spikes on the network and it will provide you also with deep analyzes.

For us it's an indispensable tool, probably the best tool we have.

Cons

To search for something is not always easy, however there are a lot of forums online, so finding help is not that difficult.

Pros

Splunk can give you extreme insights into how your systems and software are functioning. Not only is the search very flexible and powerful, the customizable dashboards give a status report at a glance into trends, problems and performance. You can also set up email alerts when errors occur limiting the need to have Splunk opened on your machine all the time.

Cons

Splunk has a learning curve. They have extensive documentation but it isn't intuitive and some features are buried pretty deep. We have an onsite expert who holds bimonthly meetings to answer questions in a group forum.

Pros

First of all you don't need to login to your servers. Just configure splunk forwarder on all of your server and have peace of mind. During outages you dont have to panic and just rely on Splunk and be sure that you will have your root cause visible in splunk.

Cons

Kernel huge page issues, Search head clustering, Index clusetering. These features are as good as costly too. For SHC and IC it does need all same config hosts.

Pros

When you need to store, correlate, and search large amounts of data, especially System Log data, there is no tool that even comes close to Splunk. It's power and flexibility is amazing.

Cons

Very expensive. Difficult to implement until all moving parts are understood. Steep learning curve for beginners.

Pros

Splunk integrates with almost all popular enterprise software products including VMware, AWS, Azure, etc. Most customers use it primarily to do log analysis but it can also perform data analytics for business reporting. The UI is very straightforward and enables you to quickly search through large datasets using SPL. We were able to quickly locate the source of the issues by using Splunk to triangulate logs from several different components. There is a Splunk Cloud version with a free trial if you are aiming to do some integration work and testing. Finally, like all monitoring tools, Splunk offers AI and machine learning for even better predictive analytics.

Cons

Splunk is expensive and probably not for smaller startup companies. The pricing is tiered and is subscription-based so if you start to ingest a lot of data, look out. It can eat into most of your IT budget and Splunk by itself doesn't handle all the Day 2 operations that are needed.