Splunk Enterprise Reviews

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.

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.

Data visualization, Analytics skills with AI-powered and can handle data in TB/per day without any interruptions in services. Live dashboards, developing use-cases and their capabilities (correlation).

complex architecture and efficient skills are required, financial is also not feasible for small and medium customers. no inbuilt query builders for beginners to understand the platform.

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

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

INgestion of the huge volume of the data. q

Reporting commands on volume data and training documentation on the reporting.

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.

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.

Provides a single location for collecting and analyzing logs. Provides ease of use for non-technical users, but powerful features for security and IT. There is an add-on/app for anything you could imagine.

Some documentation is vague, and when certain things don't work, it can be difficult to find out a solution to the problem.

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

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.

Splunk Light is ideal for independent on-premise organization.
Augment endpoint logging.
Can find and store logs from a wide range of resources.
Customization of dashboards.
Making applications dependent on your requirements.

Complex generally design.
Long execution time.
The instrument needs to incorporate AI to comprehend the framework logs and alarming ought to be founded on the auto learning.

Assurance tool for critical monitoring process

Missing helpers about configuring reports and queries

Ease of querying logs, user friendly front end, user can create automated alerts for receiving information on current state of the data

Sometimes, becomes slow when trying to query historical data

It an intelligent business tool that provided me an opportunity to customize and build report from large volume of data from different departments within the 13 Africa countries in telecommunication sectors. The platform allows data to be consolidated accordingly to the organization need and produces visualized reports of dashboard features. I also noted that the system can analyst unstructured large volume of data speedily and is reliable and web based allowing for user flexible accessible from any part of the world if you have internet. The systems have been reliable and secured from the time (2 years) I started using it without any system intermittent, system errors and cyber-attack.

The system is built and use-able with structured and unstructured organization though the price in foreign currency could hamper small and medium organization to use it especially in most Africa country where the local currency has depreciated against the major trading foreign currency.so the Forex pricing is a challenge.
The navigation of the platform will require minor training though if the user is computer proficient, they would management with minor challenge and interpretation of the data. So, first time user it can be difficult to use it
It will depend on internet for access and internet tend to be pricey in most African country and therefore could increase the business cost for small and medium enterprise. It can increase business cost if not fully used

- 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.

- 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.

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.

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.

The ablitity to configure and tweak the use cases. Building Intelligence into forensics. The AI feature is gud but needs more enhancements.

The log management needs to be efficient , If the auditing logs is enabled then a huge influx of logs are pumed into splunk but no meaningful meaning can be derived.

We use this as our SIEM. The ability to have the data ingest, visualization, alerting and correlation all in one product is very important to me from a security standpoint. We're cloud-first so having that ability with large cloud providers is important to me (AWS, Okta, GCP, etc)

The cost can be a little concerning and htere is a bit of a learning curve when you first get into Splunk. User groups, their forum and pro serv all help with that.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dashboards feature is amazing, I use it much. Alerts and queries are easy to set up. Mostly it works fast so it's kind of Dev friendly so it's easy to onboard the new guys

Alerts should have a better way to manage it. There should be a way to promote alerts to different environments - so we will be able to set the Dev/Stg/Prod
Sometimes some things that we want to do take a while searching on the internet for a solution - they might think how to do it better - maybe some examples or better documentation

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.

I did not find any flaws with this software.

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.

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.

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

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.