AccessData Forensic Toolkit (FTK), from Exterro vs. Splunk Enterprise Security

Well suited: Splunk ES is highly recommended in an environment with many data sources and experienced computer engineers. It has a steep learning curve, but once that hurdle is crossed, it is absolutely a beast. It is also very expensive, so a company putting a high amount of budget in Security is needed. Not well suited: Splunk ES is not recommended if a company has only a few sources and some non-technical IT users. The price won't justify the fewer data sources and scratching just the surface level. Moreover, non-technical IT users would be better off with something that has a query builder, unlike Splunk.

Incentivized

• Advanced Threat Detection and Correlation: ES stands out in its ability to detect sophisticated threats by correlating data from multiple sources. For instance, it can identify unusual patterns in user behavior, cross-referencing with network logs to flag potential insider threats.
• Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: ES offers robust real-time monitoring capabilities. It excels in promptly alerting us to critical security events, such as suspicious network traffic spikes or unauthorized access attempts, allowing for immediate response.
• Comprehensive Log Analysis: ES ingests and analyzes an extensive range of log data. It's particularly adept at parsing and making sense of complex log formats, making it a versatile tool for understanding system activities and security events.

Incentivized

• ES on the cloud (SaaS) has too many limitations with platform administration.
• Supported integrations are not always on par with enterprise support especially when dependent on 3rd-party proprietary APIs.
• In later versions, unforeseen glitches seem to show up that have no resolution except version upgrade. This used to not be the case in prior versions which were very stable.

We are very happy with Splunk and would advise anyone to take a serious look at it. It might look pricey but the rewards Splunk offers seem endless.

Incentivized

It takes real effort to make it smooth. The interface is fine once you know your way around but it's not something a new guy can hop into and start using confidently. I guess the main reason for that is how much fine tuning it needs. We spent weeks customizing correlation searches and filtering false positives before it started working the way we needed.

Incentivized

I don't think I've ever seen Splunk ES go fully offline or have any downtime greater than a few minutes on rare occasions.

Incentivized

It takes a long time for items to load if you are just generally searching through logs. It is best to use the data models which load faster but can be strange in terms of what is coming from which logs where. Yes, you can look it up, but this also requires familiarity with where things are and how to look them up.

Incentivized

It's good when it's responsive, but I've had times where I had to wait quite a while for a response. But these are typically the exceptions rather than the rule. When you do get a response it is always well-informed and appropriate. I would say they've been trending better over time with this.

Incentivized

I experienced only on-line training, but the trainers were very professional and competent. Maybe it could be more useful if they also have an experience in projects because sometimes they didn't have a real project experience to communicate to the students. Anyway, it was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself, aven if I have more than 10 years of Splunk activity experience.

Incentivized

It was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself. The only problem was that, when I worked with the Splunk Professional Services, I found some difference between the training contents and the information from PS. In addition is required a long experience on Splunk Enterprise for the data ingestion part, in other words I'm able to work with ES because I'm worling on Splunk since 11 years, otherwise I'd some problem.

Incentivized

It's a fantatic product and it was very useful the presence of Splunk Professional Services for the Design Phase and the final Health Check.

Incentivized

Splunk enterprise is the only solution that we’ve been able to identify that provides risk based alerting, which allows our SOC to reduce analyst fatigue which would be a huge problem without it. Before RBA, there were thousands of alerts a day and it was impossible to review all of them

Incentivized

for my exterience, unit pricing and billing frequency are correct. As I already said, I hint to have more discount flexibility, expecially with new customers, because there are competitors less expensive and very aggressive that are dangerous. In addition the possibility to don't pay the license for the development period could be a very interesting feature for the final customers.

Incentivized

- 8 out of 10 and took 2 for the data pipeline and administration part. Even if you'd like to improve yourself or your team, you have to pay a lot of money and it could be more than GIAC education + cert. - Normalization for Data models and CPU-based searches can be a problem sometimes.

Incentivized

I had a fantastic experience with Splunk Professional Services: they worked with us in our last SON project (a SOC migration for a very large customer) and helped to build a multi tenent environment even if ES isn't a multi tenant platform. Th Splunk PS was a very professional and competent people, he is italian and was able to speak with our italian customers.

Incentivized

• ES has highly impacted ROI because as the customer of the ES the work we do for creating use cases for clients in terms of security-related aspects by their logs has given more return than investment.
• The correlation searches we run to get detailed results from the Data models are very less time-consuming than Splunk Enterprise itself we can get quick responses to the use cases and dashboards populated because of ES.
• The CIM compliance feature is ES has made more jobs easy in the terms of finding more Authentication related data we can get data onboarded in the Email data model from O365 and search is email data model instead of searching for particular indexes.

Incentivized