Snort vs. Splunk Cloud Platform vs. Splunk Enterprise

If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.

Incentivized

Splunk is excellent when all your data is in one location. Its ability to correlate all that data is intuitive (once the hurdle of learning the query language is overcome). It is also easy to standardize the presentation of information to the company. When data is siloed/standalone, other systems can be cheaper and faster to implement.

Incentivized

It's well suited for what I do, which is network security operations. And that's for anything from troubleshooting incidents, troubleshooting performance, troubleshooting for the purpose of a compliance and auditing. It's not best suited for users who are new in terms of they're new to the product and they have expectations that probably Splunk cannot meet.

Incentivized

• IPS detection.
• DoS detection.
• Packet logging.

Incentivized

• This SIEM consolidates multiple data points and offers several features and benefits, creating custom dashboards and managing alert workflows.
• Splunk Cloud provides a simple way to have a central monitoring and security solution. Though it does not have a huge learning curve, you should spend some time learning the basics.
• Splunk Cloud enables me to create and schedule statistical reports on network use for Management.

Incentivized

• It is very useful in creating custom rules for analyzing system logs and display relevant information. The query language is very easy to learn.
• We can create custom UI to visualize the output of our data. The interface is very flexible. It also allows the sharing of rules among users.
• There is an open online community to help others. Stackoverflow also has a splunk community. These resources make it more convenient to learn.

Incentivized

• At times can be unstable with Cisco bugs, require frequent upgrading.
• FTD images that are being pushed for ASAs are less efficient from an administration standpoint, no CLI.

Incentivized

• The SPL programming language that the queries are built in is not very intuitive.
• There should be a better repository of pre-built queries for what I would think of as common Active Directory usage monitoring.
• I would like to see more free training/familiarization information made available.

Incentivized

• Splunk light limits number of users to 5. Wish there was a flexible license, where one could add more users.
• Splunk light does not let you add > few realtime alerts. Wish there was a flexible license, where one could add as many realtime alerts as wanted.
• Better insight into daily ingestion values

Incentivized

Ease of use and have all the features we need

Incentivized

We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.

What it does well:

- Powerful SPL query language for advanced users

- Excellent visualization dashboards

- Comprehensive documentation and community support

Where it needs work:

- Steep learning curve for SPL syntax

- Non-Intuitive UI for beginners

- Complex administration and data model configuration

- Search performance degrades with poor query optimization

Bottom line: Enterprise-grade tool requiring dedicated training investment. Best for teams with experienced analysts.

Incentivized

You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.

Incentivized

When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.

Incentivized

Splunk Cloud support is sorely lacking unfortunately. The portal where you submit tickets is not very good and is lacking polish. Tickets are left for days without any updates and when chased it is only sometimes you get a reply back. I get the feeling the support team are very understaffed and have far too much going on. From what I know, Splunk is aware of this and seem to be trying to remedy it.

Incentivized

Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.

Incentivized

The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.

Smooth without too many major issues.

Incentivized

For our organization, the Cisco defense in depth concept works the best. While Cisco can be made to work with other vendors, we have found the best in depth protection by integrating Cisco products for maximum visibility. We had a Barracuda Web Filter, but it was difficult to maintain when you had limited scope on what you could block, so we created a whitelist only setup which required a lot of additional manpower. This wouldn't have covered new threats with DNS spoofing and the like. Sourcefire also integrated with our anti-malware platform (Cisco AMP) for even better visibility on what may be happening on the end users workstation. We are planning on adding in Cisco ISE to complete the approach and possibly stealthwatch to cover our bases in the future. The Palo Alto gear was interesting, but it was priced far out of our range.

Incentivized

Search Processing Language really is a game changer for writing easy-to-understand and maintainable queries on your data base logs. Once understood, setting up and validating a query can be done in no time- which leaves us the option to focus on more monitoring and improved services. We have no other tools that utilizes data this efficiently

Incentivized

I didn't get to fully evaluate Logstash as our corporation was already using Logstash, but both seemed like viable solutions to the problem that we were having. I wanted to evaluate Logstash some more, both did seem like they would work for the business needs that we had, we went with splunk as many teams were already using it.

Incentivized

Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome

• Being open source, ROI on free is hard to beat for something that works.
• I believe it greatly enhances the security of my network.

• End-end visibility across your departmental silos
• Strengthen the overall global monitoring posture
• Move from Reactive to Proactive Monitoring
• Highly secure environment at your finger-tips
• Takes you away from managing infrastructure/administration, allows saving time & money. Reduce the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

Incentivized

• I don't have any numbers to share but Splunk has positively served as a 24/7 monitoring tool that has saved hours of work by self-detecting, saving statistics and alerting problems in the system or from external interfaces as soon as they happen.
• Splunk dashboards does a solid job in collecting, analyzing data and creating reports that contain an entire day's activity and then automatically sent out to the business.
• Splunk is very easy to learn and very useful to any program or business application.

Incentivized