Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.
$16
per month
Splunk SOAR
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Splunk now offers a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform via its acquisition of Phantom. Splunk Security Orchestration and Automation (Splunk SOAR) provides playbook automation and is available as a standalone solution.
Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
Our company has very complex and dynamic security operations because of the large number of security tools and systems that we need to manage and coordinate. Moreover, it helps us to meet many regulatory and compliance requirements because it helps us to automate and document our security operations. We also use it to streamline our security operations and improve our response to potential threats.
As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
A lack of instruction It can be difficult to contact the support staff. Limited experience from current users.
It takes some effort to set up and learn new technology at first. More assistance is required from the support staff. The product's price needs to go down.
As we already have a lot of clients being catered with Splunk SOAR and because Splunk SOAR is robust and efficient, we are already using it, and we have understood the product to a certain extent, I feel we are personally more enticed to use and scale it to a lot of business.
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
Honestly, it's a bit of a love-hate thing. On one hand it's insanely powerful but on the other, the workflows can be a real headache. You need multiple hours to get comfortable with it.
We are able to automate almost every one of our use cases, even our threat-hunting, and threat intel procedures. We have 20+ playbooks and cover almost everything, even searching logs into Splunk, looking into TIP and external systems, enrichment, and collecting evidence for analysts; it can perform concurrent playbooks running.
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
Splunk Phantom integrates well with Splunk ES and has many integrations. One thing that I liked about XSOAR as compared to Phantom is that it has an "app-store" where you can download not only app integrations (similar to Phantom) but Playbooks and dashboards as well.
We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
The playbooks are valuable. They are the core component. Being able to implement and build a code process to work through and scale out what we want to do is valuable
Before its use, analyzing each email would take at least 15 to 20 minutes, with some complex cases taking up to 30 minutes...With the automation provided by Splunk Phantom, we could significantly reduce the amount of time and human effort required to complete this task
