Likelihood to Recommend Solarwinds SEM is great for generating reports for investigation purposes. Once you set up the connectors you can walk away and the product runs without needing maintenance. It was however pretty difficult to create the reports and alerts when now starting out and it can be very intimidating for new users.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros It does a great job of notifying us when accounts have been locked out. We can then find out the device on the network where the login attempt occurred. Searching for incidents is now a lot faster with the implementation of the HTML 5 interface. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons All SolarWinds product suffer from slow response times in management portals. SolarWinds SEM is no exception. While it is much preferred over a "thick client" there is much room for improvement in speed. If you use the email alert features with SolarWinds make sure to prepare you staff and team for the large amount of emails they could receive. Make sure to reduce the number of alerts so your team does not ignore the alerts. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability If you are familiar with SolarWinds then you can use this product it's as easy as that. If you have never used a SolarWinds product then it will take a minute to get how they do reports and make dashboards but that being said the tool is great and can make things very easy once you get a feel for how it works and get everything setup how you like it.
Read full review You definitely need to learn how to use Splunk to get the most of the tool. There are many courses available for free to get up to speed on the usability of the tool but it's not that simple. It will take time to digest all the data and to understand how to query for what you are looking for.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I'm not an ES user, but, in my implementation I usually try to prevent all service stops to guarantee High availability to the final customers.
Read full review Performance ES requires a very performant infrastructure: if it has it's performant, otherwise not. I had situation with a very performant infrastructure and I didn't notized that it was a distributed architecture, it seemed that there ware few data on my PC, othewise I experienced less performant infrastructures with less performaces.
Read full review Support Rating The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material.
Read full review 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.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Splunk was a pretty good product but the licensing structure needed a lot of work. They changed the structure three times that I am aware and I still had problems understanding LogRhythm had a lot of issues correlating users to IP addresses, the mappings were frequently wrong so this product could not be trusted in my environment as all our access logs are IP based and this needs to be matched to usernames from AD Fortianalzyer is a great product but it can only do logs from Fortigates so that was not helping for anything other than our firewalls.
Read full review 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
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model 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.
Read full review Scalability - 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.
Read full review Professional Services 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.
Read full review Return on Investment For the price, it produced a decent value. It did a lot of the easy stuff well. I can't give any specific data given the objective of the product was to monitor very basic events in the environment. There are free options that can do a better job. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Screenshots