SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) vs. Splunk Enterprise vs. Splunk User Behavior Analytics

Optimal for SolarWinds Security Event Manager needs for smaller companies - it is a very cool product but has some limitations around EPS (which gets chewed up quickly if you're doing it the right way & adding servers/storage/FW & other network devices)... Also pricing model is GREAT (not consumption-based, which is the greatest grift the SIEM industry has created).

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

Splunk User Behavior Analytics application is necessary when any company wants to capture the threat based on user behavior instead of just counting the number of occurrences of particular event. With Splunk UBA, we can analyse number of anomalies captured and which in turn creating threats which are nearly true positive.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

• Monitor and troubleshoot for any system errors.
• Get the insights on application data sets and do some predictive analysis.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

• Performance-wise, it can be improved. Queries take a long time.
• Dataset exploration - More data visualization charts can be added.

Incentivized

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Fortianalzyer can only do logs from FortiGate so usefulness is limited. Elasticsearch was a lot slower than Solarwinds and the filters were a lot harder to set up and use. The connectors for SEM were far more stable.

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

Easier we were using Splunk Enterprise on heavy forwarder on which all the add-on were installed and were using Splunk Cloud with respect to search head and indexers stack. And with Splunk Enterprise Security premium app, we were relying on correlation rules which were throwing more number of false positive but after implementing Splunk UBA, we are now getting real-time true positive threat or incidents.

Incentivized

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

• 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.

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

• Fewer team members to work on real threats.
• Less time required to deal with real incidents.
• Easy to implement across the network.

Incentivized