Splunk. The name is not very descriptive, but if you drop it in front of IT professional, they’ll know what you mean. This cloud-based platform for operational intelligence is a new and sophisticated big data tool, which gives even novice users the ability to process and analyze large reams of data on their own.
What does this mean, for the enterprise, exactly? Well, it means extracting precise intelligence from big data is now possible for an organization of any size, whether it has one server or thousands.
Here are 5 features that make Splunk so special:
1. Millions of Logfiles
Think of all the websites on the entire Internet. Actually, think of each individual page of content. Kind of unfathomable, right? That’s what it’s like for an IT professional to think about all of the log files for all of the servers in its data center. When something goes wrong, having a fast and smart search engine for these millions of log files is a crucial start to finding a solution. That’s what’s at the core of Splunk—log storing, searching, analyzing and processing.
2. The Sleekest SPL Yet
Splunk’s search processing language, or SPL, offers the ability to analyze mountains of data and turn up precise, contextually relevant insights in real-time.
3. Ease of Installation
Unlike other enterprise platform solutions that take an IT professional and a few days to properly install and deploy, Splunk can be installed by anyone and in about five minutes.
4. Ease of Scalability
You can start with a single Splunk server and simply add on as your organization (and therefore your data) grows. Speed increases with the number of Splunk servers holding data and the work is automatically and evenly distributed.
5. No Ageism Here
Most monitoring tools retain data for a certain period of time and/or give you fewer options for older data. For example, you might want to compare application start up speed between last year and today, but you can’t get that level of granularity with year-old data. Spunk doesn’t have any such limitations. It can index unlimited amounts of data per day and keep it all at your fingertips, forever.
These are just a handful of the features that contribute to actualizing Splunk’s mission of making machine data accessible to anyone. It does this by identifying data patterns, providing metrics, diagnosing problems, and providing intelligence for business operations. Although it’s not specifically designed for security, managed security service providers (MSSPs) have begun to use it as an integrated security information and event management (SIEM) tool.
Splunk gives MSSPs access to a wider range of security and nonsecurity use cases than a traditional SIEM solution. In fact, Splunk delivers on the true promise of SIEM better than a traditional SIEM solution that lacks the scalability and flexibility of Splunk.
Splunk software can handle delivering these use cases as well as other key SIEM capabilities, including:
- Real-time aggregation of security-relevant data
- Ability to add context to security events
- Incident investigations/forensics
- Security reporting and visualizations
- Real-time correlations and alerting for threat detection
- Advanced/unknown threat detection
- Compliance reporting
In short, Splunk, now with more than 10,000 customers around the globe, has fast become the new standard for SIEM used by MSSPs.
In order for MSSPs and IT admins to fully unlock the potential of Splunk, they need to actually get the packets to process. A network TAP will replicate traffic and send it your analyzer, where Splunk can provide real time analysis.
For more information on how you can use Garland Network TAPS to see every bit, byte, and packet® and analyze them for potential threats, check out our new white paper, Maintaining the Edge of the Network – A New Necessity for Security Architects.