Splunk Enterprise

The system is highly intuitive to use. It is faster than other solutions I've used on the market and has a huge library of 3rd party plugins to get more from the system. It is easy to create scheduled searches, dashboards, reports etc. but there are a number of additional plugins (at an extra cost) to help with security, single pane of glass and metric collection.

It offers challenges for a decentralized working model. Where Splunk is centrally managed, it is easy to ensure that best practices are maintained. Where the system is opened up for an entire department to utilize and on-board their logs, it becomes more difficult. However, with some creative thinking and good process, this issue can be overcome.

Several of our applications are distributed across multiple systems. It is the same software running on each server but doing the same job for different users. Each server would generate its own log files. When things went wrong, we used Splunk to be able to see what was going on on each server. Click a few buttons and you get two logs from two different servers listed together coordinated by time. But that leads you to discover that the issue came from a separate upstream or downstream server, then bring in those logs too . . . all coordinated by time. Don't get me wrong, the IT guys love these tools for their own enterprise reasons, but as a server stack developer, this was a resource I used OFTEN.

I never fully grokked their SQL like language. I could do basic things daily without issue. However, I often had to hit the documentation to do anything more than a simple "find this" query.

It allows me to bring a lot of information into one friendly view. It's a great security audit tool.

It has limited functionality. It is a very memory intensive system. It does not integrate with Lennox.

The ability to use this software for security operations, data analysis, creating dashboards, generating tickets and everything else

Splunk uses its own SPL, which is not very easy to learn. However, there are lots of documentation that Splunk provides to its customers. There is paid training available which is useful for beginners to learn.