ReliaQuest GreyMatter vs. Splunk Enterprise

Our company generates more than a terrabyte of log a day and it can easily go above 2 TB a day. We were using out of the box SOC Solution from splunk to manage our SOC. We lacked the know how of using splunk and also lacked the staff to keep the product up to date to help us tackle the latest threats. We outsourced our SIEM/SOAR service to RQ and they helped us with creating new use cases which addressed the latest threat to our organization. RQ has people who research the latest threats and helps us keep up to date on the day-to-day security operations. RQ also helps with data onboarding if required. So we would recommend RQ to customers who are short-staffed and who lack personnel who could research security threats to keep your organization safe from threat actors.

Incentivized

Pros: Splunk is very well suited if you have multiple log sources of related data. All of them can be correlated and tasks can be automated based on the requirement. Other than alerts, Splunk can also run a specific script of your choice, based on some defined conditions. Cons: If you have a few logs but a large number of log sources, Splunk can be very expensive.

Incentivized

• SOC service.
• Managed services.
• Correlation searches.

Incentivized

• Real-time + Scheduled alerts - i-e you can set up alerts which are actively monitoring your logs
• Pretty good response time for search results. With our key/value logging, Splunk makes it blazing fast to query the data.
• Dashboards provide insights into historical data
• Love how Splunk indexes all of the data and provides keys to search on

Incentivized

• Some Analysts are relatively fresh to SOC. They sometimes get put into supporting large infrastructures.
• RQ has a ton of correlation searches that they use to provide end-to-end visibility. Most of them can be restructured to get the same results and this can reduce the number of correlation searches.

Incentivized

• Even though there is a search tool as a help function, you still have to read through many documentation to find the answers you're looking for and sometimes you don't find it. The help function in Splunk could be improved to be more intuitive or have a built-in help per report, panel or dashboard.
• Creating a Splunk dashboard is rather straightforward however, customization is not. Splunk could be improved to provide more tools or features for customization such as adding colors and font options for text and graphs or graphics.
• My dashboard has a lot of useful information and I want the important panels and reports at the top but there is no easy way to do this. Perhaps Splunk could be improved to allow features such as adding URL links to other dashboards or some other clever way to emphasize the important data in my dashboard without compromising space.

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.

Splunk Enterprise has plenty of storage space for security logs and can search and correlate suspicious activities up to 30+ days back. Splunk Enterprise can integrate with a ticketing system to track threats and correlate with IoC between security events. Splunk Enterprise can provide reports of account lockouts. Splunk Enterprise can consolidate multiple security alerts into one entry with a number showing how many events occurred.

Incentivized

When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.

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

Reliaquest is vendor agnostic. They have a lot of correlation searches that they use to provide security for your organizations. Compared to other products we have tried we felt that they are the only company that is doing proper market research on the latest and greatest threat to our vertical and coming out with the latest methods to keep up to date. RQ also has a good leadership structure that we could rely on if we run into any escalations. Compared to other products that we tried they try to work with you holding hands trying to resolve your problems.

Incentivized

A lot of products have natively inside their own dashboards and or their own logging repositories. And each one is difficult to learn or they're too complex or they're not verbose in the sense that they're not easy to mine the data that you're looking for. So that could be anything from the native logging that you find in other Cisco products. It's easier to use Splunk to draw the data that you're looking for as opposed to going to the individual's products themselves to get the logs that you're looking for.

Incentivized

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

• RQ's Greymatter content has enriched our SOC experience because we always felt Splunk's out-of-the-box use cases were not sufficient enough to provide end-to-end coverage.
• RQ specializes in a lot of big data solutions so that we can rely on them to help us troubleshoot tasks and also make sure our security solutions are working accurately.

Incentivized

• Splunk has allowed developers to diagnose production issues when access of control was taken away from them to be allowed to view items in production environments and I believe that is invaluable.
• At times some developers weren't super happy about using it, but it was more of the fact that they were used to having production access and not creating their splunk queries to get information.
• Going one place to view logs was very beneficial to have.

Incentivized