Darktrace vs. Splunk Enterprise

Darktrace would be well suited to any environment really; the only constraint would be the budget. The cost scales on the number of devices to be monitored by the product, so it can be quite expensive in larger environments. Any company that would benefit from having 24/7 monitoring of their network would find that this product would suit that need perfectly. It can also create a number of reports, which is useful if you have any requirement to present periodic figures and statistics for your network. There are also additional features available and in development such as Antigena, which can be configured to allow potential threats to be automatically mitigated; it can block connections to a certain address, using certain ports, or it can enforce "normal behaviour" where it will only allow a machine to communicate in a way that Darktrace has observed before and considers normal. This has huge benefits particularly for 24/7 organisations where you don't have the ability to have someone monitoring the network personally at all times, as it could stop a malware outbreak in its tracks.

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

• Uses it Al model UEBA to detect anomalies in the behaviour of not only the users in a corporate network but also the routers, servers, and endpoints in that network.
• Provides a visualisation of both egress and outbound network traffics flowing in and out of the organisation.
• Darktrace comes with it autonomous AI model detection and responses capabilities.
• Darktrace as an AI next generation NDR solution, prevents ,contains and quarantines malicious traffics from and into the corporate network.

• 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

• The system has so many features and places to tweak we found it hard to tune for our use.
• We met regularly with someone from Darktrace to assist us in processing the alerts
• The process for mail scanning requires you to reroute mail traffic

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

It's a powerfull product that help administrators to provide email security to our organization.

Good metrics about received emails that help us to determine in doubt case if the email is a false positive or it's malware.

They're improving the product releasing continuous updates and have mobile phone app to manage it.

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.

The Darktrace toolset is very expansive, allowing it to handle many different tasks, but this leads to a user interface that is sometimes not at all intuitive. Icons don't always make sense visually, and the associated tool tips do not always provide enough detail on what action the button performs

Incentivized

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

Darktrace support is excellent in my experience. They send a competent engineer on-site to provide on-boarding training. They were also very responsive in responding to questions and concerns. Having an individual point of contact who is a competent network and security engineer is not a common experience, at least for me.

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

We did NOT select Darktrace. OSSIM/AlienVault is a more mature product and it provided better intelligence and reporting. The end user interface is much easier to use - and you can tell built form engineers who have had to do the work. My suggestion for anyone considering Darktrace, is to get the price upfront; do a 30/60 onsite trail; and do the same thing, at the same time, with AlienVault. AlientVault will win every time. I say that because that's exactly what I did.

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

• One big positive is how it helps us with the security assessments that clients have done on us. They are looking to see if we know how we might have unusual/malicious traffic running on the network.
• If you have a small network and only need 1 appliance, it can be a good ROI and peace of mind.
• You could go down a hole in trying to spend time looking at all of your traffic with this software. You need to focus only on what it is showing as potential bad traffic.

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