Splunk can be an incredibly powerful data analytics tool, but is your organization fully harnessing its power?

Each year, SP6’s team of Splunk engineers identifies the most common challenges that prevent customers from maximizing their Splunk investment. We’ve gathered their insights into this guide, complete with actionable strategies to overcome each hurdle. By following these 12 Splunk best practices, your organization can improve performance, drive greater insights, and achieve a higher return on your Splunk investment. 

Issue #1: Lack of proper training for SOC analysts and admins. 

Solution: Develop an actionable training plan. 

When security admins lack sufficient training in Splunk, their searches and investigations tend to be shallow, slow, and inefficient. This can lead to increased security risks, higher infrastructure and license costs, and worsened overall performance, stability, and availability. 

To address this, it’s crucial to develop a comprehensive training plan for all Splunk users and administrators. Consider blocking out one to two hours per week for training and taking advantage of the free resources available. Focus on implementing at least one new practice or feature within Splunk that is currently underutilized, such as risk-based alerting, accelerated searches (data model acceleration), or data source monitoring. 

Issue #2: Neglecting to tune queries and alerts. 

Solution: Implement Risk-Based Alerting. 

When queries and alerts aren’t properly tuned, Splunk admins receive an overwhelming number of alerts each day – many of which never get investigated. In fact, according to Forrester, organizations receive an average of 11,000 security alerts daily, yet analysts can only investigate 20.  

One of the best ways to filter out excess alerts in your Splunk environment without tuning out actual threats is to implement Risk-Based Alerting (RBA). RBA incorporates additional context and attribution into your detection logic and groups related detections based on risk objects like users, devices, or behaviors. This results in a lower overall volume of alerts, higher detection accuracy, and more context surrounding alerts that allows analysts to quickly identify which alerts warrant closer investigation. 

Issue #3: Not leveraging automation to optimize security operations. 

Solution: Leverage a SOAR solution. 

If your security team is overwhelmed by more alerts than they can realistically investigate, a Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform like Splunk SOAR can be a game-changer. 

Splunk SOAR automates the repetitive tasks involved in threat response, allowing analysts to complete tasks that typically take hours or days in seconds. With integration capabilities for over 300 third-party tools and support for 2,800+ automated actions, Splunk SOAR empowers organizations to streamline complex workflows across multiple teams, enhance response times, and reduce human error. 

Issue #4: Poorly written searches (detections) in Splunk. 

Solution: User training and accelerated data models. 

Poorly written searches can significantly degrade your security or IT operations monitoring. They can cause missed security detections, skipped searches, delayed alerts, and a reduction in the identification of security or IT service events. 

Poorly written searches can also cause unnecessary increases in infrastructure costs or Splunk Cloud license spend. This is because inefficient searches use more compute, increasing the number of CPUs or SVCs your organization needs to purchase. 

Training your analysts on how to write better queries is paramount to having an optimized Splunk environment. 

Issue #5: Lack of collaboration between Splunk admins and Splunk users. 

Solution: Incorporate Splunk Admins into the requirements and change process. 

When admins — who primarily work on the back end of Splunk — don’t communicate with the users of Splunk, several business requirements that drove the decision to purchase Splunk in the first place may not be met. For instance, crucial data might not be monitored, or data retention requirements might not be observed. 

Incorporating Splunk admins into the requirements and change process is crucial to increase collaboration between the two teams and ensure users are leveraging Splunk to its fullest potential. 

Issue #6: Users and admins are not taking full advantage of the product or solution ecosystem (free apps). 

Solution: Utilize new (or lesser known) features in Splunk or Splunk apps. 

Splunk offers more capabilities than most organizations are aware of, meaning you might be missing out on several key features. Here are some commonly overlooked functionalities: 

• Risk Based Alerting 

• SC4S –Splunk Connect for Syslog (newer way to collect Syslog data via pre-canned configs for very common data sources) 

• HTTP Event Collector (40% to 50% of customers not utilizing) 

• Indexed Extractions (only 30% of customers using it intentionally) 

• Splunk Metrics (5% use across customers, not common outside ITSI) 

• Lookup Editor (estimate that 20% of customers not utilizing) 

• Adaptive Response (AR) (comes with ES, yet most customers not comfortable implementing) 

• Security Essentials App (free app exploring security use cases and security content to start address threats and challenges) 

Issue #7: Providing irrelevant raw data to users. 

Solution: Enrich your data and add context to your data/logs. 

Without enriched data, it’s impossible to prioritize which alerts to respond to. This leads to additional labor expenses, as technology and security team members need to spend more time investigating alerts. It also increases detection times and poses the risk of threats being missed entirely. 

Enriching your data through things like automatic lookups, threat intelligence, and assets and identities reduces the amount of time analysts need to interpret alerts while also giving them increased visibility outside of what the raw log can provide. 

Issue #8: Lack of data source monitoring. 

Solution: Implement alerting on missing data sources. 

As your environment changes over time, it’s not unusual for certain data to stop flowing into your monitoring tool. This can have grave consequences if gone undetected: alerts won’t trigger, compliance status can be lost, and customers can face outages that you’re entirely unaware of. 

The solution to this problem is to implement alerting on missing data sources, especially the critical ones. By doing so, you can quickly detect and resolve any data-flow issues before they impact your customers, compliance status, and overall level of security. 

Issue #9: Lack of data governance. 

Solution: Implement a strategic approach to sending data to Splunk. 

Failing to put boundaries on who can import data into Splunk — as well as the kind of data that can be imported and the amount — can lead to many problems down the line. It can cause an unexpectedly high license cost as users import excess data, the inability to standardize reporting and alerting, and issues with data not being sent to the correct tools. 

Tying data ingest to your business objectives is key to optimizing your Splunk investment. Ensure that all data has a clear purpose behind it and create a robust process for data onboarding requests. As you develop this process, focus on gaining a better understanding of which teams need to import data to Splunk and ensure their ingestion adheres to the established SOP. 

Issue #10: Splunk admins being spread too thin across multiple platforms. 

Solution: Dedicate necessary time to Splunk or consider Splunk Cloud or Co-Managed help. 

Commonly, Splunk admins are forced to wear too many hats and are unable to give Splunk the time it needs for optimized business value. The result is similar to buying a gym membership that goes unused – your company has spent money on a powerful tool that will never deliver business value. 

The most direct solution to this problem is having admins set aside time for proper platform administration. Additionally, switching to Splunk Cloud can solve for some — but not all — of admin duties. Leveraging a co-managed Splunk partner like SP6 for fractional assistance can also fill in the gaps and provide you with extra support where you need it the most. 

Issue #11: Lack of a monitoring strategy. 

Solution: Start with the end in mind. 

Many organizations don’t know what to monitor and lack a defined strategy for security or IT services monitoring. This often leads to a longer timeline to attaining business value as well as decreased ROI. 

Starting with the end in mind is crucial to maximizing your Splunk investment. Define what you’re monitoring and why, such as: 

• IT ops/observability: Which business services should be prioritized? 

• Security: What information should you be protecting? What known adversary behavior can you tie detections to? 

Issue #12: Not leveraging the right Splunk partner. 

Solution: Find the partner that’s right for your organization. 

Turning to an experienced, knowledgeable Splunk partner for project-based professional services or ongoing co-managed services can rapidly increase your Splunk ROI. 

At SP6, our dedicated Splunk engineers have 10+ years of experience helping organizations optimize their Splunk investment. Our free Helping Hands program provides you with four hours of free one-on-one Splunk consulting – no strings attached.

Schedule a complimentary consultation with us today to get started.