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Splunk vs Splunk Cloud: What are the differences?
Differences between Splunk and Splunk Cloud
Splunk is a powerful software platform that provides real-time operational intelligence and log management solutions. On the other hand, Splunk Cloud is a cloud-based version of Splunk, providing the same functionality as Splunk but with the added benefit of being hosted on the cloud.
Installation and Infrastructure: Splunk requires a dedicated server infrastructure for installation and maintenance, whereas with Splunk Cloud, the infrastructure and maintenance are taken care of by Splunk as it is hosted on the cloud. This relieves the users from the burden of managing the server infrastructure themselves.
Scalability and Elasticity: Splunk's scalability depends on the server infrastructure it is installed on, and scaling up or down can be a complex process. On the other hand, Splunk Cloud offers easier scalability and elasticity, as it is hosted on the cloud. Users can quickly increase or decrease resources as needed to accommodate changes in data volume or workload.
Upgrades and Maintenance: Splunk users are responsible for managing upgrades and maintaining their installations, which requires planning and effort to ensure minimal downtime. In contrast, with Splunk Cloud, upgrades and maintenance are handled by Splunk, providing users with a hassle-free experience as updates and patches are automatically applied without disrupting service.
Data Security and Compliance: Splunk offers various security features, but the responsibility for securing the infrastructure and data rests with the users themselves. On the other hand, Splunk Cloud incorporates additional security measures to protect data stored in the cloud, relieving users of some security responsibilities. Splunk Cloud also provides options for compliance with industry-specific regulations.
Cost and Pricing Model: Splunk has a perpetual license model, where users pay for the software and infrastructure upfront. In contrast, Splunk Cloud follows a subscription-based pricing model, with users paying on a monthly or annual basis. Splunk Cloud provides flexibility in terms of scalability and cost, allowing users to adjust resources and costs based on their needs.
Deployment and Time-to-Value: Splunk's deployment can be time-consuming, involving infrastructure setup, configuration, and optimization. Splunk Cloud offers a faster time-to-value as it eliminates the need for infrastructure setup and allows users to start analyzing data and gaining insights almost immediately after signing up.
In summary, the key differences between Splunk and Splunk Cloud lie in the aspects of installation and infrastructure, scalability and elasticity, upgrades and maintenance, data security and compliance, cost and pricing model, and deployment time-to-value. Splunk Cloud, being a cloud-based solution, provides easier scalability, automatic upgrades, enhanced data security, flexible pricing, and faster deployment, making it a convenient option for organizations seeking a hassle-free way to harness the power of Splunk.
We would like to detect unusual config changes that can potentially cause production outage.
Such as, SecurityGroup new allow/deny rule, AuthZ policy change, Secret key/certificate rotation, IP subnet add/drop. The problem is the source of all of these activities is different, i.e., AWS IAM, Amazon EC2, internal prod services, envoy sidecar, etc.
Which of the technology would be best suitable to detect only IMP events (not all activity) from various sources all workload running on AWS and also Splunk Cloud?
For continuous monitoring and detecting unusual configuration changes, I would suggest you look into AWS Config.
AWS Config enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. Here is a list of supported AWS resources types and resource relationships with AWS Config https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/resource-config-reference.html
Also as of Nov, 2019 - AWS Config launches support for third-party resources. You can now publish the configuration of third-party resources, such as GitHub repositories, Microsoft Active Directory resources, or any on-premises server into AWS Config using the new API. Here is more detail: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/customresources.html
If you have multiple AWS Account in your organization and want to detect changes there: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/aggregate-data.html
Lastly, if you already use Splunk Cloud in your enterprise and are looking for a consolidated view then, AWS Config is supported by Splunk Cloud as per their documentation too. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/Splunk-Inc-Splunk-Cloud/B06XK299KV https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/Splunk-Inc-Splunk-Cloud/B06XK299KV
While it won't detect events as they happen a good stop gap would be to define your infrastructure config using terraform. You can then periodically run the terraform config against your environment and alert if there are any changes.
Consider using a combination of Netflix Security Monkey and AWS Guard Duty.
You can achieve automated detection and alerting, as well as automated recovery based on policies with these tools.
For instance, you could detect SecurityGroup rule changes that allow unrestricted egress from EC2 instances and then revert those changes automatically.
It's unclear from your post whether you want to detect events within the Splunk Cloud infrastructure or if you want to detect events indicated in data going to Splunk using the Splunk capabilities. If the latter, then Splunk has extremely rich capabilities in their query language and integrated alerting functions. With Splunk you can also run arbitrary Python scripts in response to certain events, so what you can't analyze and alert on with native functionality or plugins, you could write code to achieve.
Well there are clear advantages of using either tools, it all boils down to what exactly are you trying to achieve with this i.e do you want to proactive monitoring or do you want debug an incident/issue. Splunk definitely is superior in terms of proactively monitoring your logs for unusal events, but getting the cloudtrail logs across to splunk would require some not so straight forward setup (Splunk has a blueprint for this setup which uses AWS kinesis/Firehose). Cloudtrail on the other had is available out of the box from AWS, the setup is quite simple and straight forward. But analysing the log could require you setup Glue crawlers and you might have to use AWS Athena to run SQL Like query.
Refer: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/cloudtrail-logs.html
In my personal experience the cost/effort involved in setting up splunk is not worth it for smaller workloads, whereas the AWS Cloudtrail/Glue/Athena would be less expensive setup(comparatively).
Alternatively you could look at something like sumologic, which has better integration with cloudtrail as opposed to splunk. Hope that helps.
I'd recommend using CloudTrail, it helped me a lot. But depending on your situation I'd recommed building a custom solution(like aws amazon-ssm-agent) which on configuration change makes an API call and logs them in grafana or kibana.
Pros of Splunk
- API for searching logs, running reports3
- Alert system based on custom query results3
- Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc2
- Dashboarding on any log contents2
- Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing2
- Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc2
- Rich GUI for searching live logs2
- Ability to style search results into reports2
- Granular scheduling and time window support1
- Query any log as key-value pairs1
Pros of Splunk Cloud
- More powerful & Integrates with on-prem & off-prem7
- Free3
- Powerful log analytics3
- Pci compliance1
- Production debugger1
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Cons of Splunk
- Splunk query language rich so lots to learn1