Splunk Vs ELK Feature Comparison

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Hello readers, I’ll be covering about the basic difference of Splunk and ELK stack,its use cases (Feature comparision) and the main purpose is to compare the “big two” in the log analytics world—Splunk and the ELK Stack Because Both Splunk and the ELK Stack can be used to monitor and analyze infrastructure in IT operations as well as for application monitoring, security and business intelligence.

what is Splunk?

Splunk is a software platform widely used for monitoring, searching, analyzing and visualizing the machine-generated data in real time .It performs capturing, indexing, and correlating the real time data in a searchable container and produces graphs, alerts, dashboards and visualizations. Above all Splunk provides easy to access data over the whole organization for easy diagnostics and solutions to various business problems.

In other words

Splunk is an analytics-driven security information and event management tool that collects, analyzes, and correlates high volumes of network and other machine data in real-time.

Category Splunk

1. Features : Search capability, Reporting,Alerts and data visualization.
2. Setup and Maintenance Easy : Easy.
3. Solution : Bit challenging.
4. API and Extensibility : 200+ API’s.
5. Plugin Support : yes.
6. Components : Forwarder, Indexer and Search Head.
7. Customer Support : Proficient.
8. community Support : Good Community Support
9. Cost : $2,000/GB year
10. Search : SPL
11. Compression : Yes

after that we will discuss the use cases of Splunk so,

What are the use cases of Splunk?

• Detecting Brute Force Attacks:- A brute-force attack consists of a multiple login attempts using many passwords by an unauthorized user/attacker with the hope of eventually guessing the correct password.

index=__your_sysmon_index__ sourcetype=winxsecurity user=* user!""
| stats count(eval(action="success")) as successes count(eval(action="failure")) as failures by user, ComputerName
| where successes>0 AND failures>100

• Malware Attack:- For instance it Look for infection count of malware attack.

| from datamodel:"Malware"."Malware_Attacks"
| stats dc("signature") as "infection_count" by "dest"
| where 'infection_count'>1

• Detecting Unencrypted Web Communications:- Find unencrypted web communications that could lead to a data breach.

index=__your_sysmon_index__ sourcetype=firewall_data dest_port!=443 app=workday*
| table _time user app bytes* src_ip dest_ip dest_port

• Identifying Web Users By Country:- Use IPs in your data to report and visualize user locations.

index=web sourcetype=access_combined
| iplocation clientip
| geostats dc(clientip) by Country

what is ELK Stack?

The ELK Stack or more recently called Elastic Stack,is a collection of three open-source products — Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. ELK stack provides centralized logging in order to identify problems with servers or applications. It allows you to search all the logs in a single place. It also helps to find issues in multiple servers by connecting logs during a specific time frame.

• E stands for ElasticSearch:Elasticsearch is a distributed, free and open search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured .therefore it is used for storing logs.
• L stands for LogStash :It is used for both shipping as well as processing and storing logs.
• K stands for Kibana: It is a visualization tool (a web interface) which is hosted through Nginx or Apache.

Category ELK Stack

1. Features : Search capability, Reporting,Alerts and data visualization.
2. Setup and Maintenance : Bit challenging as compare to Splunk.
3. Solution : On-Perm and SAAS
4. API and Extensibility : Provides API Support
5. Plugin Support : Similarly yes.
6. Components : Logstash,Elasticsearch and Kibana
7. Customer Support : Good
8. community Support : Better than splunk
9. Cost : 45 $/ month
10. Search : Query DSL
11. Compression : No

after that we will discuss the use cases of ELK stack so,

What are the use cases of ELK Stake?

• Log management: Log management is the practice of continuously gathering, storing, processing, synthesizing and analyzing data from disparate programs and applications in order to optimize system performance, identify technical issues, better manage resources, strengthen security and improve compliance
• Security monitoring and alerting: Signals Alerting for Elasticsearch can detect anomalies in data stored in Elasticsearch and other IT systems. Correlate your already existing Elasticsearch data with data from any REST endpoint, run calculations and statistics, and trigger notification if an anomaly was detected. Fully integrated with Search Guard Security.
• Web scraping:Web scraping is an automatic method to obtain large amounts of data from websites.
• E-commerce search solutions:
• Visualizing data: just because ELK stack is consist of Kibana(visualization tool),Elasticsearch + Kibana will become your go-to tool for visualizing data that you’re trying to wrap your head around.
• Full text search

After that we have some refrences,

References

https://blog.knoldus.com/introduction-to-splunk/

https://blog.knoldus.com/what-is-the-elk-stack/

In Conclusion :

In this blog, we have covered the definition and difference of splunk and ELK stack and its use cases because Monitoring tools ultimately give you the power to relieve your team from menial tasks, save time and money in service operations activities.