What is an On-demand Splunk Consultant?
Splunk is the enterprise for over 11,000 organizations that use its Unified Security and Observability Platform. On-demand Consultants are passionate about helping you find a solution for every request to make the best impact possible and are motivated by a thirst to keep updated on emerging technologies and thrive in a constantly evolving environment.
An on-demand consultant will help you with Splunk Core/Cloud, Enterprise Security/UBA, SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response)/ Phantom, ITOps, and DevOps. Their daily focus is to ensure your satisfaction; this is why they will focus on meeting all your requirements on every request, deliver outstanding outcomes on your every requirement, document every activity & outcome, and help you meet your requirements to the best of your ability.
All on-demand Splunk Consultants possess experience in technical consulting or big-data analytics and can demonstrate an understanding of common enterprise applications such as statistical and analytical modeling. These consultants have trained to help you with Splunk implementation, Splunk Cloud & Cloud fundamentals, Splunk architecture experience, and Cloud Migration.
Why Should you Hire a consultant?
It is possible to implement Splunk and all its interfaces yourself, but it is meant to be a vast program, and everyone needs help occasionally. Though Splunk can help you reduce IT (Information Technology) troubleshooting time by up to 90% and triage up to 70% faster, it may be difficult to admit that sometimes you need help because Splunk takes some time to get used to.
Many organizations fail to realize the extent of power that the Splunk software has. It can take weeks or even months to deploy the software, which can set back the company and often hinder the decision to invest in the tool. Once you have purchased Splunk, you can take a moment to ask yourself, “Do we have the technical expertise to understand and utilize all the features that Splunk offers fully? Can we take the time to understand all the niche technology?”
Sometimes, the answer is yes, but even if the answer is yes, think next about the extent of time and resources your company can put into understanding and utilizing Splunk. Make sure you are using your money effectively on infrastructure costs that you may not even be using, including spending needlessly on Splunk licenses. After deployment and adoption, you will also need ongoing care of your Splunk environment. There are many different issues that an experienced Splunk consultant will help you with.
Issue #1
Establishing a solid foundation to build on in the future is the most critical first step in deploying anything, and Splunk is no exception. Splunk is meant to be an easy install. Still, many configuration options may impact a Splunk environment when configuring it in the future or integrating with other platforms. Your organization needs to ensure that Splunk is scalable for easy future development to avoid unnecessary costs.
A Splunk professional can help install and configure your Splunk environment so that you can scale it in the future and bring on new components, such as a new indexer or forwarder. You can still have the same configurations as your environment changes through new data sources, servers, and appliances.
Issue #2
Because of Splunk’s vast number of resources and different platforms that you can use, it is easy to get excited looking at all the things it can do for you, which can lead to overspending on IT infrastructure that you may never need or use.
A Splunk consultant will sit down and learn all the requirements you need to meet and explain all the services you may need to do. By analyzing your Splunk environment, they can help you determine the best use of your resources, saving you thousands in server hosting costs, and give you definitive answers about how you need to deploy your Splunk server without any issues.
Issue #3
When implementing Splunk, you have a set amount of GB of saved data that you can use. Keeping unnecessary data on licenses wastes space, resulting in additional money on additional licenses. Often, organizations take out a second or even third license to save unnecessary information.
A Splunk consultant will review your saved data and determine what is helpful to help you cut down on licensing by cutting down data that does not provide value to your business. A Splunk consultant can even help you replace unneeded data with higher-value data that serves a purpose if you decide you want to keep multiple licenses.
Issue #4
The main reason most organizations opt to use Splunk is because of its wide variety of features and functionality options that provide a significant improvement in organizational efficiency. There are so many details that Splunk can help with; new administrators of Splunk may need help understanding or may take a long time to learn, which can be a disservice to the company.
When a professional administrator provides Splunk consulting services, they will bring an intimate knowledge of what the product offers, use their experience to deploy Splunk quickly, and even give you recommendations on what to do next. Partnering with a Splunk admin is the best thing you can do to deploy the Splunk environment.
Issue #5
Though the first step to deploying Splunk should be to partner with an experienced Splunk admin, it is also important to remember that they might only be on staff for a while. Your staff may be new to Splunk, which is okay if your organization tries to ensure they stay familiar with it for a while. This means having an experienced professional to consult with and train your staff.
A good Splunk administrator will also take the liberty to train your staff on everything they have implemented onto the Splunk platform and continue to make sure that your staff has everything they need to keep up with administrative efficiency. A Splunk administrator will educate your staff on how to use Splunk, including the Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL), and help users create dashboards, security alerts, and more.
Issue #6
Data analysis using Splunk dashboards and other visualizations is a wonderful way to help your company move forward by looking at all your data in one comprehensive view. The Splunk platform is designed for data reliability and reporting, but this is only possible if the user is fully equipped to use all aspects of the platform from top to bottom. Even when Splunk does all it is meant to do, many external factors could prevent data from reaching Splunk indexers. Any missing data will skew the results of reports, rendering them unusable.
With the help of a Splunk administrator, you can build confidence in your use of Splunk features like indexer, forwarder monitoring, and indexer clustering to design your IT ecosystem to avoid any problems that might arise. Any IT issues can lower your confidence in using Splunk systems, but with an experienced admin, you can stop any problems before they occur.
Conclusion
For many instances, Splunk is the go-to tool, but an experienced second look can help you take your data to new levels. Prudent your partner through times of Splunk needs. Click here for a consultation to experience new ways to use Splunk with our experienced Splunk partners!