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In a global environment where data is now considered more valuable than oil, managing and securing vast amounts of data is critical for the modern enterprise.
Unsurprisingly, private and government organisations across Australia are increasingly leveraging Splunk to power enterprise observability, unified security, and custom applications.
Splunk is a stand-out tool for tracking and analysing large volumes of data, making it invaluable for modern IT operations.
While Splunk is renowned for its versatility in security and observability, its deployment is challenging. Navigating Splunk’s complexities requires highly qualified technical professionals with extensive practical experience.
This is where Tesserent steps in. With deep expertise and a proven track record, Tesserent helps organisations overcome the challenges associated with Splunk implementation.
Overcoming Splunk Implementation Challenges: Tesserent’s Expertise
Let’s examine the most common challenges faced in Splunk deployments and how Tesserent can assist you in designing, deploying, and managing your Splunk environment to optimise your Enterprise IT.
Challenge: Data Onboarding
To compete in today's digitally driven world, organisations must derive actionable insights from the ever-growing amount of machine data generated across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Part of Splunk’s versatility lies in its ability to handle any and all types of data. However, this is where many IT teams run into trouble. Properly onboarding data can be overwhelming, especially with large volumes of untapped, unidentified "dark data."
Many organisations need help to clean and manage their data effectively, making it difficult to leverage Splunk's capabilities completely.
Employing effective data onboarding practices is critical for optimal Splunk performance.
Suppose a data source is ingested with default configurations. In that case, Splunk will spend a lot of time and processing power guessing the correct settings for each event before ingesting the data, which is inefficient and costly.
Solution: Ingest Optimisation
Tesserent's expertise in ingest optimisation and data onboarding ensures that your Splunk deployment is efficient and effective. Our Splunk-certified engineers ensure proper configuration of source types, including settings for event line breaking, timestamp recognition, and field extraction. They also ensure efficient data parsing and indexing, leading to faster and more accurate searches, improved data consistency, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).
The Tesserent approach provides all the necessary context for understanding data, transforming Splunk from an experienced linguist deciphering raw data into an efficient system that reads and processes data seamlessly.
Challenge: User Experience Optimisation
While Splunk offers immense data management and analytics potential, users often find the user experience (UX) lacking. Without customisation, users frequently struggle with limited control over their data pipelines. Despite the platform's flexibility, configuring it to meet specific needs can be difficult, especially given the skills gap in IT teams regarding Splunk customisation.
Creating effective dashboards is crucial to overcoming these challenges. Dashboards should be simple, intuitive, and tailored to user needs. Considering user familiarity with the data, choosing appropriate visualisations, and ensuring the layout guides users through a logical flow is essential. Regularly seeking user feedback and updating dashboards based on input can significantly enhance usability and effectiveness.
Configuring and customising the platform without a specialist Splunk engineer becomes an insurmountable challenge for some teams. This limitation means they lose the value of this powerful platform and are unable to harness its full potential for data analytics and management.
Solution: Custom Dashboards and Data Models
Tesserent can provide services to develop custom dashboards and console designs, ensuring they are powerful, user-friendly, and meet specific business needs.
Additionally, Tesserent offers expertise in creating powerful charts, detailed reporting, and effective alerts. These customisations help bridge the skills gap, enabling IT teams to leverage Splunk’s full potential without the steep learning curve.
By addressing these UX challenges through Tesserent’s tailored solutions and expert support, businesses can better utilise Splunk’s capabilities to drive actionable insights and enhance overall operational efficiency.
Challenge: Complex Cross-Platform Environments
Managing a diverse mix of on-premises systems, various cloud platforms, and hybrid solutions with Splunk is inherently complex. Ensuring consistency in deployment processes and compatibility across these environments demands significant effort and strategic planning. Different platforms often require distinct tools for development, testing, and deployment.
Seamlessly integrating and ensuring interoperability among these tools poses a significant challenge, necessitating careful consideration of compatibility issues and the development of a cohesive workflow. Each platform comes with unique security specifications, making it essential to maintain a consistent and robust security posture across all environments. Ensuring data consistency, addressing security vulnerabilities, and meeting compliance requirements are critical yet challenging tasks.
Solution: Mastering Cross-Platform Splunk Deployments with Tesserent
Tesserent's Splunk-certified engineers are adept at managing the complexities of cross-platform environments, leveraging their extensive expertise and advanced capabilities. Our engineers are highly skilled in deploying and managing Splunk across various platforms, including on-premises, Splunk Cloud, AWS, and Google Cloud, as well as hybrid environments.
Our team ensures seamless integration and migration between these platforms, addressing the unique challenges posed by each. By utilising a comprehensive approach that includes Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), User Behavior Analytics (UBA), and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), Tesserent's engineers can enhance your organisation's security posture, providing real-time insights and rapid incident response capabilities.
Tesserent's engineers apply best practices in continuous monitoring and automated response, ensuring robust security and compliance across diverse IT environments. Our expertise extends to deploying advanced security technologies and developing custom applications tailored to client needs. Through their deep knowledge and practical experience, Tesserent's Splunk-certified engineers empower organisations to overcome the challenges of complex, multi-platform environments, driving operational efficiency and enhancing overall security resilience.
Challenge: Continual Optimisation and Maintenance of Splunk
Due to the dynamic nature of IT infrastructures, maintaining and optimising a Splunk environment is a continual challenge. Over time, factors such as architectural changes, adding new users, upgrades, storage limitations, and organic growth can significantly impact Splunk's performance. Architectural modifications often require reconfigurations to ensure optimal data flow and processing, while adding users can increase the load on the system, necessitating performance tuning. Upgrades, although essential for leveraging new features and improvements, often bring compatibility and integration challenges that need careful management. Additionally, as data volumes grow organically, maintaining efficient data indexing and storage becomes critical to avoid performance bottlenecks.
Tesserent's Solutions for Splunk Optimisation
To address these ongoing challenges, Tesserent offers a comprehensive Splunk Health Assessment designed to maximise your Splunk investment. This service includes thoroughly reviewing your Splunk architecture, identifying potential issues and providing tailored recommendations for improvement.
Our experts utilise best practice guidelines from Splunk and their extensive experience to review and optimise instances, ensuring robust performance across search heads, indexers, and forwarders. The technical assessment covers all aspects of your environment, whether bare metal, virtualised, or cloud-based. This includes evaluating hardware specifications, VM configurations, OS settings, and resource utilisation to recommend enhancements. A crucial part of the assessment is the data collection health check, which optimises data classification and indexing, prioritises high-value data and minimises unnecessary data volumes.
Contact Tesserent today to discover how a Splunk Health Assessment can enhance your business operations. Schedule a free 20-minute consultation with our certified Splunk consultants today to learn how a Splunk Health Assessment can help you thrive in the digital age.
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Security Specialist
Tesserent is a full-service cybersecurity and secure cloud services provider, partnering with clients from all industries and all levels of government. Let’s talk.
