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Splunk Cloud vs Splunk Enterprise: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this Markdown code, we will discuss the key differences between Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise. Splunk Cloud is a cloud-based version of Splunk, while Splunk Enterprise is an on-premises software. Let's explore the differences between the two in detail.
Deployment Model: Splunk Cloud is a fully managed service provided by Splunk, where the entire infrastructure and management of the Splunk environment is handled by Splunk itself. On the other hand, Splunk Enterprise is deployed on-premises, requiring organizations to manage their own infrastructure, such as servers and network connectivity.
Scalability and Capacity: Splunk Cloud offers elastic scalability, allowing users to easily scale up or down their resources based on their needs. With Splunk Cloud, users can leverage the power of the cloud to handle large amounts of data and concurrent searches. Splunk Enterprise, while scalable, requires organizations to provision and manage their own hardware resources, which may have limitations based on their infrastructure and capacity planning.
Maintenance and Upgrades: With Splunk Cloud, Splunk takes care of all maintenance tasks and upgrades, ensuring that users have access to the latest features and bug fixes. Organizations using Splunk Enterprise, however, are responsible for their own maintenance tasks, such as applying patches and upgrading the software. This requires additional resources and effort to keep the environment running smoothly and up to date.
Security and Compliance: Splunk Cloud provides a secure infrastructure and is compliant with various industry regulations (i.e., HIPAA, GDPR). Splunk takes care of security measures like data encryption, access controls, and network security. With Splunk Enterprise, organizations have the flexibility to implement their own security measures and comply with industry regulations, but the responsibility lies with the organization itself.
Cost and Pricing: Splunk Cloud operates on a subscription-based pricing model, where users pay a recurring fee based on their usage and the number of data ingested. The costs are predictable and can scale with the organization's needs. Splunk Enterprise, on the other hand, requires an upfront investment in hardware and software licenses, along with ongoing maintenance costs. The total cost of ownership may vary based on the size of the deployment and the resources required.
Customization and Control: Splunk Cloud provides a managed environment with limited customization options. Users have control over their own specific configurations and applications, but some capabilities may be limited due to the managed nature of the service. With Splunk Enterprise, organizations have full control and flexibility to customize and tailor the environment according to their specific needs, allowing for extensive customization and integration possibilities.
In summary, Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise differ in their deployment model, scalability, maintenance and upgrades, security and compliance, cost and pricing, and customization and control. Splunk Cloud provides a fully managed, scalable, and secure cloud-based solution, while Splunk Enterprise offers more control and customization options but requires organizations to manage their own infrastructure and maintenance tasks.
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 Cloud
- More powerful & Integrates with on-prem & off-prem7
- Free3
- Powerful log analytics3
- Pci compliance1
- Production debugger1
Pros of Splunk Enterprise
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