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Splunk, as a company, is a shell of its former self. All they care about is pimping themselves out to maximize profits to an extreme that only Dilbert can relat
by flounder3 4y ago
Splunk, as a company, is a shell of its former self. All they care about is pimping themselves out to maximize profits to an extreme that only Dilbert can relate to, even at the expense of destroying a long term professional relationship over trivial matters. They are more than happy to kill a deal over a 5% disagreement rather than understand the needs of a Fortune 500 customer and negotiate.
They are mad because Cribl is good at transforming data before it ingested by Splunk, so as to reduce the amount of data that is indexed. Period.
Splunk ONLY RECENTLY released “Ingest Actions” to filter data post-ingest (to avoid indexing) for their SaaS product — something that has always been a mainstay of their on-premise “Enterprise” product. Their ONLY suggestion to filter data that we didn’t care to index in early 2021? Cribl. There’s literally no other reason for us to use Cribl.
I’ve been paying for Splunk since 2008 and can’t wait to get away from them. Their sales teams have decayed into unethical slimebags and I am trying everything in my power to not renew our contracts with them. This just sealed the deal.
Source: I cut checks to Splunk for $x,xxx,xxx yearly
- ec109685 4y agoWhat are you planning to move to?
- flounder3 4y agoSounds crazy, but Datadog. I’ve been hammering their product teams for years with specific use cases for the sole purpose of replacing Splunk. They recently migrated search technologies and are rapidly closing the gap. Plus, their exclusion features are instant and fantastic, and their C-suite replies to me when I escalate. Elasticsearch simply couldn’t handle key collisions. We have hundreds of various apps across 5-10 different languages and frameworks where a key name may be reused as either a string or a hash or an integer or an array. If we can’t freeform search (which Splunk is EXCELLENT at), we just need to be able to transform the data beforehand. Datadog plans to do so with their recent acquisition of Vector.
- david38 4y agoSounds crazy indeed. I worked at Splunk for many years and was a DataDog customer later. The costs of either are not something I care to deal with.
- rsdbdr203 4y agoWould love to know more about specific use-cases you've been talking to Datadog about. I'm starting a company (log-store.com) that I pitch to people as 75% of the features of Splunk at 50% the price. Right now that 75% is probably more like 25%, and the 50% is _actually_ 0%... it's FREE! Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!
- ec109685 4y agoSad. Splunk should be more fantastic. They have done the heavy lifting of taking streams of data at high volume, which should be the basis to build a log search product, metrics And alerting, and observability. Instead, each of these systems have their own collectors and correlating from one to the other is hard. A canonical log line is so much more valuable than a metric collected every 60 seconds, and the former can derive the latter: https://stripe.com/blog/canonical-log-lines https://stripe.com/blog/canonical-log-lines Splunk should have been the lynchpin.
- flounder3 4y agoAbsolutely agree. It’s tragic. Shoving SignalFx down our mouths and trying to get us to create “metric” indices was the straw that broke my back.
- jcims 4y agoI built a PCI compliance solution for a customer back in 2008 for ~$200k all-in when the closest competitor's bid was five times that. The product was amazing at runtime but of course had some idiosyncrasies in how it was configured and whatnot. I've been a user (only) of Splunk heavily ever since and just last year got pulled into a project to migrate a huge install to a cloud platform. It felt like I got into a time machine...there were seemingly zero administrative or architectural improvements to make the product more manageable or supportable in the 10+ years since I had last looked at it from an ops perspective. I'm sure that's not 100% true but it felt like it. Trying to build Splunk on top of a modern IaC deployment methodology is a huuuuge lift.
- jollofricepeas 4y agoExactly. This is the question. If you’re looking for APM well you’ve got great options but for those using Splunk in the security space (SIEM & SOAR) you’re screwed. There’s no better SIEM alternative that deals with logs at scale. Splunk recently screwed a friends Fortune 50 company. They didn't pay a bill on time (renewal negotiations) and Splunk without even contacting them just left all the logs from one of their instances on the floor. They lost everything for literally an entire country. I mean EVERYTHING.
- flounder3 4y agoLol, this is exactly what I was referring to! We were negotiating a massive renewal (50x budget IN EARNEST!) and out of nowhere they threatened to cut us off with less than 24 hours notice because we were a week behind their schedule, despite signed agreements. Thankfully our VAR (a longtime partner) jumped in and cut a PO to vouch for us and our word. NONE of our other vendors have EVER done that shit in my entire career. EVER. My word means nothing to them; they act like a pure private equity player now.
- nicolas_t 4y agoLol, I could have written exactly the same comments you did about Splunk. I'm the one who decided to start using splunk for our company 8 years ago, we're working on migrating away and I will never under any circumstances consider recommending splunk for any future companies I work for.
- flounder3 4y agoI can truly empathize. I’ve never wasted so much of my time on a vendor. It’s infuriating and certainly not worth the personal stress and agony. It shouldn’t be this hard!
- buffet_overflow 4y agoCan echo the licensing sentiments across 2 companies now. It's a shame because I grew to really like SPL and how Splunk handled web based distributed search. What are you moving towards now, if I may ask?
- kordlessagain 4y agoEx-splunker here. I just started working at FeatureBase and would say, if your data is in Kafka, FeatureBase might be something to consider. It’s a crazy fast binary index built on Roaring bitmaps.
- windexh8er 4y agoI can add from the other side of the fence. I worked for a startup that was acquired by Splunk. They are everything listed here and worse on the inside. My first few weeks at Splunk were very odd. They try to indoctrinate new hires with a barrage of "A-players" that continuously talked about how awesome Splunk was. Except... When I started Splunk was getting their ass kicked by cloud-first players that had recently come to market. Splunk's monolithic architecture wasn't well suited to be run as SaaS at the time and Splunk was burning cash and losing money on every customer that they suckered into moving away from their perpetual licenses into subscription hell. I left money on the table when I ran out the door less than 6 months later. I'm curious what Splunk's long game is with this because they just told every F2000 that their bottom line is being chipped away by Cribl and friends. So if I'm an enterprising procurement department I'd be tossing Cribl or Rudderstack or whatever other data transformation preprocessor on the table alongside my renewal. Expand opportunity? If you put your ear to the tracks you can almost hear all of the account managers digging out missed quota excuses. Splunk isn't innovative and hasn't been for a long time. Most of the employees saw the writing on the wall and went to Snowflake as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Splunk tried to capitalize on the security market by, basically, double charging customers for ES. Instead of delivering value it seems to be Splunk is just looking for ways to squeeze a few last drops of lemonade.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- keyle 4y agoSounds like a good move... From their about page: Splunkers have received over 1,020 patents to date that tells me everything I need to know.
- PanosJee 4y agoI am one of those people. There was a bonus for every patent granted. They were telling us that we need to big patent arsenal to fend off against IBM. It turned out that Splunk is IBM now.
- psaux 4y agoNo comment about the company, but want to make clear as a buyer you understand the procurement and legal parts i.e. MFN or MFC. If they do discount, even 5%, then it ripples across their accounts as a legal matter, esp at your scale. I was a buyer for some big companies, 8 digit, and the procurement office would only do a deal with MFN/MFC clause. They would also audit the supplier from time to time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- flounder3 4y agoI totally understand that ripple effect and am very familiar with Most Favored X when it comes to unit pricing of a tangible good (e.g. xx,xxx physical servers with a particular SKU), but in this case we were talking about a SaaS product where overages were disputed. Nearly every vendor would jump at the chance to discount additional commitments or support at the ‘expense’ of waiving some past overages.
- psaux 4y agoThanks for the response, been there on the overages per SAAS’s. Now running a startup, they scare me even more.
- totetsu 4y agoLast used splunk around 2010, and we ran a bunch of scripts to truncate and reformat logs before they got anywhere near our splunk data load license