Splunk Enterprise vs DNSFilter: Which is a better fit?

Joe: Hi, this is Joe. I'm a software engineer. I give Splunk Enterprise five out of five. And for more reviews, click below. Before Splunk Enterprise, we had manual tools. We were using command line tools, like Grab, Sed, and ARK, and whatever kind of homegrown scripting we could come up with. And it was not really working for us very well. We had gigabytes of log files and it was difficult to find what we needed to. There was no way to do an index search. It was slow, cumbersome, and it really was limited for the type of data that we had. We chose Splunk Enterprise because a related project was having great success with it, and they had a similar dataset that we were going to be using so they strongly recommended that we use it. And they were correct. We were able to develop our own searches, our own dashboards, and for the type of data we had, Splunk worked beautifully and it came up with everything that we needed. So it was my responsibility to come up with Splunk Enterprise and get everything up and running, and I didn't have any background in data analysis or writing searches or queries or dealing with data ingestion. So what we did was I went to training from the Splunk University in California, and I also was able to use online videos that Splunk had available for free. And after doing all of that, I went back to the office and I was able to install Splunk. I was able to get the data ingested and then write some dashboards and searches and queries. And from that, quite a few visualizations were available to us. And so I took that to the team. I showed off what we could learn from the data we had. They had a lot of comments, and I made quite a few iterations through the system. All of that was quite easy to do and it really did not take very long at all, especially from someone that didn't have a background in doing this before. So we were quite pleased with it. Well, if you're new to the world of big data and data ingestion and visualizations, I would definitely recommend watching the videos that Splunk has available that can teach you how to use the software. I would also recommend their training courses were very helpful and they're great for beginners, and they also have advanced courses if you want to continue onward. And I would recommend using the internet. There's a lot of blogs out there. There's a lot of news articles you can read. There's a lot of tutorials, a lot of help in video form and in written form. So the great thing about Splunk is it's so popular and there is just a lot of information out there available to you. You don't have to struggle through things on your own.

Matt: My name is Matt I'm President of a technology company. I give DNSFilter a rating of five, and for reviews like this click below. We focus heavily on the non-profit sector. And so when we were evaluating different vendors, scalability, price, and just what their barriers to entry. What we might mean by that is how many devices have to be in an environment? what's the minimum spend? Those kinds of factors were taken into consideration, and through all of that, DNSFilter was found to have every solution or every option we needed. It was great for the non-profit sector. It got rid of all of the minimums and requirements and the budgets and fit everything into a non-profit budget. So we jumped on board with DNSFilter, ran through all the demos and trials, and they came out with no errors that we could ever find. We chose DNSFilter after we had reviewed their pricing and their minimums and found that everything fit within a non-profit budget. We then took it to the tech team. I was one of the ones who looked at it very first, and I know this goes against all the rules, but I deployed it into a test environment without ever reading any of the instructions and had the entire thing up and running within five minutes. That alone impressed me with how easy and intuitive it was to use. And so when the rest of our team began looking at it, checking more into the more advanced settings, we found that it was still very, very intuitive to use. Our admins could find anything and everything they needed. All the reporting and getting into threat analysis, we were able to find everything we needed without having to spend a lot of time just clicking through a whole bunch of pages and getting lost. We were able to quickly and easily find everything we needed. The integration of DNSFilter was very straightforward. They give you the settings that you need, a couple of DNS settings, as well as everything you need for setting up what's called a roaming client. Very straightforward. Step-by-step, they do not leave you hanging and guessing how to configure a setting or how to deploy an agent. What we had found was existing clients, we had them onboarded within about five minutes for each site, and those who were newer clients, we just easily put the agent into our onboarding procedures, did not slow our technicians down, did not change the amount of time it takes to onboard clients. We found that it integrated very, very nicely. It deploys easily with simple scripts. So we have not found any challenges at this point for deploying DNSFilter. Anybody who's looking to get DNSFilter, I would say jump on it right away. You've got a simple trial that you can use. You can get the entire environment stood up within a matter of minutes and begin your testing. All within a half hour, you can get signed up, have a test environment running, and begin seeing the results. There's no reason not to try out DNSFilter. And I believe that as soon as anybody logs in and sees the platform and see it in action, they'll buy it right away.