Splunk vs. Microsoft Sentinel

Splunk Enterprise Security seamlessly ingests, normalizes and analyzes data from any source — at scale. Streamline data optimization to selectively ingest crucial data, including at the edge, and benefit from cost-effective storage through data tiering. Splunk Enterprise Security prioritizes what’s important to customers and integrates with global leaders in technology. We don’t play favorites.

Splunk has 1,500+ curated detections aligned to industry frameworks so you can realize value from day one. With Splunk, you get automatic security content updates delivered directly from the Splunk Threat Research Team to help you stay on top of new and emerging threats.

Microsoft Sentinel makes it difficult to identify key, impactful content when you’re outside of the console. Security practitioners may not understand when content is updated or how it maps to MITRE ATT&CK until attacks are actually surfaced. 

Optimize your data sources for best use in the Splunk platform. Search data where it lives and only ingest into Splunk when needed for tasks such as normalization, enrichment and data availability and retention. With Splunk Enterprise Security, you have the flexibility to store and access your data — even at the edge — and the choice to ingest key data critical to your security use cases. This ensures the most cost-effective data optimization strategy. 

Splunk Enterprise Security risk-based alerting (RBA) enhances prioritizations by attributing risk to users and systems, mapping alerts to cybersecurity frameworks and triggering alerts when risks exceed thresholds. This reduces alert fatigue, keeping efforts focused on detecting high-fidelity threats to proactively address risk. 

Sentinel lacks sophisticated  risk-based alerting. Security practitioners must dig through many alerts and attack chains, without knowing the most critical alerts to address first.  Not having advanced correlations and customizable risk scoring prevents Sentinel from effectively prioritizing alerts, so high-risk threats may not be addressed promptly.

With a unified risk-based threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR), Splunk powers the modern SOC by offering extensibility, seamless integrations and support for hybrid environments, coupled with a deep understanding of threats and risks. Splunk unifies TDIR workflows through integrated, industry-leading products such as Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk SOAR, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and Splunk Attack Analyzer to address a broad spectrum of SecOps use cases.

While Sentinel includes playbooks, its reliance on Logic Apps automation is tailored to the Azure ecosystem, limiting extensibility to non-Microsoft technologies. An effective SOC demands a SIEM platform that provides robust technical extensibility and seamless integrations, supports diverse, hybrid environments and empowers organizations with a deep understanding of threats and risks. With its narrower scope, Sentinel struggles to meet the dynamic, multifaceted needs of the modern SOC.

In the world of security, being future ready is essential. Beyond choice in architecture, vendor and predictable costs, Splunk continues to invest in the security community. We are a founding member of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), and are proud of our progress and where we’re headed. 

While Microsoft has started to make minimal contributions to OCSF, it appears they remain more interested in driving engagement with Microsoft products and standards than anything else.  As technology and standards evolve, customers may be left behind.