Come See Us at RSA 25 Conference: Enabling Splunk Observability and Security with NETSCOUT Smart Data

Splunk has a great commercial titled  No more “I don’t knows.”

The commercial depicts an organization struggling to determine why its business-critical application is down. 
 

Question: Who’s working on the problem - IT, Engineering, Security? 
Answer: I don’t know.
Question: Is it the network, the application, a cyber-attack?
Answer: I don’t know.
 

In the end, a Splunk representative comes to save the day by explaining how Splunk provides complete visibility across all systems so you always know what’s going on and can recover faster from incidents like this.

Though comically done in the commercial, this scenario plays itself out every day in not-so-funny real-world environments.

Splunk emphasizes the integration of observability and security within a unified platform (i.e. Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud) to enhance organizations' ability to detect, investigate, and respond to issues more effectively. By consolidating security and observability data, Splunk provides end-to-end visibility across digital systems, enabling proactive management of both performance and security incidents.

Splunk Platform can unite security and observability data, provide data tiering flexibility, and allow data reuse capabilities.  In cases like in the commercial, when a business-critical application is down or faltering, one of the most important sources of data is network data.

In today’s digital-first world, networks are the lifeblood of business operations. Every email, transaction, customer interaction, critical system update, and even attacker activity flows across networks — making them an incredibly rich source of information.

Yet, many organizations still struggle to fully tap into the value hidden in their network data.  This is where NETSCOUT can help.

NETSCOUT has been capturing, analyzing, and creating intelligence from network traffic for over 40 years. Using patented deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, NETSCOUT converts raw network packets into an intelligent source of data we call “Smart Data”.

NETSCOUT provides a unified, highly scalable architecture that enables an organization to gain packet-level visibility across its entire digital infrastructure. Because NETSCOUT network analysis technology understands thousands of different network protocols, it can provide even deeper insights into industry-specific applications (e.g., finance, healthcare, ICS). With this level of “Visibility Without Borders,” organizations can gain both comprehensive and deep end-to-end visibility into their most critical business applications.

Together, Splunk’s Observability and Security Platforms, powered by NETSCOUT’s network insights, enable NetOps and SecOps teams to not only harden their defenses but also operate more efficiently and resiliently and stay ahead of potential disruptions.

For example:

Observability is all about gaining deep, actionable insights into the health and behavior of your systems. Traditional monitoring tells you when something breaks; observability tells you why — and often before it happens.

NETSCOUT Smart Data helps Net/DevOps teams answer questions such as:

What are the critical dependencies for this multi-tiered application?

How are these components performing?

Is the down or slow down due to the network, the front-end web server, the back-end database, or supporting DNS or authentication services?

NETSCOUT Smart Data provides the answers to all of these questions, enabling the organization to pinpoint the cause of the issue and resolve it quickly.

Cyber security attacks can ultimately manifest themselves as application downtime.  Today, cyberattacks are stealthier, and traditional perimeter defenses, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and server logs aren't enough. The same NETSCOUT packet-based Smart Data used for network or application performance, anomaly detection, and troubleshooting can also be used by SecOps for cyber threat detection and incident response. NETSCOUT Smart Data provides a single, unalterable, high-fidelity source of network data that can be used in Splunk for:

• Threat Detection: Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) provides hundreds of built-in threat detection analyses. NETSCOUT’s Splunk Common Information Model (CIM)-compliant Smart Data can be seamlessly used in Splunk to reveal malicious activity (e.g. from lateral movement inside your network to command-and-control communications to data exfiltration).
• Investigation, Hunting, and Incident Response: When an incident is detected in Splunk ES, NETSCOUT’s Smart Data, which is captured independent of any detections, can be used by Splunk ES to conduct historical investigations. NETSCOUT Smart Data can be used to understand exactly what happened before, during, or after the incident occurred. NETSCOUT Smart Data can be used to proactively hunt for signs of network or data breaches that may have been missed. Finally, NETSCOUT Smart data provides the forensic evidence to determine the appropriate incident response.
• Compliance: NETSCOUT Smart Data in Splunk helps demonstrate compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, providing audit trails without heavy manual effort.

Splunk is a great platform for Observability and Security that can be made even better by leveraging NETSCOUT Smart Data. Instead of managing siloed network data sources (e.g., netflow, individual server logs, etc.) NetOp and SecOp teams can leverage a unified NETSCOUT Smart Data source to reduce complexity and cost and not have any more “I Don’t Know” scenarios.

To witness how NETSCOUT’s Smart Data can be used in Splunk’s Observability and Security Platforms, come visit us at RSA 25 Booth # 1435 or, even better, book a meeting with one of our experts.