Somerford Associates Limited

Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)

Splunk ITSI is an intelligent solution which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), powered by Machine Learning (ML) to help reduce event noise and predict service degradation and outages of core business and IT services.

Splunk ITSI, Observability, SignalFX provides visibility over a business service and its underpinning IT applications and infrastructure.

Features

  • Collects and indexes log and machine data from any source
  • Powerful search, analysis and visualisation capabilities
  • Real time analysis for operational intelligence and business reporting
  • AI and ML reduce event noise to predict future degradation
  • Quickly determine the origin of an incident and its root
  • Monitor and manage internet of things including SCADA data
  • Big Data Analytics, machine data from internet/internal network
  • Provides business and service context to prioritise incident investigation
  • Supports drill downs to profile an entity and troubleshoot outages
  • Observability and SignalFX - Real Time Cloud Monitoring for infrastructure

Benefits

  • Monitor performance of network infrastructure against Service level Agreements
  • Real-time network intelligence, avoid costly network escalations/downtime
  • Automate alerts, remediation and incident workflows
  • Delivers a central, unified view of critical IT services
  • Maps critical services with KPIs to pinpoint what matters most
  • Proactively monitor clients/users understand and anticipate their needs
  • Uses machine learning to detect patterns and dynamically adapt thresholds
  • Consolidate capabilities, reduce platform and application specific tools
  • Real-time anomaly detection reduces alert fatigue
  • Analyse machine data from systems with varying formats

Pricing

£3,641 a licence a year

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at penny.harrison@somerfordassociates.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 12

Service ID

6 2 4 7 3 2 0 1 5 9 7 6 3 2 1

Contact

Somerford Associates Limited Penny Harrison
Telephone: +44 1242 388168
Email: penny.harrison@somerfordassociates.com

Service scope

Software add-on or extension
No
Cloud deployment model
  • Public cloud
  • Private cloud
  • Hybrid cloud
Service constraints
None
System requirements
  • Hardware non Windows> 2 x 6 core 2+GHZ, 12GB RAM
  • Windows> 2 x 6 core 2+GHZ, 12GB RAM
  • Windows Server 2012 and later
  • Linux, 2.6 and later
  • Windows 8.1, 10
  • Mac OS X 10.12 and later

User support

Email or online ticketing support
Email or online ticketing
Support response times
Response within 1 hour
User can manage status and priority of support tickets
No
Phone support
Yes
Phone support availability
9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
Web chat support
No
Onsite support
Yes, at extra cost
Support levels
Our Service Desk provides support for P1 to P4 where a part of the software, appliance or license was previously working and is not working as expected or at all.

If an issue requires a level of Professional Services to engage, a member of the support team will discuss with your Account Manager to discuss this further.

Service Desk offer support through several channels, including telephone, e-mail and remote sessions where appropriate. Any employee of our entitled customers can raise a support desk ticket via telephone or e-mail with their company e-mail address. This will be logged and assigned to an engineer who will respond within 1 business hour.

Somerford resolve over 90% of service desk tickets without requiring the involvement of our Partners. Where Partner involvement is required, we will advise you on this the process. Wherever possible, we will manage your service desk case with our Partners.

Our service desk is available between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday, excluding Bank Holidays. Our service desk will provide support for existing Customers and companies that are engaged in Proof of Concepts.

All our customers have a Technical Account Manager.
Support available to third parties
Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

Getting started
Splunk can provide free evaluation licences. We will provide Professional Services to help plan and execute your deployment and offer a full catalogue of training services to support the deployment.
Service documentation
Yes
Documentation formats
  • HTML
  • PDF
End-of-contract data extraction
The Splunk tool provides analysis and visualisation of data from various sources. The data rests at its original location and does not solely reside in Splunk. Therefore there is no need for data extraction at end of contract
End-of-contract process
If a licence is terminated we can provide Professional Services at extra cost to help the Buyer to migrate their analytics need to another supplier.

Using the service

Web browser interface
Yes
Supported browsers
  • Internet Explorer 11
  • Firefox
  • Chrome
  • Safari 9+
Application to install
No
Designed for use on mobile devices
Yes
Differences between the mobile and desktop service
Mobile web browser functionality is the same. Splunk Mobile App does not provide visualisations but it can be used for alerting
Service interface
No
API
Yes
What users can and can't do using the API
The Splunk Enterprise REST API provides methods for accessing every feature in our product. Your program talks to Splunk Enterprise using HTTP or HTTPS, the same protocols that your web browser uses to interact with web pages, and follows the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST).
API documentation
Yes
API documentation formats
  • HTML
  • ODF
  • PDF
API sandbox or test environment
Yes
Customisation available
Yes
Description of customisation
The user is able to configure dashboards, alerts, reports and underlying target data sources. Configuration can be through Splunk Web, Splunk's Command Line Interface (CLI), Splunk's REST API or directly within configuration.

Scaling

Independence of resources
Splunk Cloud sits on dedicated infrastructure scaled appropriately to each customers license size. Alternatively Splunk sits in the buyers network or the infrastructure of their chosen cloud provider and therefore contention is under their control.

Analytics

Service usage metrics
No

Resellers

Supplier type
Reseller providing extra support
Organisation whose services are being resold
Splunk

Staff security

Staff security clearance
Conforms to BS7858:2012
Government security clearance
Up to Developed Vetting (DV)

Asset protection

Knowledge of data storage and processing locations
Yes
Data storage and processing locations
  • United Kingdom
  • European Economic Area (EEA)
User control over data storage and processing locations
Yes
Datacentre security standards
Managed by a third party
Penetration testing frequency
At least once a year
Penetration testing approach
In-house
Protecting data at rest
Other
Other data at rest protection approach
Splunk's own cloud service uses logical data separation, authenticated user accounts, and industry standard hardening. Data in transit is encrypted with industry standard SSL and data at rest is encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption. This service is acccredited to ISO270001. We can help the buyer to enable a similar configuration suitable for their data at rest protection.
Data sanitisation process
Yes
Data sanitisation type
  • Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation
  • Deleted data can’t be directly accessed
Equipment disposal approach
Complying with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v.30, CAS (Sanitisation) or ISO/IEC 27001

Data importing and exporting

Data export approach
There are many ways that a user can export data. Splunk provides a REST API to export data. Data can be exported by the Splunk Web facility. Users can use the Command Line Interface, SDK's and data forwarding tools.
Data export formats
  • CSV
  • Other
Other data export formats
  • XML
  • JSON
  • Raw data
Data import formats
  • CSV
  • Other
Other data import formats
  • XML
  • JSON
  • Raw data

Data-in-transit protection

Data protection between buyer and supplier networks
TLS (version 1.2 or above)
Data protection within supplier network
TLS (version 1.2 or above)

Availability and resilience

Guaranteed availability
Splunk Cloud is considered available if you are able to log into your Splunk Cloud Service account and initiate a search using Splunk Software. Splunk continuously monitors the status of each Splunk Cloud environment to ensure the SLA of 100% uptime. In addition, Splunk Cloud monitors several additional health and performance variables.

Alternatively Splunk sits within the Buyers network or the infrastructure of their chosen cloud provider. Availability is controlled by the Buyer or their cloud provider
Approach to resilience
Splunk handles resilience by replication of data across a cluster of Splunk Indexers across data centres. Splunk Cloud maintains a seven-day backup of data and configuration files and backups run continuously.

Alternatively Splunk sits within the Buyers network or the infrastructure of their chosen cloud provider. Resilience is the responsibility of the Buyer or their cloud provider
Outage reporting
Splunk provides a cloud monitoring console to monitor the health of your Splunk Cloud environment. Email alerts are also available.

Alternatively Splunk sits within the Buyers network or the infrastructure of their chosen cloud provider. Outage reporting is the responsibility of the Buyer or their cloud provider.

Identity and authentication

User authentication needed
Yes
User authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Identity federation with existing provider (for example Google Apps)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Username or password
Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
The Splunk user authentication system allows the assignment of roles which provide custom permissions. The Buyer can define all roles using a list of capabilities and data access restrictions.
Access restriction testing frequency
At least once a year
Management access authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Identity federation with existing provider (for example Google Apps)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Username or password

Audit information for users

Access to user activity audit information
Users have access to real-time audit information
How long user audit data is stored for
User-defined
Access to supplier activity audit information
No audit information available
How long system logs are stored for
User-defined

Standards and certifications

ISO/IEC 27001 certification
Yes
Who accredited the ISO/IEC 27001
KPMG
ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date
25/01/2016
What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover
Deployment in customers own environment
ISO 28000:2007 certification
No
CSA STAR certification
No
PCI certification
Yes
Who accredited the PCI DSS certification
KPMG
PCI DSS accreditation date
04/03/2016
What the PCI DSS doesn’t cover
Deployment in customers own environment
Other security certifications
Yes
Any other security certifications
  • HIPAA
  • SOC 2 Type II

Security governance

Named board-level person responsible for service security
Yes
Security governance certified
Yes
Security governance standards
ISO/IEC 27001
Information security policies and processes
Our Cloud based service uses third-party validation by Brightline. Auditing of our processes and policies efforts to safeguard customer data to industry standards worldwide. Working with our audit partners, SOC 2 Type 2 attestation is completed for all Splunk Cloud customer environments and ISO 27001 certification is completed for Splunk Cloud customer environments provisioned for data ingestion of over 20GB/day

Operational security

Configuration and change management standard
Supplier-defined controls
Configuration and change management approach
For Splunk initiated changes, maintenance is performed at most once per month and Customers will receive notice of Routine Maintenance by email at least 48 hours in advance. For Customer initiated changes, the maintenance can be performed regularly. You can request an alternate time within the Routine Maintenance window if required. Customers will receive email notice when such maintenance is starting and when complete.

Alternatively Splunk sits in the network of the Buyer or the infrastructure of their chosen cloud provider, Configuration and change management is the responsibility of the Buyer or their supplier.
Vulnerability management type
Supplier-defined controls
Vulnerability management approach
We have a robust process for threats to the Splunk platform. We maintain a policy of evaluating all potential security vulnerabilities that are discovered internally or externally within two business days of discovery. We use the industry standard CVSSv2 to rate vulnerabilities. In the case of critical risk, high impact vulnerabilities, Splunk will make all reasonable effort to supply patches, assuming that patches are a viable stop-gap for customers who cannot otherwise upgrade Splunk.
Protective monitoring type
Supplier-defined controls
Protective monitoring approach
Splunk monitors application and platform components of the service for potential issues. Cloud Operations staff monitor alerts and logs for issues, and log a ticket for issues that require remediation. In the event of application or data compromise affecting customer data, the customer is notified immediately and remains in contact with the remediation team until resolution.

The security measures of Splunk and AWS are further described in the Technical Briefing paper at https://www.splunk.com/pdfs/technical-briefs/safeguarding-customer-data-in-splunk-cloud.pdf
Incident management type
Supplier-defined controls
Incident management approach
Splunk maintains an incident response policy and program, with defined processes, roles and responsibilities. Customers may submit security issues through the normal support channels or any additional channels as provided in the EULA.

Secure development

Approach to secure software development best practice
Independent review of processes (for example CESG CPA Build Standard, ISO/IEC 27034, ISO/IEC 27001 or CSA CCM v3.0)

Public sector networks

Connection to public sector networks
No

Pricing

Price
£3,641 a licence a year
Discount for educational organisations
No
Free trial available
Yes
Description of free trial
Full capability of a Splunk Enterprise license for 60 days allowing indexing up to 500 megabytes of data per day. This can be converted to a perpetual Free license or the buyer can purchase an Enterprise license to continue using the expanded functionality designed for multi-user deployments.
Link to free trial
https://www.splunk.com/en_us/download/sem.html?ac=sitelink_freedownload&gclid=Cj0KEQjw5YfHBRDzjNnioYq3_swBEiQArj4pdC_6Iz6y

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at penny.harrison@somerfordassociates.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.