Lol, 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.

Lol, 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.

I 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!

Can 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?

It's pretty ridiculous this can happen. With building Matano (https://github.com/matanolabs/matano), an open source security lake, one of our core decisions was to store all data in S3 in Apache Iceberg tables (an open table format that lets you query data from any supporting tool i.e Spark, Presto, Athena, Snowflake, more). This let's you own your data without it being held hostage on some vendors instances in a proprietary format.

-https://github.com/matanolabs/matano

- https://iceberg.apache.org

>There’s no better SIEM alternative that deals with logs at scale.

I think folks that use Splunk for basic search just don't fully comprehend how capable the product is for hunt-type operations when someone fluent in SPL is at the helm.

I can't agree more. I've used every main 'competitor' now and nothing can compare to splunk for hunting across massive logging pools. It genuinely feels like magic with advanced SPL and solid regex.

My frustrations with Splunk have been around their certification and training changes over the years. Used to be able to get a solid tool certificate and decent training materials all for free. It only hurts Splunk though as less people have experience with the tool it lessens their advantage. Makes me disappointed as I really do like the tools itself but literally everything else is terrible. I'd much rather deal with Elastic or go open source with Security Onion.

> They didn't pay a bill on time (renewal negotiations)

I don't side with Splunk on their actions but I can't stand customers who withhold payment as a renewal tactic and think that it's equally wrong.

Wait, what? When a license expires my understanding is indexing continues, you just can't search, you can get a key to unlock search by contacting Splunk. I assume you mean the SaaS Splunk Cloud, then, because the renewal period would be far in advance of the license expiring, Splunk doesn't just "stop". That behavior makes no sense and would lose of a lot of clients, you can't just backfill data gaps.