I built a PCI compliance solution for a customer back in 2008 for ~$200k all-in when the closest competitor's bid was five times that. The product was amazing at runtime but of course had some idiosyncrasies in how it was configured and whatnot. I've been a user (only) of Splunk heavily ever since and just last year got pulled into a project to migrate a huge install to a cloud platform. It felt like I got into a time machine...there were seemingly zero administrative or architectural improvements to make the product more manageable or supportable in the 10+ years since I had last looked at it from an ops perspective.

I'm sure that's not 100% true but it felt like it. Trying to build Splunk on top of a modern IaC deployment methodology is a huuuuge lift.