Splunk Enterprise Certified Administrator Course Review

What is Splunk?

It's a software tool that makes machine data on multiple machines across the network available for analysis, better known as SIEM (Security Incident Event Management). It does this by collecting data, identifying patterns, providing metrics, diagnosing problems, and performing basic analytics on all the machines that have had the Splunk agent installed on them. This information can then be read by security experts on the management dashboard and used to drive cybersecurity operations. Splunk is one of the most used tools and is also a publicly-traded company. If you look at Splunk's stock performance over the last five years, it has risen from $46-$173 over 400% in 5 years. This is a testament to how well the company is doing and is a good indicator that they are likely to do well going into the foreseeable future.

What is the Splunk enterprise certified administrator?

This course has two purposes. Firstly, it prepares students to pass the Splunk Core Certified Administrator Exam offered by Splunk. Second, it provides training individuals to administer Splunk in their environment. It goes over all of Splunk's main features both in theory and through walkthroughs, which will give you a chance to get used to its interface, see how queries are run, and understand some of its capabilities. It is intended for any cybersecurity professional that uses Splunk daily. Certification provides some accreditation if you're a consultant and wants third-party validation of your skill and experience using Splunk. The course is taught by Anthony Fecondo, a Splunk professional service consultant with several years of experience working with SIEMs within security operations centers (SOCs). Below are some key concepts found in this course.

Splunk Administration

This course will teach you how to be a Splunk administrator in an organization. Splunk works by installing universal forwarders on different systems within the company, those agents record and feed data back into the SIEM itself. This course will teach you how to use the dashboard, run queries to extract information from the database and create visualizations that you can use to show information easily to stakeholders. One of the most important parts of this software is reporting on key performance indicators to management.

User Management

Suppose you're an upper-level analyst or manager. In that case, you will be responsible for managing the accounts for tens or hundreds of users, so You will learn how to manage different user accounts levels. It is important to understand your different account options so that you can maintain the appropriate least privilege model. Splunk offers four general roles: global admin, team admin, alert admin, and user, each with user permissions.

Receiving and turning data

If you have ever worked with a SIEM or any security tool that generates alerts, you get many false positives. They are alerts that appear to be security issues but are not valid. You can also have false negatives when the tool fails to generate an alert for a legitimate security issue. This course teaches you how to tune Splunk so that you can have fewer false positives and false negatives. It is important to make sure you don't miss out on any real security issues.

Conclusion

This course prepares cybersecurity professionals to take the Splunk enterprise administrator certification, a certification offered by Splunk. It can go a long way in proving your proficiency and familiarity with the platform, which will give employers confidence in your ability. Throughout the course, you will be taught all the different components, including deployment, licensing, configuration files, indexing processes, managing users, authorization and authentication, reporting, and user experience. It's a very comprehensive course that also comes with labs where you can follow along with the instructor as they perform the platform's actions.