Adopting a Usage-based Alternative to Splunk for Endpoint Telemetry

Guest blog courtesy of LimaCharlie.

Service providers want functionality of Splunk, but without the budget-breaking costs of operating the platform. Ingesting, storing, and analyzing endpoint telemetry with Splunk becomes increasingly expensive as organizations grow. Fortunately, there is a cloud-native alternative that easily collects endpoint telemetry without breaking the bank. MSSPs are using the SecOps Cloud Platform (SCP) to achieve Splunk capabilities (and more) for a fraction of the cost.

Pay-as-you-go, store data for a year

Cybersecurity pricing structures are often frustrating, cryptic, and subject to change with little notice. Security service providers feel this pain acutely whenever they negotiate product licensing for customers or guesstimating future resource demands. For example, MSSPs often buy extra endpoint protection licenses for customers, anticipating growth, and wind up holding the bag when their predictions are off.  

With the SCP, pricing is simple: a workstation endpoint, including a rolling year of free data storage, costs $3. Non-endpoint telemetry sources cost $0.20 per GB. That’s it. If customers need more endpoints or telemetry sources, at any time, the expense is easy to calculate. Deployment is equally simple thanks to SCP’s support for templated security profiles

No rip-and-replace

Many critical upgrades are indefinitely delayed due to the cost and complexity of ripping and replacing existing systems. Fortunately, API-first platforms like the SCP avoid this problem by integrating with your existing security stack. Anything with an API can easily integrate into the SCP as part of the larger security ecosystem. This allows teams to phase out existing tools gracefully without creating gaps in coverage.

For example, Splunk collects staggering amounts of data, the vast majority of it never used for a security incident. Connecting the SCP to the same telemetry sources and filtering out excess noise (while keeping everything for a year) is relatively simple. It also puts security teams in a strong position, allowing familiar technology to remain. As analysts grow comfortable writing YAML or JSON rules and invoking them via API on the SCP, redundant infrastructure can be safely retired.

Simpler, native, multi-tenancy

Trying to manage multiple organizations while keeping them siloed is a difficult task for service providers. This is because many tools, including Splunk, were not designed with multi-tenancy in mind. The SCP offers multi-tenancy as a core feature. Creating dozens of  tenants, complete with deployable security profiles, is as easy as creating one. With the SCP, each tenant’s billing, telemetry, and permissions are fully isolated. Onboarding and offboarding tenants takes just a few clicks.

Managed cloud infrastructure

Running Splunk often involves substantial hidden infrastructure costs. These additional expenses can double an organization’s cost estimates. Beyond the normal licensing and data usage fees, businesses must often pay for:

The SCP is a managed cloud platform that removes these and other infrastructure-related costs. Users familiar with cloud services and infrastructure will feel immediately at home on the SCP. Scaling services and creating additional endpoints is fast, simple, and direct. There is no need to buy additional hardware or hire experts solely to manage the infrastructure used by the SCP.

Automate for extreme responsiveness

Splunk is great at routing telemetry from various outputs, including endpoints, to specific destinations. The SCP excels at this as well, while offering a level of security responsiveness other data observability pipelines do not. With the SCP, automated detections run directly on logs rather than being shipped off to another tool for analysis.

For example, if O365 detects a strange login from an endpoint, an automated script can directly respond to O365 and have it block the account. In fact, entire automated Python playbooks can be written to perform countless security functions in response to endpoint telemetry. The SCP also includes an MCP server for security teams seeking to incorporate agentic AI into their security stack.

Optimize processes, reduce overhead, respond faster

Splunk is a powerful tool that requires considerable infrastructure and expertise to maintain. Splunk offers more than necessary for the job, as evidenced by their own optimization page and discussion board. Many Splunk users only use a fraction of what the platform provides, yet they are paying for the full service.

For these users, switching to a faster, easier, and more streamlined platform makes sense. The SCP is ideal for service providers seeking a customizable, API-driven, pay-as-you-go security platform.

Learn more at LimaCharlie.