From Reactive to Resilient: Managed Splunk Operations for a Leading UK Financial Business

How Apto’s Operate managed service gave a critical financial institution the platform stability, data quality, and engineering capacity to maintain and advance its security coverage.

Background 

Our client is a major UK business operating a Splunk Enterprise platform at the heart of its SOC. The platform supports a broad range of security functions — from threat detection and investigation, to SOAR-driven automated response and production monitoring — making its reliability directly tied to the organisation’s security posture. 

Prior to engaging Apto’s Operate service, the platform had experienced a period of instability. A cascading indexer failure had exposed the risks of running a critical security platform without dedicated, proactive management. The internal engineering team responsible for maintaining the environment, was stretched — managing day-to-day platform health whilst also trying to advance the institution’s security capabilities and prepare for a significant cloud migration. 

What the organisation needed was not just reactive break-fix support, but a trusted partner who could proactively monitor the platform, surface issues before they became incidents, and free up internal engineers to focus on higher-value work.

The Challenge 

The engineering team faced a combination of operational and technical pressures that were compounding over time: 

• Platform visibility gaps: There was no continuous, independent monitoring of the Splunk environment. Issues with data quality — in particular, timestamp extraction failures — were going undetected and silently breaking detection coverage, meaning threats could be missed entirely. 

• Alert noise: The volume of raw platform alerts was high, but without tuning to the organisaations specific environment, the signal-to-noise ratio made it difficult for the team to act on what mattered. 

• License pressure: With data volumes growing and the licence nearing its limits, there was no granular visibility into what was driving ingest growth. Without this, proactive cost management was impossible. 

• Engineering backlog: Routine but important tasks — CIM mapping, search performance tuning, and Azure SSL connectivity issues — were queued behind day-to-day platform operations, stalling strategic progress. 

• Cloud migration horizon: A planned migration from on-premises Splunk to Splunk Cloud was approaching, adding further complexity to an already stretched team. 

The Apto Operate Service 

Apto deployed its Operate managed service, comprising two complementary components: Operate Core for continuous platform health monitoring, and Operate Attach for targeted engineering support. 

Operate Core: Continuous Monitoring and Daily Reporting 

Apto’s Operate Core service uses a purpose-built monitoring application to track the health of the Splunk environment across five dimensions: platform management, data management, performance management, analytics management, and reporting. Automated health checks run continuously, with Apto analysts triaging alerts daily before passing only actionable findings to the CSP team. 

In the early weeks, Apto worked closely with the institution’s team to tune the alerting to match the specific characteristics of their deployment. This iterative refinement significantly reduced false positives, ensuring that every alert reaching the engineering team represented a genuine issue requiring attention. 

The ongoing Core service has delivered value across several areas: 

• Data quality monitoring: Continuous tracking of timestamp extraction issues across data sources — a category of failure that directly impacts whether security detections fire correctly. Early warnings allow the team to remediate before detection coverage is compromised. 

• Network and infrastructure alerting: Proactive identification of degraded network performance and infrastructure components reporting offline, preventing these from cascading into broader platform issues. 

• Licence trend analysis and forecasting: Moving beyond raw licence utilisation totals, Apto now provides a granular breakdown by index and identifies the three most expensive sourcetypes each reporting period. Long-term ingestion logs are being collected to support licence growth modelling and inform decisions about data retention and source onboarding. 

• Monthly reporting sessions: A structured monthly review with stakeholders across both the engineering and SOC team creates a regular forum for platform health discussions, cross-team visibility, and forward planning — conversations that had rarely happened organically before the Operate service began. 

Senior Stakeholder, Cyber Security Engineering Team 

Operate Attach: Targeted Engineering Support 

Alongside the Core monitoring service, Apto’s Operate Attach component provides a flexible pool of engineering resource for discrete tasks that would otherwise compete with the customer team’s operational responsibilities. During this engagement, Attach delivered four significant workstreams: 

• CIM Mapping for Enterprise Security migration: In preparation for the customer’s planned migration from Splunk Core to Splunk Enterprise Security, Apto completed CIM mapping for a priority set of the institution’s sourcetypes. This work — essential for ES use cases and data model acceleration — was removed from the CDC’s backlog at a point when the team was already at capacity, directly accelerating the migration readiness timeline. 

• Search performance review — EventTypes vs Macros: Following updated Splunk guidance, Apto investigated the performance difference between the customers existing use of EventTypes and the alternative approach of Search Macros. The analysis identified a measurable improvement in search completion times when using Macros, effectively increasing the searching capacity of the platform and reducing the risk of skipped scheduled searches that could delay threat detection. 

• Azure SSL certification remediation: A long-standing issue with SSL certificate configuration was preventing reliable connectivity between the institution’s Azure estate and Splunk. Apto took ownership of the investigation, proposed a resolution, and guided the team through the remediation steps — unblocking a piece of work that had stalled through two previous attempts. 

• RHEL upgrade planning for Splunk SOAR: As part of a broader infrastructure refresh, the organisation needed to lift and shift its Splunk SOAR and search head instances to new hosts running updated operating system versions. Apto produced a detailed upgrade guide and migration plan, providing a clear path forward for the internal team to execute.

Outcomes and Value Delivered 

Across the Operate Core and Attach services, our customer has gained tangible improvements across its security platform operations: 

• Improved security coverage assurance: Continuous data quality monitoring means the SOC can rely on its detections being fed by accurate, correctly timestamped data. Platform issues that previously went unnoticed are now surfaced and remediated before they affect threat detection capability. 

• Engineering capacity unlocked: By taking ownership of routine monitoring, reporting, and a series of engineering tasks, Apto has freed the engineering team to focus on the cloud migration and strategic platform development, rather than being consumed by operational maintenance. 

• Licence cost visibility and control: For the first time, the platform managers have granular, index-level insight into what is driving their Splunk licence consumption — enabling informed decisions about data ingestion and providing an early warning system against licence breaches. 

• Migration readiness accelerated: The CIM mapping exercise and search performance recommendations have materially advanced readiness for both the Splunk ES migration and the forthcoming cloud transition. 

• Cross-team collaboration enabled: The structured rhythm of daily reports, fortnightly check-ins, and monthly review sessions has created a consistent forum for the engineering, operations, and platform management teams to align — surfacing issues and driving decisions that had previously fallen between organisational boundaries. 

 

Looking Ahead 

As our customer prepares for its cloud migration, Apto’s Operate service is positioned to play a central role in the transition. Operate Core will monitor the health and data quality of the on-premises platform throughout the migration, ensuring security coverage is maintained as workloads shift. Operate Attach will provide engineering resource to support the migration workstreams, pick up tasks arising from team changes, and maximise the performance of the existing deployment during its remaining operational life. 

Once the cloud platform is live, Apto will continue to monitor its health in the same way — providing licence growth analysis, dormant source identification, and user impact reporting to keep the new environment efficient and cost-effective from day one. 

About Apto Operate 

Apto Operate is Apto Solutions’ managed Splunk service, designed to shift organisations from reactive troubleshooting to proactive, data-driven platform management. Combining continuous automated monitoring with expert analyst review, daily reporting, and flexible engineering support, Operate ensures your Splunk platform remains stable, performant, and aligned with your security objectives — without consuming your internal team’s capacity.

Find out more here!