Splunk Enterprise Security Certified Admin Interview Questions

Interview preparation is just as crucial as exam preparation. As a result, preparing for an interview necessitates far more practice and confidence than studying for any other exam. You must make the finest first impression possible. So, in order to assist our candidates inadequately preparing for the Splunk Enterprise Security Certified Admin interview, we have done our best to provide you with the most up-to-date and expert-revised interview questions. Candidates should do their homework about the firm, job positions, and responsibilities, and most importantly, appear confident when responding to questions. Furthermore, we have covered all types of interview questions from beginner to advanced. So, we strongly advise applicants to prepare with the finest and accomplish the best. But first, you should be familiar with the basics of what the Splunk Enterprise Security Certified Admin exam is all about.

About the exam:

This exam tests an individual’s ability to install, configure, and manage a Splunk Enterprise Security deployment. Moreover, after completion of the certification, a candidate can manage a Splunk Enterprise Security environment, including ES event processing and normalization, deployment requirements, technology add-ons, settings, risk analysis settings, threat intelligence and protocol intelligence configuration, and customizations. Therefore, to help our users we along with our experts have designed some of the most important Interview Questions.

Now, let’s begin with the basic to advance level Splunk Enterprise Security Certified Admin Interview Questions.

Splunk Enterprise Security Certified Admin advance questions

Can you discuss your experience with configuring and managing the Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) app, including data inputs, correlation searches, and creating customizations?

I have been trained on a vast amount of information and can provide an in-depth answer to your questions on configuring and managing the Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) app.

For configuring data inputs, you can add data to the ES app by configuring input sources, such as log files, network devices, cloud services, and third-party apps. You can also define sourcetypes, source categories, and host names to ensure that the data is correctly categorized and attributed.

For correlation searches, you can use the built-in correlation searches in the ES app, which can identify security incidents and threats by analyzing the data and looking for patterns that match specific security use cases. You can also create custom correlation searches to meet specific security requirements or to enhance the built-in correlation searches.

For customizations, you can create custom dashboards, reports, and visualizations to meet the specific requirements of your organization. You can also use the Splunk ES app to create custom alerts, add custom fields to events, and build custom knowledge objects, such as notable events and incident review workflows.

Overall, the Splunk Enterprise Security app provides a comprehensive solution for security information and event management (SIEM) and can be configured and customized to meet the specific needs of your organization.

What steps do you follow to maintain the security and performance of a Splunk ES deployment?

Here are some steps that you can follow to maintain the security and performance of a Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) deployment:

Regular software updates: Keep your Splunk ES deployment up to date by regularly checking for software updates and applying them as soon as possible to ensure that the system is protected against known security vulnerabilities.
Secure configuration: Configure the system securely by setting strong passwords, enabling SSL/TLS encryption for communication between components, and limiting access to the system to only authorized users.
Data monitoring: Monitor the data inputs and outputs to ensure that the data is being processed and stored as expected and to identify and address any performance issues.
Performance tuning: Regularly monitor and tune the performance of the system by optimizing indexing, searching, and reporting performance, and by reducing disk I/O and network traffic.
Disaster recovery: Establish and test a disaster recovery plan to ensure that the system can be quickly restored in case of a failure.
Regular backups: Regularly back up the system data to ensure that it can be quickly restored in case of a failure.
Security audit: Regularly conduct a security audit of the system to identify and address any potential security vulnerabilities.
User management: Manage user accounts and permissions carefully to ensure that only authorized users have access to sensitive data.

By following these steps, you can ensure the security and performance of your Splunk ES deployment and minimize the risk of data breaches or system failures.

How would you go about troubleshooting issues with a Splunk ES deployment?

Troubleshooting issues with a Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) deployment can be a complex process, but the following steps can help you to quickly identify and resolve common issues:

Review the logs: The first step in troubleshooting is to review the logs and event data generated by the system. This can help you to identify any error messages or unexpected behaviors.
Check system health: Check the health of the system by monitoring the indexing and searching performance, as well as the disk space and network utilization.
Consult the documentation: Consult the Splunk ES documentation, including the knowledge base and user forums, to find solutions to common issues.
Use the Splunk ES CLI tools: Use the CLI tools provided by Splunk ES, such as the “splunkd” and “splunk” commands, to gather diagnostic information and perform advanced troubleshooting tasks.
Work with Splunk support: If you are unable to resolve the issue on your own, you can reach out to the Splunk Support team for assistance. They can provide expert guidance and help you to resolve the issue.
Engage with the community: Engage with the Splunk ES community by joining online forums, attending webinars and events, and participating in the Splunk Trust community.

By following these steps, you can effectively troubleshoot issues with a Splunk ES deployment and ensure that the system is running smoothly and efficiently.

Can you discuss your experience with creating and using threat intelligence within Splunk ES?

To create and use threat intelligence within Splunk Enterprise Security (ES), an administrator should follow these steps:

Acquire Threat Intelligence: Threat intelligence data can come from various sources like commercial vendors, open-source feeds, and internal sources.
Normalize and Enrich: The acquired threat intelligence data needs to be normalized and enriched to a common format that can be consumed by Splunk ES.
Store and Manage: The enriched data can be stored in Splunk’s index or in a separate database for management.
Use in Rules and Correlation Searches: The threat intelligence data can be used to create correlation searches that can detect and alert on malicious activity, or to create custom rules in the Splunk ES Content Update app.
Monitor and Respond: The created alerts and reports should be regularly monitored to identify any suspicious activities and to take necessary action.

What experience do you have with configuring and using the Splunk ES Incident Review dashboard?

Splunk ES Incident Review dashboard is a centralized view of all the security incidents detected and analyzed by Splunk Enterprise Security. A certified Splunk Enterprise Security Administrator is expected to have experience in configuring and using the dashboard to monitor and respond to security incidents. This involves setting up data inputs, creating alerts, creating custom reports and dashboards, and performing ad hoc searches and investigations. To configure and use the dashboard, an administrator should have a strong understanding of the underlying data models, as well as the knowledge of best practices and guidelines for security information and event management (SIEM) and incident response.

How do you approach integrating and using third-party security tools with Splunk ES?

To approach integrating and using third-party security tools with Splunk Enterprise Security (ES), you can follow these steps:

Determine the security tools you need to integrate with Splunk ES.
Research the supported integration methods for each tool, such as APIs or data inputs.
Plan the integration, including what data you want to collect and how you will manage the integration process.
Configure the data inputs for the third-party security tools in Splunk ES.
Validate the integration by checking the data that is being collected and ensuring that it meets your needs.
Create custom alerts, reports, and dashboards in Splunk ES to monitor and visualize the data from the third-party security tools.
Regularly review and update the integration as necessary to ensure that it continues to meet your needs and perform optimally.

Can you discuss your experience with creating and implementing custom alerts, reports, and dashboards within Splunk ES?

As a Splunk Enterprise Security Certified Admin, I have experience in creating and implementing custom alerts, reports, and dashboards within the Splunk ES environment. This involves understanding the requirement, designing the appropriate search queries, setting up the alerts in the Alert Manager, creating reports and dashboards using the Splunk Dashboard Editor and configuring the desired visualization options. I also ensure that the created alerts, reports and dashboards are relevant, up-to-date and provide the required insights to the stakeholders. Additionally, I regularly review and optimize these components to ensure their performance and accuracy.

What experience do you have with implementing and using the Splunk Enterprise Security Content Update (ESCU) app?

The ESCU app is a critical component of the Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) solution, which provides security teams with real-time threat intelligence and security analytics. Implementing ESCU involves configuring and integrating the app with existing Splunk ES installations, setting up data inputs to collect and index relevant security data, and fine-tuning the app’s settings and configuration to meet the specific needs of the organization.

To effectively implement and use the ESCU app, administrators should have a good understanding of the Splunk platform and its architecture, as well as experience working with security data and security analytics solutions. They should also have strong analytical and problem-solving skills, as well as experience working with data privacy and security best practices.

What steps do you follow to ensure data privacy and security when using Splunk ES?

To ensure data privacy and security when using Splunk Enterprise Security (ES), some steps that can be followed include:

Implement role-based access control (RBAC): This involves creating different roles with different levels of access to the data and applications within Splunk ES, which helps to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information.
Encrypt sensitive data: To prevent sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized parties, it can be encrypted both in transit and at rest.
Use secure protocols: Secure protocols such as SSL/TLS should be used to encrypt the data that is being transmitted between the Splunk ES environment and other systems.
Regularly audit user activity: Regularly auditing user activity within the Splunk ES environment can help to identify any potential security breaches or unauthorized access attempts.
Implement network security: Firewall rules and network segmentation should be used to limit access to the Splunk ES environment to only authorized systems and users.
Regularly update software: Regularly updating the software and components within the Splunk ES environment can help to mitigate the risk of known vulnerabilities being exploited.
Backup and disaster recovery: Regular backups and a disaster recovery plan should be in place to minimize the impact of data loss or data breaches.

How do you approach scaling a Splunk ES deployment to accommodate increasing data volume and complexity?

When scaling a Splunk ES deployment, there are several factors to consider, including:

Indexer capacity: This includes adding more indexers to handle the increased data volume and balance the load.
Storage: Ensure that the storage capacity is adequate for the increased data volume.
Data distribution: Consider distributing data across multiple indexers to reduce the load on any one indexer.
Forwarder configuration: Ensure that forwarders are configured optimally to minimize data loss and ensure data accuracy.
Cluster configuration: Consider configuring a Splunk cluster to improve reliability and increase the ability to handle increased data volume.
Data retention policy: Evaluate the data retention policy and adjust it as necessary to accommodate the increased data volume.
Monitoring: Regularly monitor the performance of the deployment and make adjustments as necessary to ensure it continues to perform optimally.

Basic questions - Splunk Enterprise Security Certified Admin

1. List the features of Splunk Enterprise?

Some of the basic features of the Splunk Enterprise are as follow:

Indexing
Search
Alerts
Dashboards
Pivot
Reports
Lastly, the Data model

2. How can the Search option be useful in different ways?

Searches provide insight from your data, such as:

Retrieving events from an index
Calculating metrics
Searching for specific conditions within a rolling time window
Identifying patterns in your data
Lastly, Predicting future trends

3. What is Indexing?

One can collect data from devices and applications such as websites, servers, databases, operating systems, and more. Once the data is collected, the index segments, stores, compresses the data and maintains the supporting metadata to accelerate searching.

4. What do you understand by Alerts?

When search results for both historical and real-time searches fulfil defined conditions, alerts are sent to you. Alerts can be set up to send alarm information to specific email recipients, publish alert information to an RSS feed, or run a custom script, such as one that sends an alert event to Syslog.

5. What are Dashboards?

Dashboards contain tablets of modules like search boxes, fields, charts, and so on. Dashboard panels are regularly connected to saved searches or pivots. They display the results of completed searches and data from real-time searches that run in the knowledge.

6. What do you understand by Reports?

Create ad hoc reports, plan them to run at regular intervals, or have a scheduled report to create alerts when the result satisfies certain criteria.

7. What is a data model?

A data model is a search-time mapping of semantic knowledge about one or more datasets that are hierarchically organized. It stores the domain information needed to create a range of customized dataset queries. Splunk software uses these specific searches to generate reports for Pivot users.

8. What is the use of Security Posture dashboard?

The Security Posture dashboard is meant to provide high-level insight into the important events across all domains of your deployment, suitable for display in a Security Operations Center (SOC).

9. What is a notable event?

A notable event represents one or more anomalous incidents detected by a correlation search across data sources.

10. How to Configure widgets?

In the glass table editor, click a widget.
For Custom Drilldown, click On.
Select a drill down a destination or type a URL.
For Viz Type, select an appropriate option to display your search results. Visualization types include single-value, gauge, sparkline, and single value delta.
Click Update to update the widget configuration.
Click Save.

11. List the Processing components?

The types of processing components are:

Firstly, Forwarders
Secondly, Indexers
Lastly, Search heads

12. What are Search headers?

Search heads manage searches. They handle user search requests and distribute them among a group of indexers who search their local data.

13. How to Identify your components?

Firstly, Use the monitoring console.
Lastly, Examine each instance’s configuration files.

14. List different types of search header?

Firstly, Independent search head
Secondly, a search head node of an indexer cluster
Thirdly, a member of a search head cluster
Fourthly, a search head node of an indexer cluster and a member of a search head cluster
Lastly, a member of a search head pool

15. List different types of Indexes?

Firstly, Independent indexer
Secondly, A peer node of an indexer cluster

16. What are the different types of Forwarders?

Firstly, Universal forwarders
Secondly, Heavy forwarders
Thirdly, Light forwarders
Lastly, Intermediate forwarders

17. List different types of management components?

Firstly, the Monitoring console
Secondly, Deployment server
Thirdly, License master
Fourthly, Indexer cluster master
Lastly, the Search head cluster deployer

18. What is Indexer cluster?

An indexer cluster is a collection of indexers that have been set up to replicate each other’s data so that the system has multiple copies of all data. Index replication or indexer clustering is the term for this method.

19. What do you understand by event processing?

Event processing parses incoming data to allow for quick search and analysis, then stores the results as events in the index.

20. In what ways Splunk Enterprise enhances the data in indexing?

Separating the data stream into individual, searchable events.
Creating or identifying timestamps.
Extracting fields such as host, source, and source type.
Performing user-defined actions on the incoming data.

21. What are Events indexes?

Events indexes impose minimal structure and can accommodate any type of data, including metrics data. Moreover, events indexes are the default index type.

22. What is Metrics indexes?

To accommodate the larger volume and lower latency demands associated with metrics data, metrics indexes use a highly organised format. When opposed to putting the same data into events indexes, putting metrics data into metrics indexes leads in faster performance and less index store usage.

23. List the different types of nodes in indexer cluster?

There are three types of nodes in a cluster:

Master node
Peer node
Lastly, One or more search heads to coordinate searches across all the peer nodes.

24. How to add capabilities to a role?

On the Splunk Enterprise Security menu bar, select Configure > General > Permissions.
Find the role you want to update.
Find the ES Component you want to add.
Select the check box for the component for the role.
Lastly, Save.

25. What are the different ways you can configure Splunk software?

Use Splunk Web.
Use Splunk’s Command Line Interface (CLI) commands.
Edit Splunk’s configuration files directly.
Lastly, Use App setup screens that use the Splunk REST API to update configurations.

26. What is the use of Scripted inputs?

To acquire data from an API or other remote data interfaces and message queues, scripted inputs are employed.

27. How to Update the app from within Splunk Enterprise?

To update your existing technology add-on with the newer one, click the link in the version column.
Click Update to get the newer version.
Lastly, Click Restart.

28. How to add lookup definition?

From the Splunk Enterprise menu bar, select Settings > Lookups > Lookup definitions.
Filter on mitre.
Click the Clone action for mitre_attack_lookup.
Leave Type as-is.
Type a name for the industry-standard framework.
Revise the Supported fields.
Lastly, click Save.

29. How to add tags to a event type?

In Splunk Web, click Settings > Event types.
Locate the event type that you want to tag and click its name.
On the detail page for the event type, add or edit tags in the Tags field. Separate tags with spaces or commas.
Lastly, click Save.

30. Define an event?

A type of event is not the same as an event. An event is a single instance of data, such as a single log entry. Furthermore, an event type is a classification that is used to categorise and label events.

31. What do you understand by transaction?

The transaction command locates transactions based on events that satisfy a set of criteria. Furthermore, transactions are made up of each member’s raw text, the earliest member’s time and date data, and the union of all other fields of each member.

32. List the two raw events added to the transaction?

Firstly, Duration
Lastly, Eventcount

33. What is the difference between duration and eventcount?

The values in the duration field show the difference between the timestamps for the first and last events in the transaction. Whereas, the values in the eventcount field show the number of events in the transaction.

34. What does User Activity displays?

The User Activity dashboard displays panels representing common risk-generating user activities such as suspicious website activity.

35. What does Access Anomalies displays?

Using internal user credentials and location-relevant data, the Access Anomalies dashboard displays collective authentication attempts from diverse IP addresses as well as unlikely travel anomalies.

36. What is Prohibited Traffic list?

The System Center dashboard uses the Restricted Traffic list to detect software that is prohibited by your security policy, such as IRC, data destruction tools, file transfer software, or known harmful software, such as malware linked to a recent outbreak.

37. Describe the Search command?

The search command is used in the pipeline to extract events from indexes or to filter the results of a previous search operation. Keywords, quoted phrases, wildcards, and field-value expressions can all be used to retrieve events from your indexes. Furthermore, the search command does not need to be specified at the start of your search criteria.

38. What are Interesting Services?

Interesting Services comprises a list of services in your deployment. The correlation search Prohibited Service Detected uses this lookup to determine whether a service is required, prohibited, and secure.

39. How to Manually maintain a list of categories?

Select Configure > Content > Content Management.
Click the Asset/Identity Categories list.
Add new categories to the list.
Click Save.

40. List some examples of search terms?

keywords
quoted phrases
Boolean operators
wildcards
Lastly, field-value pairs.