Enterprise IT - Observability

Their CFO Asked Why Splunk Cost More Than Their Core Banking Platform

The Splunk renewal came in at $3.7M. For context, that was more than they spent on their core banking middleware. The problem wasn't Splunk - it was that 73% of what they were ingesting was debug logs and health checks.

14.3TB Daily Logs (Before)

5.2TB Daily Logs (After)

$2.3M Annual Savings

Client

Regional Bank (Top 25 US)

Industry

Financial Services - Enterprise IT

Use Case

Observability Cost Optimization & Security Event Processing

Products Used

Expanso

Timeline

Pilot in 4 weeks, full rollout in 9 weeks

ROI

$2.3M annual savings (7-month payback)

The Challenge

Every December, the Splunk renewal triggered the same conversation: why is this so expensive? The infrastructure team knew the answer - 73% of what they ingested was noise. But they didn't have a way to filter it without building custom solutions for each of their 247 log sources.

Splunk bill at $3.7M annually - 38% increase from prior year
73% of ingested logs were debug, health checks, or duplicates
Security team couldn't find real alerts in 14.3TB/day of noise
247 different log sources, no consistent classification
GDPR requiring PII masking before EU data left the region
Procurement gave them 90 days to show a cost reduction path

The Solution

We deployed Expanso collectors at each major log source. The collectors classify logs on arrival - debug gets dropped, security events get priority, PII gets masked. Splunk only ingests what someone might actually look at.

Source-Side Classification

Each log line gets classified on arrival. DEBUG and TRACE drop immediately. INFO aggregates into hourly summaries. WARN, ERROR, and security events forward in real-time. Simple rules, massive reduction.

PII Masking at Source

Credit card numbers, SSNs, and account IDs get masked before logs leave the source server. No PII ever reaches Splunk. GDPR and PCI auditors stopped asking questions.

Security Event Extraction

Authentication failures, privilege escalations, and anomaly patterns get extracted and enriched before forwarding. Security team gets structured events, not grep sessions.

The Results

The next Splunk renewal came in at $1.4M. Security team response time improved because they weren't searching through terabytes of health checks. The CFO stopped asking about observability costs.

63% Volume Reduction

$2.3M Annual Savings

4.1x Faster Triage

247 Log Sources

Splunk ingestion dropped from 14.3TB/day to 5.2TB/day
Annual cost reduced from $3.7M to $1.4M
Security alert triage time dropped from 23 minutes to 5.6 minutes
Zero PII incidents since deployment - previous year had 3
Pilot proved value in 4 weeks with 12 sources, remaining 235 in 9 weeks
Same log retention policy - just stopped storing garbage
Splunk search performance improved 2.3x with less noise

"I used to spend half my day searching for the needle. Now the needle comes to me and the haystack stays in the barn. Also my CFO stopped asking me to explain why Splunk costs more than our trading platform."

Director of Security Operations, Regional Bank

Your observability bill climbing faster than your infrastructure?

If you're paying to store logs no one looks at, we should talk. We've cut Splunk, Datadog, and Elastic bills by filtering noise at the source.

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