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.
Client
Regional Bank (Top 25 US)
Industry
Financial Services - Enterprise IT
Use Case
Observability Cost Optimization & Security Event Processing
Products
Timeline
Pilot in 4 weeks, full rollout in 9 weeks
ROI
$2.3M annual savings (7-month payback)
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.
Volume Reduction
Annual Savings
Faster Triage
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
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.