Splunk Core Certified User

Security and operations teams often collect plenty of machine data but lack a consistent way to search it, interpret it, and turn it into useful SOC workflows. This 9.3-hour beginner course helps IT Directors standardize baseline Splunk skills for SOC analysts, security analysts, SIEM users, and IT operations staff who need to work with logs, fields, searches, reports, dashboards, lookups, scheduled reports, and alerts.

The course is a practical fit for teams adopting Splunk or expanding usage from basic navigation into repeatable searches and reporting. It also supports risk and compliance work by teaching teams how to search organizational data, identify reporting hosts, and understand Splunk’s role across SIEM/SOAR-style implementations. For change management, the course reinforces that Splunk should fit the organization’s existing monitoring stack — not create redundant tools or unclear ownership.

CBT Nuggets supports rollout with isolated Virtual Labs for safe Splunk practice, plus Playlists and Team Reporting to assign the course and monitor progress across the team.

IT teams complete this training to make Splunk usage more consistent across SOC and operations workflows. The course uses an isolated lab with realistic data from multiple system types, so practitioners can practice searches without affecting production environments.

• Improve SOC triage: Analysts practice narrowing events by fields such as host, helping distinguish repeated events from the number of systems reporting.
• Support compliance investigations: Teams learn to search organizational data and interpret results in the context of security monitoring and compliance checks.
• Clarify operational ownership: The course shows how Splunk administrators can share tasks, such as AWS log parsing or Cisco firewall review, with users.
• Turn searches into action: Teams build toward reports, dashboards, lookups, scheduled reports, and alerts that make recurring analysis easier to repeat.

Knowledge

• Splunk’s role in security monitoring, including where SIEM and SOAR concepts overlap.
• How Splunk navigation, bookmarks, shared administrator tasks, and basic management areas support daily work.
• How indexes, hosts, events, fields, and data sources affect search results.
• Core SPL concepts, including expanding searches and using fields to refine results.
• How commands such as top, rare, and stats summarize data for analysis.
• How reports, dashboards, lookups, scheduled reports, and alerts fit into Splunk workflows.

Ability

• Navigate a Splunk environment and work from a shared lab baseline.
• Search across organizational data and interpret event counts versus reporting hosts.
• Use selected fields to focus investigations and clean up result views.
• Write foundational SPL searches and practice them against realistic log data.
• Build reusable reporting outputs with dashboards, lookups, scheduled reports, and alerts.
• Apply Splunk skills safely in an isolated lab before using them in production workflows.