Picture this: you’re 12 hours into an active incident. You suspect an attacker has been moving through your environment for months. The investigation points towards CDN logs from six months ago that might help you recreate the breach and mitigate the threat. You open Splunk and query for them.
The data isn’t there.
Not because your team failed. Because a budget decision made months ago, reasonable in a spreadsheet, catastrophic in an investigation, removed those logs from your retention window. The data was sampled down, archived, or excluded from the pipeline entirely. And now the evidence your analysts need, including CDN logs, API data, and edge telemetry, doesn’t exist.
It’s the predictable outcome of how the industry taught security teams to manage data costs. Every choice looked defensible in isolation: trim retention to 30 days, sample high-volume sources, send CDN and edge telemetry to cold storage. Together, they built a data strategy that makes investigations a race you were already losing before the first alert fired.
Data Reduction Is a Security Risk, Not a Solution
Security teams want full retention. They want to query months of SIEM data without hitting a wall, correlate CDN logs with WAF events in the same dashboard, and run threat-hunting queries that go back as far as the investigation requires. The reason most teams aren’t doing this is straightforward: retaining that much data in Splunk has never made economic sense. A 600GB/day Splunk license already exceeds $1M/year, and enterprise environments routinely ingest multiples of that.
So data gets cut. Investigations get constrained. And the risk gets quietly absorbed, until a breach makes it visible.
Removing the Constraint
Hydrolix Search for Splunk is a free Splunkbase app that connects your existing Splunk environment to Hydrolix-stored data. High-volume sources such as CDN logs, API telemetry, and SIEM events, live in Hydrolix, where the cost structure is built for that scale and retention. Your analysts query it from Splunk exactly as they do today, in SPL, in the dashboards they already use. Nothing changes about how your team works. What changes is how far back they can see.
The economics: Hydrolix stores data at $0.20–0.37/GB with 15 months of hot retention by default, up to 10x lower TCO compared to retaining the same data in Splunk alone. The data that used to get deleted because it was too costly now stays hot and immediately queryable. If you’re already using—or are considering using—Cribl for cost management, this post comparing Cribl to Hydrolix is worth reading first.
The Dashboard Problem
Retaining the data is only half the equation. The other half is whether your team can actually use it at investigation speed.
This is where most tiered storage approaches aren’t effective. Data is technically available but practically inaccessible — queries time out, dashboards stall, analysts wait. Under active incident conditions, a dashboard that takes minutes to load isn’t a tool. It’s an obstacle.
Hydrolix summary tables solve this problem. Rather than scanning billions of raw rows of data at every dashboard refresh, summary tables pre-aggregate the queries your teams run most often and summarize common use cases, such as request counts by country and top WAF rule hits. The result: high-volume dashboards that return in seconds. where= filters work directly on summary columns, so analysts can slice and pivot without triggering a full scan. High-volume telemetry that would previously have been excluded from Splunk entirely—because the query cost made it impractical—is now queryable at operational speed.
For a security team, this matters beyond convenience. Fast dashboards get used. Slow ones get abandoned. When your team is 12 hours into an incident and needs to correlate six weeks of CDN data with SIEM events, the difference between seconds and minutes is the difference between a tool that’s part of your investigation workflow and one that isn’t.
How Enterprises Are Combining Hydrolix and Splunk
A global financial services firm uses Hydrolix Search for Splunk to correlate SIEM events with historical CDN access telemetry during active incident investigations — querying months of Hydrolix-resident data alongside Splunk-indexed events that would previously have been deleted or archived. Query volume spikes significantly during active investigations, with analysts running dozens of searches per day against historical telemetry that’s now always available.
A European parcel delivery company runs live operational dashboards continuously querying Hydrolix-stored CDN telemetry — thousands of queries over three months at sub-second average response times. High-volume data that would otherwise have been excluded from Splunk entirely now runs as a live dashboard at a fraction of the cost.
The evidence your next investigation depends on is being deleted right now. It doesn’t have to be. Show us your highest-volume telemetry sources. We’ll show you how to stop losing access to the data your investigations depend on. Request a demo today.
