The Splunk SOAR Certified Automation Developer (SPLK-2003) exam validates your ability to design, build, and maintain automation workflows within Splunk SOAR. This certification is ideal for security analysts, SOC engineers, and automation developers who want to demonstrate proficiency in orchestrating security responses and integrating SOAR with enterprise tools. This page provides a structured study roadmap, covers exam formats, and offers practical preparation guidance to help you pass with confidence.
Use this topic map to guide your study for Splunk SPLK-2003 (Splunk SOAR Certified Automation Developer) within the Splunk SOAR Certified Automation Developer path.
The SPLK-2003 exam combines multiple-choice items with scenario-based questions to measure both foundational knowledge and applied reasoning in real-world automation contexts.
Questions progress in difficulty and emphasize practical application, ensuring candidates can not only recall concepts but also apply them to solve actual security automation challenges.
An effective study plan maps topics to weekly goals, incorporates practice questions, and builds familiarity with both the visual editor and underlying automation concepts. Allocate time proportionally: playbook design and coding topics typically require more hands-on practice than configuration fundamentals.
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Playbook design and development (Visual Playbook Editor, Logic and Filters, Custom Coding, and Using REST) typically account for 35-40% of exam content. Deployment, configuration, and integration topics (Apps and Assets, Configuring External Splunk Search, Integrating SOAR into Splunk) make up another 30-35%. The remaining 25-30% covers case management, user management, and system maintenance. Focus your study time proportionally, but ensure you have working knowledge across all domains.
In practice, Splunk alerts trigger playbooks in SOAR, which enrich events, make decisions, and execute response actions. Your playbooks may call Splunk searches via the Configuring External Splunk Search block to gather context, then send results back to Splunk for reporting. Understanding this bidirectional flow is critical: you need to know how to design playbooks that consume Splunk data and how to configure the integration so alerts flow smoothly from Splunk into SOAR cases.
Hands-on experience is valuable but not strictly required to pass. Prioritize labs in these areas: building a multi-block playbook with conditional logic, configuring an asset and using it in a playbook, integrating with an external REST API, and executing a Splunk search from within a playbook. If you have access to a SOAR instance, spend time in the Visual Playbook Editor and trace how data flows between blocks. Even simulated or sandbox environments help solidify your understanding.
Common pitfalls include confusing playbook execution models (synchronous vs. asynchronous), misunderstanding asset configuration and how apps depend on assets, and overlooking error handling in REST and custom code blocks. Candidates often underestimate the importance of user permissions and role-based access control in case management. Review explanations for practice questions carefully, and pay special attention to scenarios where multiple answers seem correct but one is more complete or production-ready.
In your final week, shift from learning new topics to reinforcing weak areas. Review your practice test results and spend 60% of study time on topics where you scored below 80%. Run a full-length timed mock exam to simulate test conditions and identify pacing issues. Spend the remaining time reviewing key definitions, playbook design patterns, and integration workflows. Avoid cramming new material; instead, focus on confidence and speed in areas you already understand.
A user wants to use their Splunk Cloud instance as the external Splunk instance for Phantom. What ports need to be opened on the Splunk Cloud instance to facilitate this? Assume default ports are in use.
To integrate Splunk Phantom with a Splunk Cloud instance, network communication over certain ports is necessary. The default ports for web traffic are TCP 80 for HTTP and TCP 443 for HTTPS. Since Splunk Cloud instances are accessed over the internet, ensuring that these ports are open is essential for Phantom to communicate with Splunk Cloud for various operations, such as running searches, sending data, and receiving results. It is important to note that TCP 8088 is typically used by Splunk's HTTP Event Collector (HEC), which may also be relevant depending on the integration specifics.
Which of the following is the best option for an analyst who wants to run a single action on an event?
The best option for an analyst who wants to run a single action on an event is to open the event and run the action directly from the Investigation View. The Investigation View allows users to interact with events directly, and provides the ability to execute specific actions without the need for playbook development or debugging. This is the most straightforward and efficient way to execute a single action on an event, without the overhead of creating or editing playbooks.
While creating a playbook and using the Playbook Debugger are viable options, they introduce unnecessary complexity for running just one action. The goal is to allow the analyst to act quickly and efficiently within the Investigation View.
Splunk SOAR Documentation: Investigation View Overview.
Splunk SOAR Best Practices for Running Actions on Events.
A user has written a playbook that calls three other playbooks, one after the other. The user notices that the second playbook starts executing before the first one completes. What is the cause of this behavior?
In Splunk SOAR, playbooks can execute actions either synchronously (waiting for one action to complete before starting the next) or asynchronously (allowing actions to run concurrently). If a playbook starts executing before the previous one has completed, it indicates that synchronous execution has not been properly configured between these playbooks. This is crucial when the output of one playbook is a dependency for the subsequent playbook. Options B, C, and D do not directly address the observed behavior of concurrent playbook execution, making option A the most accurate explanation for why the second playbook starts before the completion of the first.
synchronous execution is a feature of the SOAR automation engine that allows you to control the order of execution of playbook blocks. Synchronous execution ensures that a playbook block waits for the completion of the previous block before starting its execution. Synchronous execution can be enabled or disabled for each playbook block in the playbook editor, by toggling the Synchronous Execution switch in the block settings. Therefore, option A is the correct answer, as it states the cause of the behavior where the second playbook starts executing before the first one completes. Option B is incorrect, because the first playbook performing poorly is not the cause of the behavior, but rather a possible consequence of the behavior. Option C is incorrect, because the sleep option for the second playbook is not the cause of the behavior, but rather a workaround that can be used to delay the execution of the second playbook. Option D is incorrect, because the join configuration on the second playbook is not the cause of the behavior, but rather a way of merging multiple paths of execution into one.
Configuring SOAR search to use an external Splunk server provides which of the following benefits?
Configuring SOAR search to use an external Splunk server allows for the automation of Splunk searches within SOAR. This integration enables Splunk SOAR to leverage the powerful search capabilities of an external Splunk Cloud Platform or Enterprise instance, thereby enhancing the ability to search for Splunk SOAR data using Splunk's search language (SPL).It also facilitates the use of universal forwarders to send SOAR data to your Splunk deployment12.While the other options may be benefits of using Splunk in general, the specific advantage of configuring SOAR search with an external Splunk server is the automation of searches, which can streamline the process of querying and analyzing SOAR data within the Splunk environment12.
Splunk SOAR documentation on configuring search in Splunk SOAR1.
Splunk SOAR documentation on understanding the remote-search service in Splunk App for SOAR2
Which of the following queries would return all artifacts that contain a SHA1 file hash?
To return all artifacts that contain a SHA1 file hash using the Splunk SOAR REST API, the correct query would use the_filter_cef_Shal_containsparameter. This parameter filters the artifacts to only those that contain a value in the SHA1 field within the Common Event Format (CEF) data structure.Thecontainsoperator is used to match any artifacts that have a SHA1 hash present1.
Understanding artifacts - Splunk Documentation
