Well, I've heard Palintir is no better than any other body-shop: hype-up their tech/senior engineering acumen, get the contract and throw anyone with a pulse at the project while using boring technology (SQL, spreadsheets).
I've used their products. Very nice and cool looking UI. Their magic is they have a stupid-friendly UI.
You can puta username, license plate, file name,etc... and it will dump everything about thay in a nice looking way. It also indexes regular documents, dbs,etc... and gives you a search engine. There are similar products out there.
That's why I said splunk. Actually if it was me I would use Graylog and use it's frontend friendly api to query ES on the cheap and have a cool and friendly UI.
