We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender XDR and SolarWinds Security Event Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The summarization of emails is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft 365 Defender are the combination of all the capabilities and centralized management."
"We can use Defender to block and monitor for security purposes without needing multiple other products to do different tasks."
"For me, the advanced hunting capabilities have been really great. It allowed querying the dataset with their own language, which is KQL or Kusto Query Language. That has allowed me to get much more insight into the events that have occurred. The whole power of 365 Defender is that you can get the whole story. It allows you to query an email-based activity and then correlate it with an endpoint-based activity."
"The best feature is threat hunting. There are a lot of other features I like, such as the alert mechanism. The chain alert mechanism has a huge impact. It combines all the alerts into one incident and automatically correlates them with AI."
"Another noteworthy feature that I find appealing in Microsoft Defender is the credit-backed simulation. This feature enables organizations to train their users on effectively responding to phishing emails through a simulated training environment."
"Microsoft 365 Defender is simple to upgrade."
"The portal is quite user-friendly. There is integration with Office, Intune, and other products from the same portal. From there, we can see which policies are installed on a particular machine. We also can manage devices, groups, and tagging."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use for the end user."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the visibility into both attempted and failed logins."
"SolarWinds is effective for server, network, and log monitoring. It's also good for IP address management. We also have a patch manager, but we're still working on getting that operational."
"SolarWinds Security Event Manager has been generally working well."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting."
"The solution helps you monitor database instances, application instances, other customer application things, Linux servers, IBM servers, and Oracle servers."
"It supports high availability, which is very helpful."
"It has in-depth monitoring capabilities and an easy way for setting up dashboards. I can expand in various areas, or I can reduce areas. It supports different types of breakdowns, filters, and rules. It is very simple for an out-of-the-box type of product. It doesn't take a lot of time to figure it out, which is unlike some of the solutions that I have looked at. It meets all the aspects."
"My client would like the solution to be more customizable without using code. You can only build on the default console, but we're not allowed to change it."
"The documentation on their website is somewhat outdated and doesn't show properly. I wanted to try a query in Microsoft Defender 365. When I opened the related documentation from the security blog on the Microsoft website, the figures were not showing. It was difficult to understand the article without having the figures. The figures were there in the article, but they were not getting loaded, which made the article obsolete."
"The support could be more knowledgable to improve their offering."
"The data recovery and backup could be improved."
"The capability to not only thwart attacks but also to adapt to evolving threats is crucial."
"The Defender agent itself is more compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11. Other than these two lines, there are so many compatibility issues. Security is not only about Microsoft. The core technical aspects of it are quite good, but it would be good if they can better support non-Microsoft solutions in terms of putting the agents directly into VMware and other virtualization solutions. There should be more emphasis on RHEL and other operating systems that we use, other than Windows, in the server category."
"What could be improved in Microsoft 365 Defender is its licensing, e.g. it should be more consolidated and would be good if it has some optimizations. Improving the alerts and notifications, in terms of adding more details, would also be good for this solution."
"Defender XDR could provide recommendations for threat-hunting queries. Some people do not know how to write an advanced threat query, so we need to spend time training them."
"The reporting could be more robust. It can be a lot more granular and that will make it a lot more useful in comparison to how it is incorporated at the moment."
"One of the drawbacks of being so flexible is that it is also a fairly complicated software application to install, configure, and maintain."
"Under the new system, it is not upgradable the way they say. When you try to do an upgrade, it doesn't really work unless you dump everything and start from scratch. You lose a lot of your nodes. Whenever you set your nodes up and everything else, they don't want to bring those nodes back in, so you have to really go back and restructure all your nodes. I went from version 6.5 to version 6.6 and then to version 6.7. I then went to version 2019, and now it is version 2020. It would be good if we can upgrade without having to delete everything and start from scratch. They can maybe build more KPIs and other things for the dashboard. Some of the other systems already have built-in KPIs. SolarWinds is starting to catch up, but it is not there yet. They can include some of the business or industry standards for tracking the time, that is, the meantime to detect (MTTD) and the meantime to resolve (MTTR). They can also find a way to build a KPI that measures the number of instances of port scans experienced in a week or a month."
"Training for this solution needs to be improved, as new employees are sometimes unfamiliar with the product."
"We used the support from SolarWinds Security Event Manager and they are knowledgeable but challenging to get in contact with them."
"The company had to use a third party for the implementation of the solution."
"I imagine we will have to develop our own reports soon, this seems to be more cumbersome."
"The only issue is the pricetag. SolarWinds is a costly solution."
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Microsoft Defender XDR is ranked 5th in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with 80 reviews while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is ranked 20th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 24 reviews. Microsoft Defender XDR is rated 8.4, while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender XDR writes "Includes four services and four products, which can help organizations a lot". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Security Event Manager writes "A comprehensive network security with robust technical capabilities, effective threat response, and centralized management". Microsoft Defender XDR is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, Wazuh and Trend Vision One, whereas SolarWinds Security Event Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Log360, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Sentinel, Wazuh and LogRhythm SIEM. See our Microsoft Defender XDR vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager report.
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