We performed a comparison between Microsoft Sentinel and SolarWinds Security Event Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Sentinel is a SIEM and SOAR tool, so its automation is the best feature; we can reduce human interaction, freeing up our human resources."
"The data connectors that Microsoft Sentinel provides are easy to integrate when we work with a Microsoft agent."
"The features that stand out are the detection engine and its integration with multiple data sources."
"It has basic out-of-the-box integrations with multiple log sources."
"The most valuable feature is the onboarding of the workloads. You can see all that has been onboarded in your account on the dashboards."
"It is always correlating to IOCs for normal attacks, using Azure-related resources. For example, if any illegitimate IP starts unusual activity on our Azure firewall, then it automatically generates an alarm for us."
"If you know how to do KQL (kusto query language) queries, which are how you query the log data inside Sentinel, the information is pretty rich. You can get down to a good level of detail regarding event information or notifications."
"Native integration with Microsoft security products or other Microsoft software is also crucial. For example, we can integrate Sentinel with Office 365 with one click. Other integrations aren't as easy. Sometimes, we have to do it manually."
"The solution helps me to go back in time and search for different events. For example, if you wanted to know who activated an account; you could go back in time and find out."
"It supports high availability, which is very helpful."
"SolarWinds is easy to configure, and it provides timely alerts."
"The out of the box reports and dashboard. It was easy to trim down these windows to something we could quickly use."
"It performs network behavior monitoring, log monitoring, and disaster recovery monitoring."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is the analysis and the knowledge about the incidence that we trace."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the visibility into both attempted and failed logins."
"We did previously use a different solution, but SolarWinds is much better. It's easy to interact with SolarWinds. It's easy to operate, easy to configure and is generally easier compared to what we were working with before."
"Everyone has their favorites. There is always room for improvement, and everybody will say, "I wish you could do this for me or that for me." It is a personal thing based on how you use the tool. I do not necessarily have those thoughts, and they are probably not really valuable because they are unique to the context of the user, but broadly, where it can continue to improve is by adding more connectors to more systems."
"Sentinel should be improved with more connectors. At the moment, it only covers a few vendors. If I remember correctly, only 100 products are supported natively in Sentinel, although you can connect them with syslog. But Microsoft should increase the number of native connectors to get logs into Sentinel."
"There are certain delays. For example, if an alert has been rated on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, it might take up to an hour for that alert to reach Sentinel. This should ideally take no more than one or two seconds."
"When we pass KPIs to the governance department, there's no option to provide rights to the data or dashboard to colleagues. We can use Power BI for this, but it isn't easy or convenient. They should just come up with a way to provide limited role-based access to auditing personnel"
"Sentinel still has some anomalies. For example, sometimes when we write a query for log analysis with KQL, it doesn't give us the data in a proper way... Also, the fields or columns could be improved. Sometimes, it is not giving the desired results and there is a blank field."
"The data connectors for third-party tools could be improved, as some aren't available in Sentinel. They need to be available in the data connector panel."
"We do have in-built or out-of-the-box metrics that are shown on the dashboard, but it doesn't give the kind of metrics that we need from our environment whereby we need to check the meantime to detect and meantime to resolve an incident. I have to do it manually. I have to pull all the logs or all the alerts that are fed into Sentinel over a certain period. We do this on a monthly basis, so I go into Microsoft Sentinel and pull all the alerts or incidents we closed over a period of thirty days."
"Azure Sentinel will be directly competing with tools such as Splunk or Qradar. These are very established kinds of a product that have been around for the last seven, eight years or more."
"I imagine we will have to develop our own reports soon, this seems to be more cumbersome."
"SolarWinds should improve its correlation capabilities. The correlation does not automatically detect and reduce the events fast enough. You have to manually do a correlation report, which means the tool is not scalable in many ways."
"We'd like more customization capabilities."
"One of the drawbacks of being so flexible is that it is also a fairly complicated software application to install, configure, and maintain."
"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."
"The solution's technical support is okay, but we don't have an SLA, and sometimes the response times are very slow."
"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."
"There are no multiple dashboards which would allow you to see information side-by-side."
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Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 2nd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 85 reviews while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is ranked 20th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 24 reviews. Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Sentinel writes "Gives a comprehensive and holistic view of the ecosystem and improves visibility and the ability to respond". 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 Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Elastic Security, whereas SolarWinds Security Event Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Log360, Splunk Enterprise Security, IBM Security QRadar, Wazuh and Microsoft Defender XDR. See our Microsoft Sentinel vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager report.
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