Microsoft Sentinel vs USM Anywhere comparison

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32,763 views|18,195 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
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5,857 views|3,918 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 12, 2023

We performed a comparison between USM Anywhere and Microsoft Sentinel based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Features: USM Anywhere is highly regarded for its extensive reporting capabilities, thorough vulnerability assessment, seamless file integration, and user-friendly management features. Microsoft Sentinel effectively identifies threats and integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions. Users say Sentinel makes it easy to find information quickly using KQL queries and praised the solution’s centralized log storage. USM Anywhere users have suggested improvements in self-service plugin management, database optimization, and third-party threat intelligence integration. Microsoft Sentinel could benefit from simplifying documentation, enhancing collaboration with security vendors, and improving data ingestion. Users also want more robust threat intelligence and UEBA features.

  • Service and Support: Some users say that USM Anywhere's customer service is knowledgeable and responsive, while others have faced delays and incomplete answers. Some users praised Microsoft’s quick response times and expertise, while others experienced challenges and support delays.

  • Ease of Deployment: The initial setup for USM Anywhere is generally considered to be straightforward if the user has technical knowledge. Vendor assistance is also available during the deployment phase. Some users said that deploying Microsoft Sentinel is straightforward, while others consider it to be moderately complex.

  • Pricing: USM Anywhere is seen as more cost-effective than premium solutions like IBM QRadar and Splunk, with pricing considered reasonable and relatively low. Microsoft Sentinel charges customers based on data usage, and it can be expensive for users who need to ingest data from non-cloud sources.

  • ROI: USM Anywhere has garnered favorable feedback regarding its ROI. Some Sentinel users have seen cost savings, while others have not experienced any financial benefits.

Comparison Results: Our users prefer USM Anywhere over Microsoft Sentinel for its user-friendly nature and comprehensive reporting. Users also praised USM Anywhere's vulnerability assessment features and integration. Microsoft Sentinel needs improvement in areas such as documentation, log collection, and user interface.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Sentinel vs. USM Anywhere Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Microsoft Sentinel enables you to ingest data from the entire ecosystem and that connection of data helps you to monitor critical resources and to know what's happening in the environment.""Sentinel is a Microsoft product, so they provide very robust use cases and analytic groups, which are very beneficial for the security team. I also like the ability to integrate data sources into the software for on-premise and cloud-based solutions.""The analytic rule is the most valuable feature.""Microsoft Sentinel comes preloaded with templates for teaching and analytics rules.""We are able to deploy within half an hour and we only require one person to complete the implementation.""Another area where it is helping us is in creating a single dashboard for our environment. We can collect all the logs into a log analytics workset and run queries on top of it. We get all the results in the dashboard. Even a layman can understand this stuff. The way Microsoft presents it is really incredible.""The scalability is great. You can put unlimited logs in, as long as you can pay for it. There are commitment tiers, up to six terabytes per day, which is nowhere close to what any one of our customers is running.""The in-built SOAR of Sentinel is valuable. Kusto Query Language is also valuable for the ease of writing queries and ease of getting insights from the logs. Schedule-based queries within Sentinel are also valuable. I found these three features most useful for my projects."

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"What I find the most valuable about USM Anywhere is its compliance. It shows a list of all the administrators logged on and does it quite well. There are no whistles and bells, it's reliable and simple to use.""Our main focus was intrusion detection, alerts, and correlation. It's easy to use AlienVault and integrate it with other alert tools because it includes lots of connectors. Either the tool is already there, or AlienVault will write an API for us if they don't have a connector for the solution that is providing the logs.""It is my "security person" looking at irregularities and letting me know when something has occurred.""Easy to use, scalable, stable, and very intuitive platform that provides protection against security threats.""It allows for a lot of out-of-the-box features: vuln scanning, HIDS/HIPS, and IDS.""Log-monitoring and alerting enable us to know when things happen that we need to know about.""It allows you to define what alerts you want to see, or not to see, as well as if you want them grouped, or ungrouped.""Allowed us to help our customers satisfy compliance needs around logging and monitoring."

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Cons
"The dashboards can be improved. Creating dashboards is very easy, but the visualizations are not as good as Microsoft Power BI. People who are using Microsoft Power BI do not like Sentinel's dashboards.""We'd like to see more connectors.""If their UI was a bit more streamlined and easy to find when I need it, then that would be a great improvement.""If I see an alert and I want to drill down and get more details about the alert, it's not just one click. In other SIEM tools, you just have to click the IP address of the entity and they give you the complete picture. In Sentinel, you have to write queries or use saved queries to get details.""We do see continuous improvement all the time, however, I haven't got a specific feature that is lacking or not well designed.""The solution could improve the playbooks.""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.""The only thing is sometimes you can have a false positive."

More Microsoft Sentinel Cons →

"The lack of mature functionality and expertise in any of those areas is a strong negative.""AT&T AlienVault USM can improve searchable data. It should be available for more than 90 days. If you need more than 90 days of data, you have to put a request and they give you raw data, which is not easy to search. A good addition would be to allow users to search data older than 90 days.""AlienVault must improve their correlation feature. Some of the events do not match with the correlation rules and some of the correlation events are false-positive.""The AT&T AlienVault USM is okay, but the relational database is not very good for large amounts of data. For example, many logs cannot be processed. It has been very slow for the queries and some data which are large, it is not very good in this case.""In the future, I would like to see all these features of the solution working properly.""The price of AT&T AlienVault USM could be reduced.""There could be some type of integration with our existing portal. We have our own customer portals, and it would be good if there was an integration so that our portal can provide reports. There could be some type of API into the AlienVault system with the USM system so that it is easy to show the customers high-level reports of the system through our portal.""It would be hard for any legitimate MSSP to use it."

More USM Anywhere Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It comes with a Microsoft subscription which the customer has, so they don't have to invest somewhere else."
  • "It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure"
  • "Good monthly operational cost model for the detection and response outcomes delivered, M365 logs don't count toward the limits which is a good benefit."
  • "I have had mixed feedback. At one point, I heard a client say that it sometimes seems more expensive. Most of the clients are on Office 365 or M365, and they are forced to take Azure SIEM because of the integration."
  • "It is kind of like a sliding scale. There are different tiers of pricing that go from $100 per day up to $3,500 per day. So, it just kind of depends on how much data is being stored. There can be additional costs to the standard license other than the additional data. It just kind of depends on what other services you're spinning up in Azure, or if you're using something like Azure log analytics."
  • "I am just paying for the log space with Azure Sentinel. It costs us about $2,000 a month. Most of the logs are free. We are only paying money for Azure Firewall logs because email logs or Azure AD logs are free to use for us."
  • "Sentinel is a bit expensive. If you can figure a way of configuring it to meet your needs, then you can find a way around the cost."
  • "Azure Sentinel is very costly, or at least it appears to be very costly. The costs vary based on your ingestion and your retention charges."
  • More Microsoft Sentinel Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "AlienVault is flexible on their pricing for unlimited licenses."
  • "Pricing is very competitive with other products and you get much more functionality from AlienVault."
  • "QRadar, ArcSight and Splunk are some of the most expensive SIEM products out there in the market and not everyone has the budget to buy them. In such cases, AV USM is a very cost effective alternative."
  • "Do the one month trial and try to work out the kinks during it, as it has free support and service hours."
  • "We checked out several competitors. For what it can do and the cost, it was the best option!"
  • "Use the AlienVault team. They are helpful and the documentation that they provide is second to none."
  • "​The price point is good.​"
  • "It has good pricing."
  • More USM Anywhere Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel and its Threat Hunting functionality with AI available as templates or customized by… more »
    Top Answer:It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log… more »
    Top Answer:We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is auto-scaling - you will not have to worry about performance impact, you will… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of deployment that it provides to users. The integrations that the product has with third-party applications are useful.
    Top Answer:It is a product that is priced in a medium range, making it neither a cheap nor a costly product.
    Top Answer:The vulnerability scanning feature is one of the areas where the product has certain shortcomings and needs to improve. The tool has vulnerability scanning, but it is not that efficient. A mobile app… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    32,763
    Comparisons
    18,195
    Reviews
    60
    Average Words per Review
    1,620
    Rating
    8.4
    Views
    5,857
    Comparisons
    3,918
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    551
    Rating
    7.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Azure Sentinel
    AT&T AlienVault USM, AlienVault, AlienVault USM, Alienvault Cybersecurity
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:

    - Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds

    - Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft

    - Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft

    - Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks

    To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

    USM Anywhere centralizes security monitoring of networks and devices in the cloud, on premises, and in remote locations, helping you to detect threats virtually anywhere.

    Discover

    • Network asset discovery
    • Software & services discovery
    • AWS asset discovery
    • Azure asset discovery
    • Google Cloud Platform asset discovery

    Analyze

    • SIEM event correlation, auto-prioritized alarms
    • User activity monitoring
    • Up to 90-days of online, searchable events

    Detect

    • Cloud intrusion detection (AWS, Azure, GCP)
    • Network intrusion detection (NIDS)
    • Host intrusion detection (HIDS)
    • Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)

    Respond

    • Forensics querying
    • Automate & orchestrate response
    • Notifications and ticketing

    Assess

    • Vulnerability scanning
    • Cloud infrastructure assessment
    • User & asset configuration
    • Dark web monitoring

    Report

    • Pre-built compliance reporting templates
    • Pre-built event reporting templates
    • Customizable views and dashboards
    • Log storage
    Sample Customers
    Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
    Abel & Cole, Bank of Ireland, Bluegrass Cellular, CareerBuilder, Claire's, Hays Medical Center, Hope International, McCurrach, McKinsey & Company, Party Delights, Pepco Holdings, Richland School District, Ricoh, SaveMart, Shake Shack, Steelcase, TaxAct, Taylor Morrison, Vonage and Zoom
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Healthcare Company17%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Government8%
    Educational Organization7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise59%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business54%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise21%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise47%
    Buyer's Guide
    Microsoft Sentinel vs. USM Anywhere
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Sentinel vs. USM Anywhere and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 1st in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 85 reviews while USM Anywhere is ranked 11th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 113 reviews. Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2, while USM Anywhere is rated 8.4. 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 USM Anywhere writes "Easy to use and affordable". Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Splunk Enterprise Security and Elastic Security, whereas USM Anywhere is most compared with Wazuh, AlienVault OSSIM, IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security and Rapid7 InsightIDR. See our Microsoft Sentinel vs. USM Anywhere report.

    See our list of best Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendors.

    We monitor all Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.