We performed a comparison between 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."Log aggregation and data connectors are the most valuable features."
"It's easy to use. It's a very good product. It can easily ingest data from anywhere. It has an easily understandable language to perform actions."
"Microsoft Sentinel comes preloaded with templates for teaching and analytics rules."
"The connectivity and analytics are great."
"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."
"I like the unified security console. You can close incidents using Sentinel in all other Microsoft Security portals, when it comes to incident response."
"I've worked on most of the top SIEM solutions, and Sentinel has an edge in most areas. For example, it has built-in SOAR capabilities, allowing you to run playbooks automatically. Other vendors typically offer SOAR as a separate licensed solution or module, but you get it free with Sentinel. In-depth incident integration is available out of the box."
"We are able to deploy within half an hour and we only require one person to complete the implementation."
"The stability is phenomenal and we never had any issues with downtime or even had to restart."
"The most valuable feature is the flexible log for identifying security threats inside an application. Sentinel is very good at this."
"The solution lets us get all the logs properly and regularly monitor customer infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that it provides a central locking system for many event sources."
"Sentinel gave us logs to tell us what's going right and wrong in your environment so we could secure the network."
"The most valuable feature of Sentinel is the dashboard."
"One of the most valuable features is the business intelligence engine. It's very important because it keeps track of everything that's happening and alerts us if something is different than expected. The first time I used it, I was shocked at how well it performed. Another valuable feature that I think makes this product worth the price you pay for it is that it connects to basically every system that provides some form of logging, and it's very easy to set up what triggers this."
"The solution's Kusto Query Language (KQL) execution time is pretty good."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the visibility into both attempted and failed logins."
"The graphical user interface is very user-friendly. SolarWinds is a hybrid solution so you can use it across many platforms."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting."
"Some of the rules are most valuable because you can be notified about various things, such as spyware or things that are going on in the internal network."
"The solution helps you monitor database instances, application instances, other customer application things, Linux servers, IBM servers, and Oracle servers."
"The out of the box reports and dashboard. It was easy to trim down these windows to something we could quickly use."
"Multi-tenancy, in my opinion, needs to be improved. I believe it can do better as a managed service provider."
"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."
"Only one thing is missing: NDR is not available out-of-the-box. The competitive cloud-native SIEM providers have the NDR component. Currently, Sentinel needs NDR to be powered from either Corelight or some other NDR provider."
"Currently, the watchlist feature is being utilized, and although there have been improvements, it is still not fully optimized."
"Sentinel could improve its ticketing and management. A few customers I have worked with liked to take the data created in Sentinel. You can make some basic efforts around that, but the customers wanted to push it to a third-party system so they could set up a proper ticketing management system, like ServiceNow, Jira, etc."
"Not all information shows up in Sentinel. Sometimes there are items provided in 365 and if you looked in Sentinel you would not see them and therefore think they do not exist. There can be discrepancies between Microsoft tools."
"We've seen delays in getting the logs from third-party solutions and sometimes Microsoft products as well. It would be helpful if Microsoft created a list of the delays. That would make things more transparent for customers."
"At the network level, there is a limitation in integrating some of the switches or routers with Microsoft Sentinel. Currently, SPAN traffic monitoring is not available in Microsoft Sentinel. I have heard that it is available in Defender for Identity, which is a different product. It would be good if LAN traffic monitoring or SPAN traffic monitoring is available in Microsoft Sentinel. It would add a lot of value. It is available in some of the competitor products in the market."
"The dashboard and customer view should be improved"
"I would like to see a better reporting work structure on the dashboard."
"There is no integration in the web-side of the tool."
"Creating a drag-and-drop dashboard or workbook in Sentinel is a little more complex compared to other tools like LogRhythm and IBM QRadar."
"There is a need for more flexibility in customization, especially when working with different vendors and platforms."
"It is an ancient product."
"The solution does not allow outsourced authorizations."
"I rate Sentinel a six out of ten for scalability."
"There are no multiple dashboards which would allow you to see information side-by-side."
"We used the support from SolarWinds Security Event Manager and they are knowledgeable but challenging to get in contact with them."
"One of the drawbacks of being so flexible is that it is also a fairly complicated software application to install, configure, and maintain."
"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 is no correlation made between log entries, so no threat information is presented."
"The company had to use a third party for the implementation of the solution."
"Training for this solution needs to be improved, as new employees are sometimes unfamiliar with the product."
More SolarWinds Security Event Manager Pricing and Cost Advice →
Sentinel is ranked 18th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 16 reviews while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is ranked 20th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 24 reviews. Sentinel is rated 7.6, while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Sentinel writes "An automated solution that helped me detect threats in less than half the time it used to take". 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". Sentinel is most compared with IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security, Google Chronicle Suite, Wazuh and LogRhythm SIEM, whereas SolarWinds Security Event Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Log360, Splunk Enterprise Security, IBM Security QRadar, Wazuh and Microsoft Defender XDR. See our Sentinel vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager report.
See our list of best Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendors.
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