We performed a comparison between IBM Security QRadar 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."The initial setup is very simple and straightforward."
"The standout feature of Sentinel is that, because it's cloud-based and because it's from Microsoft, it integrates really well with all the other Microsoft products. It's really simple to set up and get going."
"The analytic rule is the most valuable feature."
"Microsoft Sentinel comes preloaded with templates for teaching and analytics rules."
"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."
"The connectivity and analytics are great."
"Investigations are something really remarkable. We can drill down right to the raw logs by running different queries and getting those on the console itself."
"One of the most valuable features is that it creates a kind of a single pane of glass for organizations that already use Microsoft software. So, when they have things like Microsoft 365, it is very easy for them to kind of plug in or enroll those endpoints into the Azure Sentinel service."
"What we like about QRadar and the models that IBM has, is it can go from a small-to-medium enterprise to a larger organization, and it gives you the same value."
"The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable."
"When it comes to QRadar, they can do the correlation and not only in networks but also endpoints. This is one of the good features that we have noticed."
"QRadar UBA's most valuable feature is the risk rating of users depending on their behavior."
"IBM QRadar is great help from its security event monitoring to data center and NOC troubleshooting of issues hard for other departments to spot."
"I have found its network traffic log, network bit log, and QBI most valuable."
"A nice benefit is when we go to the process of selecting our youth cases, they go by building blocks. QRadar links it to building blocks."
"In terms of the most valuable features, the log collections and log processing mechanisms are good. They have good dashboards."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use for the end user."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting."
"It's easy to build rules and actions based on the logs and event types we collect with the software."
"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 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 out of the box reports and dashboard. It was easy to trim down these windows to something we could quickly use."
"This tool is simple to use."
"There is some relatively advanced knowledge that you have to have to properly leverage Sentinel's full capabilities. I'm thinking about things like the creation of workbooks, how you do threat-hunting, and the kinds of notifications you're getting... It takes time for people to ramp up on that and develop a familiarity or expertise with it."
"They only classify alerts into three categories: high, medium, and low. So, from the user's point of view, having another critical category would be awesome."
"Documentation is the main thing that could be improved. In terms of product usage, the documentation is pretty good, but I'd like a lot more documentation on Kusto Query Language."
"If I can use Sentinel offline at home and use it on a local network, it would be great. I'm not sure if I can use Sentinel offline versus the tools I have."
"Improvement-wise, I would like to see more integration with third-party solutions or old-school antivirus products that have some kind of logging capability. I wouldn't mind having that exposed within Sentinel. We do have situations where certain companies have bought licensing or have made an investment in a product, and that product will be there for the next two or three years. To be able to view information from those legacy products would be great. We can then better leverage the Sentinel solution and its capabilities."
"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."
"Multi-tenancy, in my opinion, needs to be improved. I believe it can do better as a managed service provider."
"The product can be improved by reducing the cost to use AI machine learning."
"There could be improvements made to the UI, the user interface. Though the newer version, 7.3.2, might already have this improvement in place."
"The user interface and configurability of IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics can be improved. It has a lot of pre-configured settings and not many things can be changed. It also needs more integrations. Currently, User Behavior Analytics is integrated only with IBM QRadar. It could have deeper integrations. It can also have more complicated scoring models. Currently, it has a very simple linear scoring model for users."
"There needs to be better integration with other applications."
"Its architecture is very complicated."
"IBM needs to invest more into the collaboration with other vendors."
"Ideally we would like a mobile version so that any alert that comes in will notify us in a mobile app, or by using SMS integration."
"IBM technical support is always terrible."
"They should provide more manual examples online so that I can learn it myself."
"The product should improve the ease with which you can create event alerts. They are not as hard now but you need to have an easier way."
"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."
"It can be difficult for users who are inexperienced with the solution."
"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."
"I would like to have a more customizable dashboard."
"There is no correlation made between log entries, so no threat information is presented."
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IBM Security QRadar is ranked 4th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 198 reviews while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is ranked 21st in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 24 reviews. IBM Security QRadar is rated 8.0, while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of IBM Security QRadar writes "A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good technical support". 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". IBM Security QRadar is most compared with Splunk Enterprise Security, Wazuh, LogRhythm SIEM, Elastic Security and Fortinet FortiSIEM, whereas SolarWinds Security Event Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Log360, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wazuh and LogRhythm SIEM. See our IBM Security QRadar vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager report.
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