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."I like the unified security console. You can close incidents using Sentinel in all other Microsoft Security portals, when it comes to incident response."
"There are some very powerful features to Sentinel, such as the integration of various connectors. We have a lot of departments that use both IaaS and SaaS services, including M365 as well as Azure services. The ability to leverage connectors into these environments allows for large-scale data injection."
"I believe one of the main advantages is Microsoft Sentinel's seamless integration with other Microsoft products."
"Sentinel also enables you to ingest data from your entire ecosystem and not just from the Microsoft ecosystem. It can receive data from third-party vendors' products such firewalls, network devices, and antivirus solutions. It's not only a Microsoft solution, it's for everything."
"Log aggregation and data connectors are the most valuable features."
"The solution offers a lot of data on events. It helps us create specific detection strategies."
"The log query feature has been the most valuable because it's very good. You can put your data on the cloud and run queues from Sentinel. It will do it all very fast. I love that I don't have to upload it to an Excel file and then manually look for a piece of information. Sentinel is much faster and is good for big databases."
"We are able to deploy within half an hour and we only require one person to complete the implementation."
"The threat hunting capabilities in general are great."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is how it monitors the real network. That is its leading security feature."
"We run 65 servers globally with just two people: an engineering person and me."
"The stability is good."
"It can analyze event logs, event security, and give a good consult."
"The solution can scale."
"IBM has everything you need in a cybersecurity solution. If you want to build a cybersecurity operation center version then I think QRadar is a perfect solution."
"It performs network behavior monitoring, log monitoring, and disaster recovery monitoring."
"It supports high availability, which is very helpful."
"SolarWinds Security Event Manager has been generally working well."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the visibility into both attempted and failed logins."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is the analysis and the knowledge about the incidence that we trace."
"I would like to see more AI used in processes."
"Microsoft Sentinel is relatively expensive, and its cost should be improved."
"Sentinel provides decent visibility, but it's sometimes a little cumbersome to get to the information I want because there is so much information. I would also like to see more seamless integration between Sentinel and third-party security products."
"I would like Sentinel to have more out-of-the-box analytics rules. There are already more than 400 rules, but they could add more industry-specific ones. For example, you could have sets of out-of-the-box rules for banking, financial sector, insurance, automotive, etc., so it's easier for people to use it out of the box. Structuring the rules according to industry might help us."
"Sometimes, we are observing large ingestion delays. We expect logs within 5 minutes, but it takes about 10 to 15 minutes."
"The KQL query does not function effectively with Windows 11 machines, and in the majority of machine-based investigations, KQL queries are essential for organizing the data during investigations."
"There is a wider thing called Jupyter Notebooks, which is around the automation side of things. It would be good if there are playbooks that you can utilize without having to have the developer experience to do it in-house. Microsoft could provide more playbooks or more Jupyter Notebooks around MITRE ATT&CK Framework."
"We'd like also a better ticketing system, which is older."
"Some UI enhancements would be nice, such as exporting custom event properties and the ability to export rules."
"I would suggest QRadar release any documentation or give an online demo, like videos on YouTube. It would increase publicity and public appeal."
"The user interface is a bit difficult to get used to."
"The weak signal detection with QRadar needs improvement. You can detect what you know, but what is unknown to the rule engine can't be detected."
"I'd like them to improve the offense. When QRadar detects something, it creates what it calls offenses. So, it has a rudimentary ticketing system inside of it. This is the same interface that was there when I started using it 12 years ago. It just has not been improved. They do allow integration with IBM Resilient, but IBM Resilient is grotesquely expensive. The most effective integration that IBM offers today is with IBM Resilient, which is an instant response platform. It is a very good platform, but it is very expensive. They really should do something with the offense handling because it is very difficult to scale, and it has limitations. The maximum number of offenses that it can carry is 16K. After 16K, you have to flush your offenses out. So, it is all or nothing. You lose all your offenses up until that point in time, and you don't have any history within the offense list of older events. If you're dealing with multiple customers, this becomes problematic. That's why you need to use another product to do the actual ticketing. If you wanted the ticket existence, you would normally interface with ServiceNow, SolarWinds, or some other product like that."
"Before we didn't have any security issues but recently a few of the user emails were hacked. We had to actually recreate their emails for them."
"The Indian tech support is not helpful."
"The solution is highly used here in Pakistan and in many sectors, they could improve it by having more SIEM connectors."
"The solution's technical support is okay, but we don't have an SLA, and sometimes the response times are very slow."
"It is a very technical program. They can simplify it so that it isn't so hard to deal with."
"Training for this solution needs to be improved, as new employees are sometimes unfamiliar with the product."
"I would like to have a more customizable dashboard."
"It can be difficult for users who are inexperienced with the solution."
"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."
"We'd like more customization capabilities."
"I imagine we will have to develop our own reports soon, this seems to be more cumbersome."
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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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