Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

My customer wanted to use EDR. We worked with the POC to demonstrate the antivirus and how it has more features for detecting threats.

It makes it easier and faster to investigate problems and incidents.

The most valuable features are that it can integrate the firewalls and determine the tendencies of the attacks.

It investigates problems and incidents quickly. Cortex is good at reducing alerts and for having a custom barrier. It's a new generation antivirus, with protection endpoints and detection response.

Cortex detects and shows what the problem is and how to resolve the problem or incident. Cortex is very easy to use and everybody can operate the solution.

It has tools for threat hunting and it has very good incident response features.

It is not easy to sell Cortex XDR, not because it isn't a good tool. Its marketing needs to be improved.

I've been using it for a year.

Setting it up is very simple.

It has a higher cost than other solutions, like CrowdStrike or Microsoft’s EDR tools, but it reduces the cost of our operations because it’s a new generation antivirus tool.

I'm rating this solution a ten out of ten because it is very good for managed threat hunting and incident response. It is the best XDR solution. It's better than other tools because it uses enterprise architecture. Everybody will find that this solution is easy to use. 

We use Palo Alto Networks Traps (Version 6) to protect our endpoints against NG malware via behavior analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Both the PA Traps endpoint logs, our PA firewall traffic logs and the Wildfire sandbox are used to provide immediate threat response and feed this information to the PA Threat Intelligence cloud.

Palo Alto Networks Traps improves our security posture and lowers risk by providing next-gen methods to combat against modern threats on all the major platforms.

The one feature that our organization finds most valuable is being able to control the USB ports on the endpoints

The MAC agent is not as robust feature-wise as the PC version. I need to control USB ports on MAC laptops and cannot. This is a MUST so I opened a case with Palo Alto and requested this feature for an upcoming update.

I would like to see more automation and self-healing for incidents that can be easily classified as malware.

No issues

Palo Alto Networks Traps features excellent protection, cost and scalability. We are a small group of 4 employees and have 2 people dedicated to deployment and monitoring of 1400+ endpoints.

Palo Alto Network's technical support is excellent. 

Since we were a Fortinet shop, we previously used the FortiClient endpoint agent. We switched to Palo alto FWs and endpoint protection because it is a more mature product with advanced next-gen capabilities not available from the Fortinet solution.

The initial setup was done by a Palo Alto certified service provider.

This product pays for itself with only one ransomware denial!

Our license runs on a monthly basis with a recurring monthly charge. If you want additional options like secure remote access with policies, that requires an additional cost. 

Palo Alto Networks Traps does not apply secure remote access to devices without policies, which we are implementing. If you want to apply more policies, like an anti-virus program, anti-malware, or configurations for using a VPN on remote connections, that would also be an additional cost. We're not doing that.

Cylance, Carbon Black, Crowdstrike, Microsoft Windows Defender ATP, Sophos, SentinelONE

On a scale from 1-10, I would rate Palo Alto Networks Traps with an eight. It is great, but I have some issues with the cost of the product license.

Cortex XDR does the stitching between a number of security domains, like email security, API security, and web security. The solution does the stitching from different sources and makes a logical incident.

We can use Cortex XDR to get the entire graph of the incidents from source to destination, and we can take remedial action. We don't need to navigate different solutions and tools or use our human intelligence to correlate all the information to make the logic. Cortex XDR entirely does it, and we can take action.

Cortex XDR should have a lightweight agent, and the agent size should not be heavy. Cortex XDR’s technical support should also be improved.

Cortex XDR should provide a feature to remove or uninstall an agent directly from the console itself without the help of an IT engineer. No one wants to do a manual installation of the agent. Everyone is looking for a solution to remove the agent from the console directly.

I have been working with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks for two years.

I rate Cortex XDR a ten out of ten for stability.

I rate Cortex XDR a five out of ten for scalability.

The technical support of Cortex XDR and other OEM products is not very good. Cortex XDR's technical support does not usually respond quickly.

Neutral

I rate Cortex XDR’s initial setup an eight out of ten.

Cortex XDR’s pricing is very reasonable. I rate Cortex XDR a five out of ten for pricing.

I am using the latest version of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. Cortex XDR is usually deployed in our clients’ organization on cloud. The time it takes to deploy Cortex XDR depends totally upon the organization.

The biggest drawback of Cortex XDR is that it has a heavyweight agent. Cortex XDR would be a good product if this issue could be resolved.

Overall, I rate Cortex XDR an eight out of ten.

We use it for our own company as well for our clients. It is mainly used for protecting the endpoints. Like everybody else nowadays, we're all working from home, and we have access to data on the public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem. We got to make sure that we're not exposing our endpoints to anything out there that could be malicious and that could cause any problems within our networking environment.

It has absolutely improved the way our organization functions. We are more secure. It is giving us more peace of mind, and it is doing what it is doing. It has found malicious activity happening on our endpoints that probably would not have been detected if we didn't have it.

The ability to kind of stitch everything together and see the actual complete picture is very useful. I guess you'd call it a playbook. Some people call it the forensics analysis of what was happening on particular endpoints when they detected some malicious behavior, and what transpired before that to cause that. It is also very user friendly.

The way they have done everything and integrated all the solutions that they've purchased over the years to make it a very seamless, effective product is very good. One thing about Palo Alto is that they take the products or services that they purchase and make them seamless for the end user as compared to some companies that purchase other companies and then just kind of have their products off to the side or keep different interfaces. Palo Alto doesn't do that.

A little bit more automation would be nice.

We've been a reseller for Palo Alto for 13 years. I have been using it for quite a while. They had bought Cyvera for the endpoint security, which was obviously the base for Cortex XDR. I have been seeing how it actually progressed from just a straight endpoint security solution that was a little clunky at one time to a very streamlined, effective solution today.

It is stable. I haven't found any issues.

It is extremely easy to scale. We have about 20 users, and their roles stem from sales to technical, marketing, and administrative.

Palo Alto has got very good tech support. I would give them a ten out of ten.

At one time, I tried Cylance, and it just wasn't that effective for what we needed. At the time, it wasn't really an EDR solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy.

Its pricing is kind of in line with its competitors and everybody else out there.

You don't have to be a Palo Alto customer to implement this solution. Some people think they have to, but no. It is a completely separate solution on its own. I would highly recommend it just because it is a complete package. It not only takes in data from your endpoint; it also takes in data from other sources that are not Palo Alto and helps to create the story about what's going on by stitching things together.

I would rate Cortex XDR a nine out of ten. It is pretty good. The reason for giving a nine is that there is always room for improvement.

I've found the security protection modules there, have been the most valuable.

I started using it from 4.1, but it didn't change that much. Some features and some fixes have been added to 4.2, but not that much. They need to improve reporting, the end-point reporting. They could also enhance their notification statuses. In the current version, you will see some threat alerts, or if anything is executable, but you will not see behavioral analysis. You will see what was being blocked, and that's it. If Traps logs something, you will get a notification. Otherwise, you have to generate the dump file and investigate on your own.

In the next release, I would like to see more UI improvements. Their UI is a bit basic. When we are speaking about Palo Alto Networks they are a big company, so they can surely improve the UI a little bit. The UI, the reports, the log system can all be improved. But overall, when we speak about security and protection, they are one of the top providers.

It's very stable. I've never experienced downtime for the ASM console or ASM core. But we experienced this for the database, and it was not clear in Trap's interface. So, Trap's server stopped working, stopped getting jobs, stopped the enforcing policies because the database was full. We did not get any alert for that, so you will not see any alert on the ESM console that says that your database is about to fill up. It was not reachable and there was no warning or indication for this. You have to go to some tools internally and check in the command line, to see. You will see some errors for the DB, and you will realize that it's a DB issue. I've never experienced any issue with the Traps itself, but with the database.

It's very easy to scale if you have file availability. If it's more clear, we can do high availability, but it's a bit tricky. We deployed this for 4,000 endpoints, and it was very easy. Two ASM core servers were enough to deploy it for 4,000 plus endpoints. These are enterprises, not SMBs. They're government institutions.

I would not say that technical support is bad, but it's not that good. It could be better.

Basically, they don't provide customer support tools just to investigate the logs. From a reseller or authorized center for Palo Alto, I can't get that much information from the logs because it's a bit complicated. If they have support tools, for example, to analyze the logs as they have for the Palo Alto firewall. They don't have for this for Traps. They need to have some tools to analyze the logs. We can generate something called tech support files from Traps, but it's useless. Nothing's there. You will not get that much from the tech support file.

But for the firewall, if we get the tech support file and upload it to somewhere they have some tools, we can get many useful logs and alerts. For Traps, this is not possible.

The initial setup was straightforward. They are using MySQL database, and I think it's a disadvantage because you need to buy a license for MySQL also to deploy it. They don't have this concept of file availability between DS and core servers.

We are a reseller. We are implementing it on customer premises for our clients.

The main advice I can share is to watch out for your database and make sure to give it enough resources. That's it.

I would rate this solution eight out of 10.

We use the product to monitor and control all the systems. It helps us understand user behavior.

The product gives full visibility and control of the endpoints in the environment. The users and the employees can protect their systems by investigating files for incidents.

The platform's most valuable feature is being a cloud-based solution. We can visualize and control the activities in the environment from anywhere.

The product's pricing needs improvement. They could provide more discounts. Additionally, the dashboard and control panel could be enhanced.

We have been using Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks for two months.

The platform is stable. As far as you have the internet, the product is secure.

The platform is scalable.

They have a good technical support team.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to maintain as well.

I implemented the product myself.

I recommend Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and rate it an eight out of ten. It is a good solution for the commercial sector as they can work on the cloud. I advise others to refer to user guides for understanding the processes easily.

The solution is like a next-level EDR. It can collect information from other solutions to have a global view of the risks and vulnerabilities.

The product has an intuitive dashboard. The first time a client interacts with the solution, they do not face any problems. It is easy for the client to navigate through the tool.

It is a complex solution to implement.

My organization sells the solution.

I did not have any problem with support.

Positive

I believe the implementation is not very easy, but it is not very complex either.

The price of the product is not very economical. It is suitable for clients that have a lot of money to invest.

Customers often ask for proof of concept. People wanting to use the solution should analyze the different tools that can be integrated with the product. At first, clients only consider it an EDR, but later, they might realize that the tool does not have all the capabilities they need. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The tool's use cases are relevant to security. 

The tool needs to be improved in terms of integration and interface. 

I have been working with the solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. 

I would rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. 

The product's technical support is good. 

Positive

The tool's setup is easy. The solution's deployment took five days to complete. 

The solution is expensive. It's pricing is on a yearly-basis. 

I would rate the tool a seven out of ten.