We performed a comparison between Arista NDR and Cisco Secure Network Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The interface itself is clean and easy to use, yet customizable. I like that I can create my own dashboards fairly easily so that I can see what is important to me. Also, the query language is pretty easy to use. I haven't needed to use it a ton, but as I need to go in and do different queries based on their requests, it has been fairly simple to use."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly."
"This solution’s encrypted traffic analysis helps us stay in compliance with government regulations. It is all about understanding data exfiltration, what is ingressing and egressing in our network. One common attack vector is exfiltrating data using encryption. My capabilities to see potential data exfiltration over encrypted traffic is second to none now."
"Other solutions will say, "Hey, this device is doing something weird." But they don't aggregate that data point with other data points. With Awake you have what's called a "fact pattern." For example, if there's a smart toaster on the third floor that is beaconing out to an IP address in North Korea, sure that's bizarre. But if that toaster was made in North Korea it's not bizarre. Taking those two data points together, and automating something using machine-learning is something that no other solution is doing right now."
"The most valuable portion is that they offer a threat-hunting service. Using their platform, and all of the data that they're collecting, they actually help us be proactive by having really expert folks that have insight, not just into our accounts, but into other accounts as well. They can be proactive and say, 'Well, we saw this incident at some other customer. We ran that same kind of analysis for you and we didn't see that type of activity in your network.'"
"The security knowledge graph has been very helpful in the sense that whenever you try a new security solution, especially one that's in the detection and response market, you're always worried about getting a lot of false positives or getting too many alerts and not being able to pick out the good from the bad or things that are actual security incidents versus normal day to day operations. We've been pleasantly surprised that Awake does a really good job of only alerting about things that we actually want to look into and understand. They do a good job of understanding normal operations out-of-the-box."
"When I create a workbench query in Awake to do threat hunting, it's much easier to query. You get a dictionary popup immediately when you try to type a new query. It says, "You want to search for a device?" Then you type in "D-E," and it gives you a list of commands, like device, data set behavior, etc. That gives you the ability to build your own query."
"Arista NDR's scalability is very good, making it easy to add more hardware components. You can order additional hardware and integrate it by stacking it with the existing setup. This feature cannot be seen in other NDR tools."
"Using the Cognitive Analytics feature, we have complete visibility that we didn’t have before."
"The most valuable features provided by this solution are visibility and information."
"It's a dependable product that is able to pinpoint where we have vulnerabilities if they occur."
"Cisco Stealthwatch has reduced the amount of time to detect an immediate threat."
"I value the feature which enables me to detect devices talking to suspect IPs."
"The deployment was a breeze. It is a very innovative and robust platform that allows us to bi-directionally stitch together data elements from Netflow-enabled devices to provide a context for network utilization."
"The most valuable feature is its alerts and dashboard."
"I believe this solution has reduced our incident response time."
"When I looked at the competitors, such as Darktrace, they all have prettier interfaces. If Awake could make it a little more user-friendly, that would go a long way."
"I would like to see a bit more in terms of encrypted traffic. With the advent of programs that live off the land, a smart attacker is going to leverage encryption to execute their operation. So I would like to see improvements there, where possible. Currently, we're not going to be decrypting encrypted traffic. What other approaches could be used?"
"One concern I do have with Awake is that, ideally, it should be able identify high-risk users and devices and entities. However, we don't have confidence in their entity resolution, and we've provided this feedback to Awake. My understanding is that this is where some of the AI/ML is, and it hasn't been reliable in correctly identifying which device an activity is associated with. We have also encountered issues where it has merged two devices into one entity profile when they shouldn't be merged. The entity resolution is the weakest point of Awake so far."
"One thing I would like to see is a little bit more education or experience on AWS cloud for their managed services team. We've explained how we have the information set up, that the traffic coming in goes to the AWS load balancer and then gets sent on to our internal servers... but when I get notices they always tell me this traffic is coming from the IPs belonging to the load balancers, not the source IPs. So a little bit more education for their team about how AWS manages the traffic might help out."
"While the appliance is very good, and I think they're working on it, it would probably help if they integrated the management team cases into the appliance so that everything we are working on with them would be accessible on our platform, on the dashboard, on the portal. Right now, Awake is just an additional team that uses the appliance that we use and then we communicate with them directly. Communication isn't through the portal."
"I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this."
"Be prepared to update your SOPs to have your analysts work in another tool separately. There are some limitations in the integrations right now. One of the things that I want from a security standpoint is integration with multiple tools so I don't need to have my analysts logging into each individual tool."
"I enjoy the query language, but it could be a bit more user-friendly, especially for new users who come across it... They should push it more into a natural language style as opposed to a query language."
"If they can make this product more web-based, that would be amazing."
"The ability to be natively integrated into Port Aggregator would be beneficial because it would reduce just one more component that's needed in order to have that type of view."
"One thing I would like to see improved is if it could automatically be tied through ISE, instead of you having to manually get notifications and disable it yourself."
"There could be better integration on the programming side, which uses Python. StealthWatch could provide a template for Python to manage the switches. For example, it would be nice if StealthWatch bounced a port automatically it detected something anomalous."
"The customizability of the UI should improve."
"Cisco Stealthwatch can improve by having bundled packages for popular add-ons. It would be a lot easier for people implementing it, have let's say a better way to use the product."
"Initially, I felt Cisco Secure Network Analytics lacked integration with Splunk."
"The visualization could be improved, the GUI is not the best."
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Arista NDR is ranked 8th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 14 reviews while Cisco Secure Network Analytics is ranked 4th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 58 reviews. Arista NDR is rated 9.0, while Cisco Secure Network Analytics is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Arista NDR writes "Gives us network layer visibility into things that may not be covered by other monitoring tools, such as shadow IT". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Network Analytics writes "Increased the visibility of what is happening in our network". Arista NDR is most compared with Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, Vectra AI, Trend Micro Deep Discovery, Darktrace and ExtraHop Reveal(x), whereas Cisco Secure Network Analytics is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, ThousandEyes, Vectra AI and Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline. See our Arista NDR vs. Cisco Secure Network Analytics report.
See our list of best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors and best Network Detection and Response (NDR) vendors.
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