We performed a comparison between Microsoft 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."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."
"The pricing of the product is excellent."
"Another area where it is helping us is in creating a single dashboard for our environment. We can collect all the logs into a log analytics workset and run queries on top of it. We get all the results in the dashboard. Even a layman can understand this stuff. The way Microsoft presents it is really incredible."
"It's pretty powerful and its performance is pretty good."
"The automation rules and playbooks are the most useful that I've seen. A number of other places segregate the automation and playbook as separate tools, whereas Microsoft is a SIEM and SOAR tool in one."
"We can use Sentinel's playbook to block threats. It covers all of the environment, giving us great visibility."
"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 graphical user interface is very user-friendly. SolarWinds is a hybrid solution so you can use it across many platforms."
"The solution helps you monitor database instances, application instances, other customer application things, Linux servers, IBM servers, and Oracle servers."
"SolarWinds Security Event Manager has been generally working well."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is the analysis and the knowledge about the incidence that we trace."
"SolarWinds is easy to configure, and it provides timely alerts."
"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."
"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."
"It performs network behavior monitoring, log monitoring, and disaster recovery monitoring."
"They should integrate it with many other software-as-a-service providers and make connectors available so that you don't have to do any sort of log normalization."
"The performance could be improved. If I create 15 to 20 lines for a single-use case in KQL, sometimes it takes more time to execute. If I create use cases within a certain timeline, the result will show in .01 seconds. A complex query takes more time to get results."
"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."
"Sentinel's reporting is complex and can be more user-friendly."
"Sentinel should be improved with more connectors. At the moment, it only covers a few vendors. If I remember correctly, only 100 products are supported natively in Sentinel, although you can connect them with syslog. But Microsoft should increase the number of native connectors to get logs into Sentinel."
"If you're looking to use canned queries, the interface could be a little more straightforward. It's not immediately intuitive regarding how you use it. You have to take a canned query and paste it into an operational box and then you hit a button... They could improve the ease of deploying these queries."
"When it comes to ingesting Azure native log sources, some of the log sources are specific to the subscription, and it is not always very clear."
"In terms of features I would like to see in future releases, I'm interested in a few more use cases around automation. I do believe a lot of automation is available, and more is in progress, but that would be my area of interest."
"It can be difficult for users who are inexperienced with the solution."
"I would like to have a more customizable dashboard."
"The reporting could be more robust. It can be a lot more granular and that will make it a lot more useful in comparison to how it is incorporated at the moment."
"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."
"Training for this solution needs to be improved, as new employees are sometimes unfamiliar with the product."
"The only issue is the pricetag. SolarWinds is a costly solution."
"It is a very technical program. They can simplify it so that it isn't so hard to deal with."
"We used the support from SolarWinds Security Event Manager and they are knowledgeable but challenging to get in contact with them."
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Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 2nd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 86 reviews while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is ranked 20th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 24 reviews. Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Sentinel writes "Gives a comprehensive and holistic view of the ecosystem and improves visibility and the ability to respond". 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". Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Wazuh, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Elastic Security, whereas SolarWinds Security Event Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Log360, Splunk Enterprise Security, Wazuh, IBM Security QRadar and Microsoft Defender XDR. See our Microsoft Sentinel vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager report.
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