Cisco Sourcefire SNORT Pros and Cons

In general, the features are all great. However, if I need to take hardware for ASA, because they need to upgrade to Firepower, we want to create rules. For that, most of the time we go to the command line. Right now Firepower is working really hard on the grid. You can apply all those rules to the grid. Even if you want to monitor the logs, for example, the activity will tell you which particular user has been blocked because of that rule. Firepower's monitoring interface is very good, because you can see each and every piece. ASA also had it, but there you needed to type the command and be under the server to see all that stuff. In Firepower you have the possibility to go directly to the firewall. The way the monitoring is displayed is also very nice. The feature I appreciate most in Firepower is actually the grid. The grid has worked very well.

Solid intrusion detection and prevention that scales easily in very large environments.

The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically learn the traffic in our environment, and change the merit recommendations based on that.

It has a huge rate of protection. It's has a low level of positives and a huge rate of threat protection. It's easy to deploy and easy to implement. It has an incredible price rate compared to similar solutions.

The solution is rather easy to use.

The solution can be integrated with some network electors like Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco ISE, and Active Directory to provide the client with authentication certificates.

I like most of Cisco's features, like malware detection and URL filtering.

The whole solution is very good, and stable.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering.

The URL filtering is very good and you can create a group for customized URLs.

To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that. Whenever I go to the technical community with an issue, they will usually say that it is not there yet, but the technical team are working on it. The issues are not insolvable. I think they should just keep working on the product to make sure that the product can become very stable. The technical support is great. I appreciate that. We have a lot of communities supporting Firepower now, so you can find help for whatever issue you have.

Integration with other components — even Cisco's own products — can be enhanced to improve administrative experience.

We are unhappy with technical support for this solution, and it is not as professional as what we typically expect from Cisco.

Performance needs improvement.

While the alerts they offer are good, it could improve it in the sense that they should be more detailed to make the alerts more useful to us in general. Sometimes the solution will offer up false positives. Due to the fact that the alerts aren't detailed, we have to go dig around to see why is it being blocked. The solution would be infinitely better if there was just a bit more detail in the alert information and logging we receive.

With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features.

I don't think this solution is a time-based control system, because one cannot filter traffic based on time.

The customization of the rules can be simplified.

If the price is brought down then everybody will be happy.

There are problems setting up VPNs for some regions.