Compare Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs. ExtraHop Reveal(x)
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Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros | ||
"One of the key advantages for us is we define a 24/7 service around it. We use far more of Vectra alerts than we do with our SIEM product because we understand that when we get an alert from Vectra we actually need to do something about it." "It is doing some artificial intelligence. If it sees a server doing a lot of things, then it will assume that is normal. So, it is looking for anomalous behavior, things that are out of context which helps us reduce time. Therefore, we don't have to look in all the logs. We just wait for Vectra to say, "This one is behaving strange," then we can investigate that part." "One of the most valuable features of the platform is its ability to provide you with aggregated risk scores based on impact and certainty of threats being detected. This is both applied to individual and host detections. This is important because it enables us to use this platform to prioritize the most likely imminent threats. So, it reduces alert fatigue follow ups for security operation center analysts. It also provides us with an ability to prioritize limited resources." "The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day." "It gives you access, with Recall, to instant visibility into your network through something like a SIEM solution. For us, being able to correlate all of this network data without having to manage it, has provided immediate value. It gives us the ability to really work on the stuff where I and my team have expertise, instead of having to manage a SIEM solution..." "The solution provide visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack in our network, beyond just the Internet gateway. It makes our security operations much more effective because we are now looking not just at traffic on the border, but we're looking at east-west internal traffic. Now, not only will we see if an exploit kit is being downloaded, but we would be able to see then if that exploit kit was then laterally distributed into our environment." "Vectra produces actionable data using automation. That has helped us. It's less manpower now to look at incidents, which has definitely increased efficiency. Right now, in a lot of cases, our mean time to detection is within zero days. This tells me by the time something happened, and we were able to detect it, it was within the same day." "One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team." | "Solid intrusion detection and prevention that scales easily in very large environments." "Cisco technical support is unbeatable. It offers a premium service every time." "The whole solution is very good, and stable." "The solution can be integrated with some network electors like Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco ISE, and Active Directory to provide the client with authentication certificates." "The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering." "I like most of Cisco's features, like malware detection and URL filtering." "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." "The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically learn the traffic in our environment, and change the merit recommendations based on that." | "Setting up the solution is relatively easy." "We had useful information within the hour of deployment. The ability to trace back for historical analysis, as well as the behavioral analysis done with the security information, puts the user in a position to make an informed decision to mitigate the performance or security incidents. Regarding the security incidents, Reveal (x) is able to create incident cards that guide your teams through the incidents and gives you the option to delve into the transaction detail to potentially view payloads as well." |
Cons | ||
"The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit." "We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events." "You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks." "One thing which I have found where there could be improvement is with regard to the architecture, a little bit: how the brains and sensors function. It needs more flexibility with regard to the brain. If there were some flexibility in that regard, that would be helpful, because changing the mode of the brain is complex. In some cases, the change is permanent. You cannot revert it." "Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team." "Some of their integrations with other sources of data, like external threat feeds, took a bit more work than I had hoped to get integrated." "I would like to see a bit more strategic metrics instead of technical data. Information that I could show to my executive management team or board would be valuable." "It does a little bit of packet capture on alert so you can look at the packet capture activity going on, but it doesn't collect a whole lot of data. Sometimes it's only one or two frames, sometimes it does collect more. That's why they have the addition of their Recall platform, because that really does help expand the capability." | "Integration with other components — even Cisco's own products — can be enhanced to improve administrative experience." "The pricing needs to be improved. We have lots of low-budget clients around us. Budget constraints are always a deterrent in our market." "The customization of the rules can be simplified." "With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features." "If the price is brought down then everybody will be happy." "I don't think this solution is a time-based control system, because one cannot filter traffic based on time." "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." "We are unhappy with technical support for this solution, and it is not as professional as what we typically expect from Cisco." | "The solution is expensive and gets more expensive if a company needs to scale it." "Netflow - Processing Netflow can be cumbersome as it requires triggers to truly gain value and insight. This in turn can add a bit of load to the hardware. The focus of ExtraHop Reveal (x) is live packet data." |
Pricing and Cost Advice | ||
"We are running at about 90,000 pounds per year. The solution is a licensed cost. The hardware that they gave us was pretty much next to nothing. It is the license that we're paying for." "The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses." "There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream." "We have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy." "At the time of purchase, we found the pricing acceptable. We had an urgency to get something in place because we had a minor breach that occurred at the tail end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. This indicated we had a lack of ability to detect things on the network. Hence, why we moved quickly to get into the tool in place. We found things like Bitcoin mining and botnets which we closed quickly. In that regard, it was worth the money." "The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there." "The pricing is high." | "We have a three-year license for this solution." "Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis." "I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices." | Information Not Available |
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Questions from the Community | ||
Top Answer: The two platforms take a fundamentally different approach to NDR. Corelight is limited to use cases that require the… more » I'm building a next-gen AI powered threat intelligence platform. What's missing from existing sol... Top Answer: Thank you I’m not really interested in being sold to. I’m asking about what works, what doesn’t and pricing models. I… more » Top Answer: The dashboard gives me a scoring system that allows me to prioritize things that I should look at. I may not necessarily… more » | Top Answer: 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… more » Top Answer: Performance needs improvement. If you compare Cisco Sourcefire with other products, it performs at the same level of… more » Top Answer: Our primary uses for this solution are URL filtering and malware filtering. | Top Answer: We just did an assessment for our 47 datacenters around North America. The top two enterprise-level network monitoring… more » |
Popular Comparisons | ||
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Also Known As | ||
| Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR | Sourcefire SNORT | Reveal(x), Revealx |
Learn | ||
| Vectra AI | Cisco | ExtraHop Networks |
Overview  | ||
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Vectra® is the leader in network detection and response – from cloud and data center workloads to user and IoT devices. Its Cognito® platform accelerates threat detection and investigation using artificial intelligence to collect, store and enrich network metadata with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known and unknown threats in real time. Vectra offers three applications on the Cognito platform to address high-priority use cases. Cognito Stream™ sends security-enriched metadata to data lakes and SIEMs. Cognito Recall™ is a cloud-based application to store and investigate threats in enriched metadata. And Cognito Detect™ uses AI to reveal and prioritize hidden and unknown attackers at speed. | Snort is an open-source, rule-based, intrusion detection and prevention system. It combines the benefits of signature-, protocol-, and anomaly-based inspection methods to deliver flexible protection from malware attacks. Snort gained notoriety for being able to accurately detect threats at high speeds. | Reveal(x) provides the visibility, insights, and answers that security analysts need to respond quickly and confidently to the highest priority threats against their organization's critical assets. It starts by automatically discovering and classifying every device communicating across the network, and using machine-learning driven behavioral analysis to detect anomalous and malicious activity. |
Offer | ||
Learn more about Vectra AI | Learn more about Cisco Sourcefire SNORT | Learn more about ExtraHop Reveal(x) |
Sample Customers | ||
| Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association | CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia | Wood County Hospital |
Top Industries | ||
Financial Services Firm18% Mining And Metals Company18% Retailer18% Insurance Company9% Comms Service Provider30% Computer Software Company26% Government6% Financial Services Firm4% | Comms Service Provider30% Computer Software Company26% Government7% Financial Services Firm5% | Computer Software Company30% Comms Service Provider18% Healthcare Company11% Insurance Company5% |
Company Size | ||
Small Business8% Midsize Enterprise8% Large Enterprise83% Small Business16% Midsize Enterprise22% Large Enterprise62% | Small Business40% Midsize Enterprise40% Large Enterprise20% | No Data Available |
Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, GFI, Vectra AI and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software. Updated: October 2020.
446,956 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is ranked 8th in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software with 11 reviews while ExtraHop Reveal(x) is ranked 7th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 2 reviews. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is rated 7.4, while ExtraHop Reveal(x) is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT writes "Good functionality and has the possibility to have one manager for other firewalls but stability needs to improve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ExtraHop Reveal(x) writes "Enables users to make an informed decision to mitigate performance or security incidents". Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is most compared with Cisco Stealthwatch, Fortinet FortiWeb, Trend Micro TippingPoint NGIPS, Darktrace and Splunk User Behavior Analytics, whereas ExtraHop Reveal(x) is most compared with Darktrace, Awake Security Platform, Cisco Stealthwatch and Corelight.
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