We performed a comparison between IBM Security QRadar 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."Sentinel is a SIEM and SOAR tool, so its automation is the best feature; we can reduce human interaction, freeing up our human resources."
"I like the KQL query. It simplifies getting data from the table and seeing the logs. All you need to know are the table names. It's quite easy to build use cases by using KQL."
"The main benefit is the ease of integration."
"Microsoft Sentinel comes preloaded with templates for teaching and analytics rules."
"It's easy to use. It's a very good product. It can easily ingest data from anywhere. It has an easily understandable language to perform actions."
"The solution offers a lot of data on events. It helps us create specific detection strategies."
"We’ve got process improvement that's happened across multiple different fronts within the organization, within our IT organization based on this tool being in place."
"Previously, it was a little bit difficult to find where an incident came from, including which IP address and which country. So in Sentinel, it's very easy to find where the incident came from since we can easily get the information from the dashboard, after which we take action quickly."
"It allows us to search data both on-premises and on the cloud."
"This is a good tool to have because it gives you the ability to track what is currently happening in your environment."
"This console gives you the entire view, which makes life easier and allows you to take precautionary measures."
"The best feature of IBM QRadar is visualization which shows you when there's a spike in the system, and this makes you realize that there's something wrong with the log."
"Provided that the report is prebuilt and I can find what I am looking for, the reporting is the most valuable feature in this solution."
"The stability is good."
"It protect us from multiple authentication values, unauthorized access and antivirus threats."
"Due to the skills shortage, we are able to use it from the standpoint of bringing in a lower level employee or a person who may not have security knowledge."
"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."
"It's extremely easy to deploy."
"The out of the box reports and dashboard. It was easy to trim down these windows to something we could quickly use."
"It performs network behavior monitoring, log monitoring, and disaster recovery monitoring."
"This tool is simple to use."
"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."
"SolarWinds Security Event Manager has been generally working well."
"SolarWinds' stability is fine. I don't think we've had any software issues."
"They can work on the EDR side of things... Every time we need to onboard these kinds of machines into the EDR, we need to do it with the help of Intune, to sync up the devices, and do the configuration. I'm looking for something on the EDR side that will reduce this kind of work."
"The learning curve could be improved. I am still learning it. We were able to implement the basic features to get them up and running, but there are still so many things that I don't know about all its features. They have a lot of features that we have not been able to use or apply. If they could work on reducing the solution's learning curve, that would be good. While there is a training course held by Microsoft to learn more about this solution, there is a cost associated with it."
"The solution could be more user-friendly; some query languages are required to operate it."
"Sometimes, we are observing large ingestion delays. We expect logs within 5 minutes, but it takes about 10 to 15 minutes."
"There is a wider thing called Jupyter Notebooks, which is around the automation side of things. It would be good if there are playbooks that you can utilize without having to have the developer experience to do it in-house. Microsoft could provide more playbooks or more Jupyter Notebooks around MITRE ATT&CK Framework."
"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."
"The troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"If Azure Sentinel had the ability to ingest Azure services from different tenants into another tenant that was hosting Azure Sentinel, and not lose any metadata, that would be a huge benefit to a lot of companies."
"I'd like them to improve the offense. When QRadar detects something, it creates what it calls offenses. So, it has a rudimentary ticketing system inside of it. This is the same interface that was there when I started using it 12 years ago. It just has not been improved. They do allow integration with IBM Resilient, but IBM Resilient is grotesquely expensive. The most effective integration that IBM offers today is with IBM Resilient, which is an instant response platform. It is a very good platform, but it is very expensive. They really should do something with the offense handling because it is very difficult to scale, and it has limitations. The maximum number of offenses that it can carry is 16K. After 16K, you have to flush your offenses out. So, it is all or nothing. You lose all your offenses up until that point in time, and you don't have any history within the offense list of older events. If you're dealing with multiple customers, this becomes problematic. That's why you need to use another product to do the actual ticketing. If you wanted the ticket existence, you would normally interface with ServiceNow, SolarWinds, or some other product like that."
"Right now, if you look at the compatibility, if you need to deploy QRadar in a physical appliance you have only two choices of server, their own or a Lenovo server. In today's world, you cannot keep something tied to such a big brand. Clients want to be able to use whatever type of server they want."
"The user interface needs improvement."
"There needs to be better integration with other applications."
"We need more features in order to create rules to detect or to meet some requirements for other areas, for example, catching the event from other authentication tools."
"The product can be a bit complex."
"The product needs to improve its GUI."
"They should introduce some automation into the product."
"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."
"The company had to use a third party for the implementation of the solution."
"The solution's technical support is okay, but we don't have an SLA, and sometimes the response times are very slow."
"The product should improve the ease with which you can create event alerts. They are not as hard now but you need to have an easier way."
"We'd like more customization capabilities."
"I imagine we will have to develop our own reports soon, this seems to be more cumbersome."
"It won't tell you when your backups are failing, but it will give you hints when your database is running on full recovery."
"Under the new system, it is not upgradable the way they say. When you try to do an upgrade, it doesn't really work unless you dump everything and start from scratch. You lose a lot of your nodes. Whenever you set your nodes up and everything else, they don't want to bring those nodes back in, so you have to really go back and restructure all your nodes. I went from version 6.5 to version 6.6 and then to version 6.7. I then went to version 2019, and now it is version 2020. It would be good if we can upgrade without having to delete everything and start from scratch. They can maybe build more KPIs and other things for the dashboard. Some of the other systems already have built-in KPIs. SolarWinds is starting to catch up, but it is not there yet. They can include some of the business or industry standards for tracking the time, that is, the meantime to detect (MTTD) and the meantime to resolve (MTTR). They can also find a way to build a KPI that measures the number of instances of port scans experienced in a week or a month."
More SolarWinds Security Event Manager Pricing and Cost Advice →
IBM Security QRadar is ranked 4th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 198 reviews while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is ranked 20th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 24 reviews. IBM Security QRadar is rated 8.0, while SolarWinds Security Event Manager is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of IBM Security QRadar writes "A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good technical support". 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". IBM Security QRadar is most compared with Splunk Enterprise Security, Wazuh, LogRhythm SIEM, Elastic Security and Sentinel, whereas SolarWinds Security Event Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Log360, Splunk Enterprise Security, Wazuh, Microsoft Defender XDR and LogRhythm SIEM. See our IBM Security QRadar vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager report.
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