What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is so we have historical logs in case of an event or if we need to do any troubleshooting.
Our secondary use of Devo is for incident detection; certain logs trigger alerts, so we now have a 24/7 monitoring service that detects and alerts us to incidents.
How has it helped my organization?
We can ingest virtually any log source, which is much better than our previous solution. We can access those logs more quickly and efficiently, with a better focus on our points of interest.
Cloud log sources were more difficult with our previous solution. Devo isn't wholly worry-free, but it's much more manageable.
With Devo, we don't have desperate multiple log storage solutions; we can do it for the most part with one. The sheer breadth of logs we can ingest is very beneficial.
The solution allows us to ingest much more data; our event volume is around 100 GB. That's ten times the volume we were ingesting before.
What is most valuable?
The alerting is much better than I anticipated. We don't get as many alerts as I thought we would, but that nobody's fault, it's just the way it is.
Having at least one year of data was one of our requirements, so 400 days of hot data benefits us. We are used to this capability, as our previous solution offered the same, and we wouldn't have purchased Devo if it didn't provide that.
What needs improvement?
There are some issues from an availability and functionality standpoint, meaning the tool is somewhat slow. There were some slow response periods over the past six to nine months, though it has yet to impact us terribly as we are a relatively small shop. We've noticed it, however, so Devo could improve the responsiveness.
When we first started implementing the solution, the staff that helped us with the migration and getting it set up seemed very new. The tool could be more mature, which we knew going in, but we were hopeful for quick improvements. We would prefer to be further along than we are in that respect, but 18 months later, we still feel pretty good about adopting Devo.
The price could be more friendly as we pay significantly more than what we were paying before, but it's in line with other solutions on the market.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've used the solution for 18 months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is relatively stable; I'd rate it eight out of ten here. We heard about somewhat shaky performance from other customers over the last six to nine months, but we were fine.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution seems scalable, though we're a small shop, so we're probably not the best to answer that well.
We have 400-450 end users across three locations.
How are customer service and support?
Once we get a hold of someone and they respond, customer support is fine. It isn't extraordinary, and the escalation process is a little below average for the industry.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used IBM QRadar, and we switched because it was antiquated. We had difficulty ingesting logs from cloud solutions, which is the direction our organization is moving in. We have several cloud solutions now versus two or three years ago, so the migration to Devo from QRadar was very timely for us in that regard.
QRadar's interface was pretty antiquated. They have updated it now, but we weren't satisfied with it at the time. We also had some support-related issues around updating the solution as it was on-prem. We were coming to a point where we had to update the hardware and software, so it was a good time for us to look for another product.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was relatively straightforward.
In terms of maintenance, I go through every quarter to ensure that each of our log sources is still sending logs to Devo. We were a little disappointed that they didn't have a good way of informing us if a log source stopped sending logs. I appreciate that each source sends on a different frequency, but we should be able to define that frequency and receive a notification of any issues.
What was our ROI?
As is often the case with security solutions, it's hard to measure an ROI because we only need it once an incident occurs. The hope is that we get a return if an incident takes place. Devo is much better than we previously had, but it's also a lot more expensive, so it should be so.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Devo is a hosted or subscription-based solution, whereas before, we purchased QRadar, so we owned it and just had to pay a maintenance fee. We've encountered this with some other products, too, where we went over to subscription-based. Our thought process is that with subscription based, the provider hosts and maintains the tool, and it's offsite. That comes with some additional fees, but we were able to convince our upper management it was worth the price. We used to pay under 10k a year for maintenance, and now we're paying ten times that. It was a relatively tough sell to our management, but I wonder if we have a choice anymore; this is where the market is.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We focused on four solutions: Splunk, AlienVault OSSIM, the incumbent QRadar, and Devo. We narrowed it down pretty quickly to Splunk and Devo, and the latter was a bit cheaper, though less mature. We took a chance and went with Devo.
What other advice do I have?
I rate the solution seven out of ten.
Devo's cloud-native SIEM increased our threat visibility, though we had hoped for a bit higher. Visibility is critical, as we rely upon knowing about security incidents as soon as possible. We expected the solution would provide additional insight, but we're finding it isn't. Devo gives us the historical logs, a fantastic capability we are very happy with. However, the incident and threat detection is not what we had hoped for. Regarding security operations, the tool is different from what we wanted.
Getting our staff up to speed with the solution was right in the middle in terms of difficulty. It wasn't as easy as we had hoped, but it wasn't insurmountable by any stretch of the imagination. Devo provided us with several training sessions, and I wonder how much that helped because our group is very technical. The tool's interface is intuitive, so our staff can find what they need. With regular use, the learning curve is relatively low, but without that, it can take some getting used to, as with any solution. Devo is broad and encompassing, so it requires familiarity to leverage it fully. We don't have dedicated internal staff to manage the solution, so we outsourced the monitoring to an MSP.
The migration from QRadar to Devo was relatively straightforward and painless; we essentially cut the cord on QRadar, maintained the logs and moved them over to the new solution. The ease of migration was relatively important, the old solution was antiquated, so we expected any newer tool to be better.
Migrating the bulk of the initial logs took about three months. We got some aspects up and running during a proof of concept while we were still using the old solution. Once we went live, we migrated the POC environment to a production environment, so it was much less stressful than it could have been.
The Devo team was intimately involved in the migration. They weren't as responsive as we had hoped, and they seemed new and didn't completely understand the product. We received better support on escalation; overall, they were critical to the migration.
Before going down this path, I advise potential customers to document their log sources and what information they need based on their use cases.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure