Cisco Secure Network Analytics Reviews

Stealthwatch is primarily a network monitoring tool.

Let's say a certain service is functioning properly and then out of nowhere this morning we started getting a lot of user complaints from the customers. We basically run the analytics against some specific goals and check what host and course the traffic is being processed through. We can monitor the traffic in real time from the moment of the issue to past months in order to see the flow of data and when exactly it spiked. We can then drill down to the root cause of the spike.

Network visibility also affected our organization in a positive manner. We wanted to track down traffic for specific goals. We just type it in the search bar and drill down to the top conversations of the period. We can see what ports are being utilized and whether there were clients and hosts that were talking to each other.

This solution has also increased our threat detection rate, by around 25-30%. An example would be that it provided a better posture in our internal network.

Stealthwatch has definitely reduced the incident response time. Whenever there's an issue, before we got Stealthwatch, we would have to go into multiple applications and gather data to pinpoint the issue. But with Stealthwatch, it's really up to us to pinpoint a time frame, specific host, or something like that. The response time is now about 50% faster.

Troubleshooting is now only minutes instead of a couple of hours that it took before we used this solution.

We also reduced a good amount of false positives and saved some time. It used to take a couple of hours to identify what the issue was, but with Stealthwatch we can find it within minutes.

It is a good application, providing for real-time monitoring of the organization of data. It can basically identify points of peak traffic where possible issues are being caused.

At my company, we might not be using it enough with other applications that we have that can integrate with it.

We need integration between ISE and Stealthwatch. I know my company is trying to get it to work. I don't know if they actually got it yet.

Stability is really good. I don't think we ever had an issue with it.

The initial setup was straightforward. It wasn't difficult.

I would say a ten in terms of return on investment because it improved our recovery time and resolved many issues.

Take the time to look into it. It could be worth the cost. I think Stealthwatch has a very good time to value. I think it's one of the best out there. If a company is looking for a solution, I would definitely recommend Stealthwatch. Originally, it was recommended to us by a Cisco partner.

The biggest lesson I've learned is to trust your applications. Believe that it works, because it does work.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten, just because I don't know everything I could know about it yet.

We use Stealthwatch primarily to secure customers' endpoint devices, in order to provide more visibility into their security vectors. We determine where they are getting attacked, if they are getting attacked, how to prevent it, how to fight it, etc. We are really trying to take the fight to the administrator and be a little more proactive, as opposed to being so reactive with security events.

The network visibility feature opens up a whole new pane of glass that didn't exist before, so when you talk about being able to look into your network and understand what's there for security events, impostering, and everything that Stealthwatch can bring to the table, there's nothing else that a typical customer's going to have installed today that will give them any of that information.

Stealthwatch has definitely increased our threat detection rate. I would say on average probably close to 100%. Especially in the market that we play in, which is largely commercial, a lot of customers are just getting into this, so they literally had nothing and now they have a lot.

It has also reduced our incident response time and the time it takes us to detect and remediate threats, at times by months. In addition, Stealthwatch has helped us reduce false positives.

Stealthwatch helps us save time, money, and administrative work. If you talk about a simple security event that a customer has to react to if they don't have the visibility you don't find out about it until something even worse happens. For example, somebody worked to get into your financial systems and they were somehow siphoning money out, not only did they get in and you didn't detect that, but now money is disappearing out of your account. So the ability to detect that threat immediately and remediate it is the true value of that reliance.

The most valuable part is that Stealthwatch is part of a portfolio of security devices from Cisco, so while some of the competition may have other products that could be better or provide a better administrative experience, they don't have the breadth that Cisco does. Cisco literally can touch every single end point, every single ingress and egress point in the network. Nobody else has that.

Stealthwatch has analytics and threat protection capabilities up there with the industry best. It's a super powerful database on the backend, basically giving you access to all the latest and greatest threat detection events that are out there, and they're constantly being updated and monitored, so that's probably the best part about having something like that.

I don't have a specific feature request, but my big push with Cisco has always been to make it easier for the administrators to use it. If you look at other products that they've been really successful within software space like Meraki, it's because a customer can jump right in and use it on day one and feel like they're accomplishing something with it. They don't have to have a Ph.D. Anything that we can do to make the customer experience better makes it easier for them to use it, which is what we want, and it also makes it easier for us to sell it.

Obviously usability, but given the space that it plays in, any way that we can continue to increase the security vector coverage is always going to be a net gain for a product like that.

Stealthwatch seems to be rock solid.

We haven't had any issues with scalability yet.

I would give the technical support seven out of ten. When it first came out, the big problem was Cisco obviously didn't have a giant technical team behind it, but that's true of any new product. Over time it has steadily gotten better, so they can solve most problems in a reasonable amount of time at this point.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd call it a six out of ten. Do you need seasoned engineers to put it in? Yes. Do you need a rocket scientist? No.

We definitely have gotten an ROI. Look at incidents in the security space when customers are hit with malware or anything like that. These are incidents that cost thousands of dollars or potentially millions of dollars, so the first incident that you prevent, it probably just paid for itself.

The solution's time to value is one of those things that depends on what the customer has in their environment. If they have relatively little security strengthening in their environment, this is something that brings near immediate full value of the product directly to the customer's hands. Obviously, if it's part of a bigger support portfolio that the customer has, it just depends on what they already have or don't have in that environment.

The market that we play in there's a lot of value very often because sometimes this is the first product that they're investing in.

Everybody should have something in this case, because end users are always going to get you in a little bit of trouble. You have people that are executing social engineering attacks, and this will help prevent some of that from entering your network and your environment.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that everybody is a target, and everybody will be a target, unfortunately.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten, largely because the usability, that day to day stuff is a little bit clunky, while other products out there are better. It's not like there is some unicorn vision in my brain, but rather I've seen other products that customers say, “I really wish it was as easy as this other product.”

We use Cisco Stealthwatch for security and network analytics. The solution saves you time, money, and administrative work. If we have the device support, it means that I don't have to send someone in a car to go to be local on the site and look at whatever the issue is.

Our limitation is that Cisco Stealthwatch doesn't have visibility over everything. When we can use it, it gives us direct information. We use this information not only for analyzing security threats but as well as just for general network performance in the places it has view of.  

The solution affected network visibility in our organization fairly well. Without it, I have almost no visibility. It requires me to send people to different sites to manually get captured or to look at the network.

The solution has increased our threat detection rate. Cisco Stealthwatch has not reduced our incident response times. It has not reduced the amount of time it takes us to detect immediate threats. It has reduced false positives.

The analytics and threat detection capabilities of Cisco Stealthwatch are pretty good. It gives us good visibility of the information. It is easy to use and to the point.

The ability to be natively integrated into Port Aggregator would be beneficial because it would reduce just one more component that's needed in order to have that type of view.

I've never known it to go down or have availability issues.

Cisco Stealthwatch is scalable with money. It's expensive.

I haven't dealt with Cisco customer service directly.

The initial setup was before I was at the company. It was over six years ago.

We used an integrated reseller for the deployment called Set Solutions. Our experience with them was pretty good.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate this product an 8. Whenever we've used it, it has been effective. It does come with a large price tag.

The biggest lesson I learned from using this solution is that when the initial intent to deploy Stealthwatch was put in, it was the security team. They were working completely independent of the network, voice, and data center restructure teams.

It wasn't a cohesive effort for everyone who might use the tool. Maybe it didn't get implemented in a way that would have maximized the benefit for the organization as a whole.

Think holistically and view the big picture. Start small, but begin with the end in mind of having the final vision of where you want to get to.

We use Cisco Stealthwatch as our primary NetFlow collector. We use it for data analysis and for any issues that arise that require NetFlow data.

We recently got a security team. They've been more hands-on. They are not intuitive to networks. 

Cisco Stealthwatch is good at bridging the gap between what they're capable of doing and the knowledge that they need. That generally comes from the networking side.

The search options on Cisco Stealthwatch are the most valuable. You can get very granular with it, down to the kilobits or the seconds if you want. The product supports any time frame that you need, so that is nice.

The solution affects network visibility in our company across all of our data, including our data center. All data transfers pass through our NetFlow collector. 

It's very easy to pinpoint any network anomalies or any type of suspicious behavior. NetFlow is very good at detecting those spikes and traffic.

We don't use Cisco Stealthwatch for threat detection. We use it more for information gathering. We use better options for threat detection, i.e. Palo Alto firewalls for our security. 

I would like the search page available with Cisco Stealthwatch to be more intuitive. The previous release was better than the current one for the UI. 

We moved to the latest UI a couple of months ago, maybe like six months ago. I'm not a fan. I wish the search options were easier.

As far as stability, we've never had a problem with Cisco Stealthwatch. We've had it for probably three years. It's time for an upgrade.

We're doing scalability with Cisco Stealthwatch now. We have a 1 GB collector. We need a 10 GB collector. We're looking at upgrading. 

Cisco Stealthwatch has been good for us in the last couple of years. We had to purchase a whole new appliance for the 10 GB collector. 

As far as scalability for the one that we purchased, it was not that great.

I haven't had to use their technical support services.

We're a Cisco running shop primarily. We purchased DNA Center and Stealthwatch all as part of that package. We're trying to get the whole suite of software packages. Stealthwatch is part of it.

Our previous manager implemented our initial setup. I'm just a user. I can imagine it was difficult.

Stealthwatch has almost everything we need. There's no reason to evaluate anyone else. 

We also have a WildPackets and a LiveAction engine. We use that for remote packet captures and not NetFlow data analytics.

The solution has not increased our threat detection rate. It has reduced our incident response times by at least 50%. It also reduced the amount of time it takes to detect and remediate threats by around 50%. We use other tools for reducing false positives.

The solution saves us time. There's a learning curve for it. Once you get the hang of it, you can get the information you need within a couple of minutes. 

As opposed to having to set up a sniper and figure out where to put everything, it greatly increases the amount of time that I can take to find what I need. 

It took me a couple of weeks to get the hang of it. I didn't use any training material, just learned on my own. I'm sure if I would have had some training, it would have been easier.

Cisco Stealthwatch is one of the tools that I tell anyone that comes to the networking group to learn first. Because you can get a lot of relevant information fairly quickly.

I give Cisco Stealthwatch an eight out of ten. Not a ten because of the UI. I'm just not a fan of it. 

Other than that, availability, uptime, and maintenance on it are all great. It does what I need it to do, but the UI is the deal breaker for me.

The biggest lesson I've learned using the solution is the importance of NetFlow. We're using NetFlow 9. I'd like to move towards NetFlow 12. 

I appreciate the historical data that NetFlow can provide in my environment. I would recommend Stealthwatch because it's invaluable to troubleshooting.

We use Cisco Stealthwatch to monitor network traffic and make network traffic analytics on east, west, north, and south traffic in our company.

Cisco Stealthwatch has improved our organization because it has brought visibility that we didn't have previously before implementing it. We have information about all of the devices on the network, which include network devices, such as routers, firewalls, et cetera, and endpoint devices, such as users' laptops or servers. The information that we can receive includes what network traffic the user processes. For example, what network traffic gets to our servers and the network traffic that originates from our laptops and user machines.

We have a better understanding of the network which allows us to tweak our security policies from the information we receive.

Cisco Stealthwatch has predefined alerts for different types of security issues that might happen in the network. Whether it's PCs or servers that are used for botnets or Bitcoin mining we receive the alerts automatically. This functionality is what we receive from the solution out of the box.

The solution has a lot of add-on features available.

Cisco Stealthwatch can improve by having bundled packages for popular add-ons. It would be a lot easier for people implementing it, have let's say a better way to use the product.

I have used Cisco Stealthwatch within the last 12 months.

The performance of the Cisco Stealthwatch is good. We haven't encountered any issue regarding performance, or that it cannot handle all the traffic that it receives.

The solution is scalable, it can be done easily. I don't see any problem with us expanding our network and for the solution to be able to accommodate our needs.

Our company has approximately 1,000 people employed and they all use Cisco Stealthwatch. We have administrators that can access it and do work on a daily basis in order to see alerts and inspect all the potential problems in the network.

We haven't had any issues with somebody from Cisco assisting us with any technical needs.  We have attended several workshops during the time that we wanted to implement Cisco Stealthwatch. We were at the workshops to get a full perspective on the solution and see what they have planned for the future for new features. The training workshops were not something that we specifically asked for. It was not tailored to us. It was open for Cisco partners, which we are as well. We haven't had any technical issues in our contact with Cisco technical support for any of our needs.

We have not used a previous solution because Cisco Stealthwatch is a relatively new concept on the market and we haven't used or looked into any other similar solutions from that category.

The implementation of the Cisco Stealthwatch should be easier. It is not very complex but it could be made easier. We had the solution up and running in approximately one business day.

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves. We did not need any assistance from any integrator.

One person is enough for maintenance, patching, and overall support of the solution. As we follow best practice, we use two people, because having two sets of eyes it's better than having just one. However, it is able to be maintained by one person. 

The licensing model for Cisco Stealthwatch can make it difficult for using to get the most out of the solution.

We looking or determining if Cisco Stealthwatch is an expensive or inexpensive solution is difficult because it is relative. However, the licenses are able to be purchased at different intervals, such as annually or every three years. The licensing is generally based on, features or sub-product categories.

There are additional licenses needed for the number of so-called network flows. It's hard to plan the number of flows you need in the network, this is a problem. The price of the Cisco Stealthwatch is relatively inexpensive.

I would recommend Cisco Stealthwatch to others.

The advice I would give others is to think about what they want to achieve from the Cisco Stealthwatch, whether it's monitoring their traffic in the data center or monitoring their endpoint users. When they make this plan or have it clear in their mind, then purchase all the necessary items in order for the solution to work according to their needs. This is one of the key points that the people or customers need to know before they delve into purchasing this solution.

I rate Cisco Stealthwatch an eight out of ten.

We are resellers, we provide solutions for our clients.

We use Stealthwatch for network segmentation use-cases, data analytics around exfiltration, encrypted threat analytics, map phishing, scans. and as a tripwire on top of all of the other security controls that are available.

We find that Stealthwatch can detect the unseen. Once you have a fully deployed Cisco enterprise agreement, we can turn on Stealthwatch and usually catch the last little bit.

Their response capability and the ability to push out responses along with changes in the network is important. This is something lacking, they don't have a lot of that, it's a passive tool.

Cisco Stealthwatch is reliant on NetFlow and IT6. If this platform could integrate with other sources of knowledge and true threat intelligence it would help them.

It's a good solid solution but integration with Network Access Control products with Cisco ISE would be good.

Cisco's ISE NAC is more of a detection and analytics tool. There are several pivots where it allows you to push policy, but those integrations are not very strong. It's an area that needs some improvement or attention.

Anything that they could do that would be a more action-oriented process out of Stealthwatch and pushing into the network program would be valuable.

The interface is an area that needs a bit more work, it's always been clunky.

I have been working with Cisco Stealthwatch for approximately seven years.

I would rate Cisco Stealthwatch a seven out of ten.

We are a system integrator and I have implemented this solution for one of our customers.

This solution is normally used for anomaly detection and malware detection.

It is deployed on-premises.

The organization now have a better overview how their traffic is flowing.

The most valuable feature is anomaly detection, where it finds things that are not allowed internally.

The usability of this solution needs to be improved.

The initial setup of this solution can be simplified.

The stability of this solution is good.

We have three people who are using this solution.

I would rate technical support for this solution highly.

We used Darktrace before.

The initial setup of this solution is complex.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to know the whole infrastructure before beginning. Also, before starting, you have to know about the licensing of the equipment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for it to run our call center 24/7 365 days a year. 

There's a lot of stuff on the new version we haven't had the chance to work with yet. 

We're trying to upgrade to the newest release. We're running a version that's three versions behind. 

So far we've had a good experience with stability. We've run into some issues with the configuration. 

It's not scalable due to our own implementation. Everything that I read though, indicates that it can be scalable. 

Most of the engineers I've worked with have been really good. Very knowledgeable and easy to work with.    

We've used Cisco for around ten years. Prior to that, we were using Nortel. We had a relationship with a Cisco account manager prior to the collaboration products. 

We had engineers that set it up. There were some problems that Cisco support came to fix. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Check the vendors and the options out there to see how they can meet your needs.