Arista NDR vs Plixer Scrutinizer comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Arista NDR and Plixer Scrutinizer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Arista NDR vs. Plixer Scrutinizer Report (Updated: January 2023).
686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
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 things that we didn't expect to happen was that our network team also jumped on it faster than we thought. In most cases, if it's a security tool that's working on the network part, they can also use it to find out certain flaws that have been in the system. Certain flaws, related to some legacy stuff, were already there for quite a few years, which they couldn't explain at first, but we could explain them based on the timing of certain things.""Vectra AI is the best. It is a major product in our cybersecurity.""Some valuable features of Vectra AI are that it is very intuitive and that there are only a small amount of false positives. Therefore, it's an effective solution.""The administrative privilege detection feature is the most valuable feature. The admin accounts are often highly accessible to the high-risk component of the environment. If those accounts are compromised or are being used in a suspicious manner, that's high-fidelity events for us to look into.""The fact that we get the visualization of what's happening on our network, which is a way of improving our security in-depth is most valuable.""One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us.""It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra.""We discovered a lot of things in our network and are correcting several misconfigurations. We are learning how some apps work together and how some things shouldn't happen. It's also easier for us to identify the source of a brute force, whereas before, we didn't even know we had a brute force."

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"The interface itself is clean and easy to use, yet customizable. I like that I can create my own dashboards fairly easily so that I can see what is important to me. Also, the query language is pretty easy to use. I haven't needed to use it a ton, but as I need to go in and do different queries based on their requests, it has been fairly simple to use.""When I create a workbench query in Awake to do threat hunting, it's much easier to query. You get a dictionary popup immediately when you try to type a new query. It says, "You want to search for a device?" Then you type in "D-E," and it gives you a list of commands, like device, data set behavior, etc. That gives you the ability to build your own query."

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"One feature I found most valuable in Plixer Scrutinizer is the very extensive reporting. Reporting is very flexible, though sometimes you need a little bit of support from Plixer Scrutinizer to create custom-made reporting in a very short time. Reporting is a very strong feature of the product.""The most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer are its ease of use, accessibility, and UI.""One of the most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer is the reporting, particularly how easy it is to drill down into the reports. Another valuable feature of the solution is its overall visibility. It's great. I also liked Plixer Scrutinizer in terms of deployment time and that it's very simple to set up. Once you get the appliance set up and connected, the customer starts to see results immediately, versus other solutions where that could take a while."

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Cons
"The solution needs to become more proactive. When Vectra AI is the primary solution in an environment - like it is in our case - you must work on response time. We have a small team so response time at endpoint level is vital.""One of the things that we are missing a bit is the capability to add our own rules to it. At the moment, the tech engine does its thing, but we have some cool ideas to make additional rules. There should be an option in the platform to add custom rules, or there should be some kind of user group where we can suggest them for the roadmap and see if they get evaluated and get transparent communication on whether they will be implemented in the product or not.""The reporting from Cognito Detect is very limited and doesn't give you too many options. If I want to prepare a customized report on a particular host, even though I see the data, I have to manually prepare the report. The reporting features that are built into the tool are not very helpful.""We have had a few issues with the integration of Vectra AI with EDR. Some filters have not been working. We've also had issues with the brain not being powerful enough.""I would like more integrations with IOCs and threats currently on the Internet. I would also like to know which threats are based on zero-day attacks, current botnets, etc. Therefore, I would like more information on external threats.""What is most important for us is to have one place where we can manage a few brains because we are based on a zero-trust network. As a result, each customer needs to have a separate brain. For the SOC team, we need to have one place where the SOC analyst can go to visit the website and from that site manage all of the customers. Right now, Vectra AI doesn't have this capability, and I would really like to have this feature.""They use a proprietary logging format that is probably 90% similar to Bro Logs. Their biggest area of improvement is finishing out the remaining 10%. That 10% might not be beneficial to their ML engine, but that's fine. The industry standard is Zeek Logs or Bro Logs, or Bro or Zeek, depending on how old you are. While they have 90% of those fields, they're still missing some fields. In very rare instances, some community rules do not have the fields that they need, and we had to modify community rules for our logs. So, their biggest area of improvement would be to just finish their matching of the Zeek standard.""There is room for improvement in the documentation. We would like to have more details on how it detects what we see."

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"The one thing that the Awake platform lacks is the ability to automate the ingestion of IOCs rather than having to import CSV files or JSON files manually.""One thing I would like to see is a little bit more education or experience on AWS cloud for their managed services team. We've explained how we have the information set up, that the traffic coming in goes to the AWS load balancer and then gets sent on to our internal servers... but when I get notices they always tell me this traffic is coming from the IPs belonging to the load balancers, not the source IPs. So a little bit more education for their team about how AWS manages the traffic might help out."

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"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point.""Though Plixer Scrutinizer has network detection and response, it's an area that needs just a little more rounding out. Another room for improvement in the solution is its lack of SaaS offering which some customers were looking for. My company deals in small to medium businesses, mid-market, and some customers wanted the SaaS feature which Plixer Scrutinizer doesn't offer. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for it to have a SaaS offering because my company also deals with educational spaces and smaller businesses that just don't have the staff that can implement this. If there's either a managed service or SaaS-based offering to just make it a little easier for those types of customers, it would be a great addition to Plixer Scrutinizer.""From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Their licensing model is antiquated. I'm not a fan of their licensing model. We have to pay for licensing based on four different things. You have to pay based on the number of unique IPs, the number of logs that we send through Recall and Stream, and the size of our environment. They need to simplify their licensing down to just one thing. It should be based on the amount of data, the number of devices, or something else, but there should be just one thing for everything. That's what they need to base their licensing on. Cost-wise, they're not cheap. They were definitely the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for. They're not the cheapest option."
  • "From a pricing perspective, they are very commercially competitive. From a licensing perspective, just be conscious that some of their future cloud solutions come with additional subscriptions. Also, if you're outside of the US, you will get charged freight for the device back to your country."
  • "Cost is a big factor, as always. However, I think we have a very good price–performance ratio."
  • "Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
  • "Vectra is a bit on the higher side in terms of price, but they have always been transparent. The reason that they are this good is that they invest, so they need to charge accordingly."
  • "My company pays for the Vectra AI licensing fee yearly. I know the figure because my company recently renewed the license, and it's okay, at least for the financial sector."
  • "Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."
  • "From a licensing perspective, the Vectra detect platform is pretty doable. Also, the hardware prices are nothing that we're not used to. The stream part is a little overpriced compared to the detect part. The reason is that you need to stream data to detect events anyway, so the data is in there. The only thing that's not available is the UI to be able to look at the stream data, which is also on the appliances but is just not activated. That's mainly the thing that we want to improve on."
  • More Vectra AI Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Awake's pricing was very competitive. It's not a cheap option though. It's an investment to utilize it, but it's one that we decided was worth the cost, with the managed services. At our scale, it was a much better option to utilize their software and their managed services to handle this, rather than hiring another person to be an analyst. It was quite cost-effective for us."
  • "Because I represent a hedge fund, I have some leverage. I told them that they had to meet my conditions if they wanted me as a client. It was the same way with Awake. They wanted an initial four-year agreement. Initially, we signed on for a one-year contract, but they wanted the four-year deal when it came time for the renewal. I told them that I was not doing that. I said that they either had to do it on my terms, or I'd go somewhere else."
  • More Arista NDR Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Currently, the license for Plixer Scrutinizer is subscription-based and at a yearly fee. The price would depend on the amount of traffic you pull in. For example, there are several blocks from a 10K flow, a 40K flow, and a 100K flow, and based on the number of devices that you receive the flows from, that's the license, and it is not a per-interface pricing model, so that is a very strong, very competitive pricing feature of Plixer Scrutinizer. Licensing for the product is also not based on the number of storage, compared to some competing products that are priced based on the amount of storage you need, particularly based on the retention and the amount of data. Plixer Scrutinizer licensing is based on the device, and it's more in the direction of $10,000 because, with just $1,000, you don't have anything."
  • "The licensing cost for Plixer Scrutinizer is in the middle. It's not the cheapest, but it's not the most expensive. Its licensing model is based on how many exporters, how many devices export information to the system. Plixer Scrutinizer has different modules you could add such as the security module which would cost extra."
  • More Plixer Scrutinizer Pricing and Cost Advice →

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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 »
    Top Answer:What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities.
    Top Answer:My company pays for the Vectra AI licensing fee yearly. I know the figure because my company recently renewed the… more »
    Top Answer:The query language that they have is quite valuable, especially because the sensor itself is storing some network… more »
    Top Answer:The pricing seems pretty reasonable for what we get out of it. We also found it to be more competitive than some other… more »
    Top Answer:One concern I do have with Awake is that, ideally, it should be able identify high-risk users and devices and entities… more »
    Top Answer:When you download Windows 10 and first log in, it says something like, "Welcome. We're setting up a few things, we'll be… more »
    Top Answer:We used this solution for MTA. I am responsible for the network; I would have been the only person using this solution.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
    Awake Security Platform
    Learn More
    Overview

    Vectra threat detection and response is a complete cybersecurity platform that collects, detects, and prioritizes security alerts. The Cognito platform for Network Detection and Response (NDR) detects and responds to attacks inside cloud, data center, Internet of Things, and enterprise networks. The platform also provides automated response capabilities for low-level threats and escalates more severe anomalies to security personnel.

    Cognito captures data for multiple relevant sources and enriches it with context and security insights. It starts by deploying sensors across different networks in datacenters, IoT, or enterprise networks. The algorithm extracts relevant metadata from network and cloud traffic. The information can also be non-security information that can help investigation. 

    The data is enriched with security context to support critical use cases, such as threat detection, investigation, hunting and compliance. The platform is machine learning-based, which enables it to adapt to any new and current threat scenario. It detects, clusters, prioritizes, and anticipates attacks by using identity and host-level enforcement. 

    With the Vectra platform, a person can investigate 50 threats in just two hours. By prioritizing alerts and leveraging threat intelligence, it provides faster results.Vectra solves today’s security challenges for network detection and response. 

    One of Vectra’s best features is the emphasis they put in pairing research and data science for security insights. It offers behavior codification with unsupervised, supervised, and deep learning models. 

    The pricing is according to a subscription model with a free trial available.Vectra is available for Office 365, Azure AD and AWS Brain.

    Features of Vectra AI

    • AI-based threat detection and response. 
    • Detects attacks in real time with behavior-based threat detection. 
    • Consolidates and correlates thousands of events, detecting threats. 
    • Enriches threat investigation with a chain of evidence and data science security insights. 
    • Machine learning techniques, including deep learning and neural networks. 
    • Gives visibility into cyberattackers and analyzes all network traffic. 
    • Continuous updates with new threat detection algorithms. 
    • Provides encryption at rest and in transit. For the AWS version, it offers AES-256 encryption via AWS Key Management Service. 
    • Guaranteed availability according to the SLA of the service selected. 
    • Does not connect to public sector networks. 

    Benefits of Vectra AI

    • Behavioral models use AI to find unknown attackers. 
    • Context increases the accuracy of threat hunting. 
    • Allows for proactive action by prioritizing the most relevant information. 
    • Provides a clear picture and extensive context for investigations. 
    • Aids decision-making in the incident response process. 
    • Helps working with large datasets by capturing metadata at scale. 
    • Automates time-consuming analysis. 
    • Reduces the security analysts’ workloads on threat investigations. 

    Other advantages of Vectra services include that they can be deployed in the public, private, or hybrid cloud. Support is available via email or online ticketing with an average of 4 hours of response. Phone support is available 24/7. 

    Vectra provides full on-site and online training and documentation. Regarding the user interface, it supports several types of web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. However, it is not available for mobile devices.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Here’s what PeerSpot users of Vectra AI have to say about it:

    "One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us." - Dave W., Operations Manager at a healthcare company

    "It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low.” - T.S., Senior Security Engineer at a manufacturing company

    Arista NDR (formerly Awake Security) is the only advanced network detection and response company that delivers answers, not alerts. By combining artificial intelligence with human expertise, Arista NDR hunts for both insider and external attacker behaviors, while providing autonomous triage and response with full forensics across traditional, IoT, and cloud networks. Arista NDR delivers continuous diagnostics for the entire enterprise threat landscape, processes countless network data points, senses abnormalities or threats, and reacts if necessary—all in a matter of seconds. The Arista NDP platform stands out from traditional security because it is designed to mimic the human brain. It recognizes malicious intent and learns over time, giving defenders greater visibility and insight into what threats exist and how to respond to them. 

    The Advent of Advanced Network Detection and Response & Why it Matters

    The 5 Levels of Autonomous Security paper

    The Scrutinizer incident response system leverages network traffic analytics to provide active monitoring, visualization, and reporting of network and security incidents. The system quickly delivers the rich forensic data needed by IT professionals to support fast and efficient incident response.

    Offer
    Learn more about Vectra AI
    Identify hidden network threats


    Your network may have security risks that you don't know about. Schedule a live demo to see how you can use Awake Security to identify and mitigate these threats.

    Learn more about Plixer Scrutinizer
    Sample Customers
    Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
    - Dolby Laboratories- Seattle Genetics- ARM Energy- Ooma- Prophix- Yapstone
    Oxford Networks, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, UltiSat, Wipro, West Aurora School District 129, SUNY Geneseo College, Bloomington Public Schools, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, Kitsap Credit Union, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County Houston Texas, Carilion Clinic, Banner Health, IDEXX Laboratories, Phibro Animal Health Corporation, Goodwill Industries, Parmalat, Armstrong Coal Company, Flybe, James Walker
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    University13%
    Mining And Metals Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Insurance Company18%
    Pharma/Biotech Company9%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    Computer Software Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Retailer22%
    Insurance Company11%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Government10%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise71%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise63%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise64%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise62%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise67%
    Buyer's Guide
    Arista NDR vs. Plixer Scrutinizer
    January 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Arista NDR vs. Plixer Scrutinizer and other solutions. Updated: January 2023.
    686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Arista NDR is ranked 7th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 2 reviews while Plixer Scrutinizer is ranked 9th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 3 reviews. Arista NDR is rated 9.0, while Plixer Scrutinizer is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Arista NDR writes "it's much easier to create your own queries and hunt for threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Plixer Scrutinizer writes "Reporting is extensive, flexible, and can be custom-made in just a short time". Arista NDR is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Palo Alto Networks Threat Prevention, ExtraHop Reveal(x) and GoSecure Network Detection and Response, whereas Plixer Scrutinizer is most compared with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, Darktrace, PRTG Network Monitor, Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Azure Network Watcher. See our Arista NDR vs. Plixer Scrutinizer report.

    See our list of best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors.

    We monitor all Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.