What is our primary use case?
My main use case for CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is to manage SIEM and endpoints.
As a SOC Analyst, I use the Falcon endpoint sensor on all of our hosts, devices, and servers to monitor detections, endpoint telemetry, server logs, network connections, and any execution activity happening on them. This represents our day-to-day daily alerts.
I use CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM to monitor, detect, and respond to all kinds of threats occurring on our endpoints, including hosts and servers.
I received an alert involving suspicious activity on an endpoint, and my first step was to investigate the alert and search for related activity in CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. It helped me establish the scope of the activity, identify related indicators, and determine whether escalation was required, or I could contain the event with a one-click action. The biggest value of Falcon in that type of investigation is centralized visibility.
I am not using Charlotte AI as of now, but it is something in our future plan as I would like to explore and understand Charlotte AI.
How has it helped my organization?
The biggest positive impact CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM has on my organization is improved visibility, operational efficiency, and faster security response. From the SOC perspective, having security logs and telemetry available in a centralized platform makes it easier to investigate suspicious activities and correlate events across different sources, helping with incident prioritization, faster triage, and more informed escalation decisions. In terms of measurable outcomes, I look at metrics such as mean time to detect and mean time to respond, which have improved, and the improved visibility and process are the biggest benefits that have added great value to my company since we migrated to CrowdStrike.
From an operational perspective, the biggest improvement is in investigation and response. Having centralized log visibility and the ability to search and complete events helps analysts identify relevant information much faster, making the improvement noticeable, particularly during initial triage. The overall benefit is that analysts can investigate faster and prioritize incidents more effectively compared to any other security EDR tools available.
From an operational perspective, I have seen improvements in the investigation and response workflow. The biggest advantage is that CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM provides centralized visibility into security events, which helps analysts quickly identify related activities and investigate suspicious behavior. I have endpoint telemetry, endpoint activities, process trees, and search logs all in one place, which is a unique feature that other platforms lack.
CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM has improved the speed of the workflow, particularly when dealing with multiple events. It has unique layers of approach, especially in the process tree and alert investigation time.
What is most valuable?
The best features CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM offers include endpoint activities and investigation capabilities, specifically the ability to investigate, understand the process, process tree, and suspicious behavior during incident response. I appreciate this because it is very convenient and makes an analyst's response fast.
The biggest benefit is the visibility and ability to investigate. For example, when I receive a suspicious activity alert, instead of manually checking multiple data sources, I can use the SIEM search capabilities to look for related events, examine timestamps, identify affected systems, and correlate activities. Overall, it makes the investigation process more efficient and gives me better visibility as a SOC analyst.
I appreciate CrowdStrike for its data visibility, detection capabilities, threat investigation, and dashboards.
I think the AI capabilities in CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM are incredible, as it has strong governance and a security platform, making it one of the most powerful platforms available.
I think the AI capabilities in CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM can be very useful, especially for assisting analysts in threat investigation and understanding threat actor motives through the MITRE ATT&CK framework. It reduces manual effort. Recently, they launched Guardian, an AI agent that can improve detection and response time and has a kill switch if it goes rogue. However, I do not think the output should be treated as completely authoritative, as there can be situations where the context is incomplete or the output needs further validation.
What needs improvement?
CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is an incredible tool with powerful platforms, but I would like to see improvements in dashboard customization and reporting. Having more flexibility to create role-based dashboards and custom reports would help SOC teams monitor effectively. I believe log onboarding and parsing could be made much simpler, as it can be very difficult for beginners to understand and integrate these third-party data sources. A much simpler UI can help.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM for eight months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have experienced stability issues.
How are customer service and support?
I have direct contact with the CrowdStrike team, who are always helpful and there for any issues, so I would say the service is fantastic.
I would rate the customer support a ten.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
As I mentioned earlier, I lacked capabilities in Carbon Black to have centralized visibility and review multiple events. There was also a lot of noise, false positives, and detections that were not helping analysts to review. Due to the limitation of available resources, I had to explore the top tool in the market. CrowdStrike was evolving, offering great features, unique capabilities, and AI-agentic workflows, with insanely good detection response time, which is why I had to switch to CrowdStrike.
It was Carbon Black, which I mentioned had limitations on centralized visibility and a lot of noise from false positive detections that were not helping analysts.
What was our ROI?
I can assure you I do see a return on investment, which is great because I have been seeing improvements in detection time, response, and time savings. I would say that is one of the best returns on investment I have seen so far. I have reduced a lot of false positives and made my tuning much stronger and impactful.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM a nine due to its highly advantaged market demand over others and its unique features, though there is always room for improvement, especially to make it much easier for beginners. The ease of use for beginners is mainly why I did not choose a ten.
I think CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is deployed in a public cloud, possibly Azure or AWS, but I work as an analyst, which is why I do not have much information. It should be both, as far as I am aware.
To look at and approach the product, evaluate risk and reward in your environment. I would definitely recommend them to make a switch because of the unique capabilities and detection improvements.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.