IBM Security QRadar Reviews

We are a product-based organization. We use this solution for a shared SOC service and security audits and compliance.

There are a lot of features in QRadar. App Exchange is the most valuable feature. User behavior analytics (UBA) is also a very good feature. Watson is also there, but we are not currently using Watson.

It is versatile and quite easy. It also has an all-in-one-box feature and good integration with AWS. 

SOAR is what is expected the most from QRadar. They have something called SOAR Resilient, and it would be great if that gets induced in SIEM. IBM QRadar (as well as McAfee ESM) should have analytics platform integration. Currently, SIEMs don't have full-fledged integration with analytics where we are able to dump our data in SIEM, and the same data can be called from different analytics applications. We should be able to bring this data to a platform like Hadoop for big data and run the analytics there. Currently, people are seeing the past data and taking some actions in the present, but when it comes to analytics, there should be futuristic data where you can predict something out of your present and past data. Apart from that, I would like to see a full-fledged ITSM tool in QRadar.

It sometimes has some technical issues that need to be checked. It requires a dedicated QRadar engineer to completely manage it. It has different module sets, such as event collector and event processor, and some technical glitches come in between. It takes the log but doesn't exactly process it in the way we want. 

If its pricing can be reduced, it would help a lot of customers in bringing in a new SIEM environment.

It is stable. There are no incidents when SIEM completely stopped. 

I have expanded it. It is very good in terms of scalability. Because it is on the cloud, it can be scaled anytime. If I want to increase my CPU's RAM, I can do it. At any point in time, if I want to get additional licenses, I can just call support, and they will provide that.

I have around six customers who are using QRadar in a shared model. We do have plans to increase its usage. We are looking after different customers, and when they're ready, we can integrate it.

They are good and responsive. However, because of COVID, of late everyone is working from home, and sometimes, their response has been a little bit slow for incidents. They did apologize for that.

It is straightforward. AWS has a feature called Marketplace in its environment. When we click it, we can load it directly. It doesn't take more than two to three days to completely deploy the infrastructure. 

They can give us some scalability and flexibility on pricing. If its pricing can be reduced, it would help a lot of customers in bringing in a new SIEM environment and grow business in the market. If I start a license today and take around 10,000 EPS, and after a month, there is an increase in the number of clients on my platform, I can increase the number of licenses. I can add 5,000 EPS on a yearly basis.

We chose QRadar over McAfee ESM.

It has good integration with AWS. AWS has come up with a Marketplace click-in option that provides direct integration between your AWS and data centers or cloud solutions through a small VPN. It allows you to bring up small environments with 5,000 EPS or 6,000 EPS or even 3,500 EPS or 2,500 EPS very quickly. It is very flexible and not at all tough for a startup engineer to click and bring solutions inside. It is quite easy.

I would rate IBM QRadar an eight out of ten.

I am a system integrator. We have installed it on-premises, on the cloud, in distributed environments, and all other environments for our clients.

We have worked with other solutions, such as LogRhythm and Splunk. Compared to others, IBM QRadar has the best price-performance ratio so that you are able to reserve minimum costs. It starts settling in fast and gets the first results very quickly. It is also very scalable.

There are a lot of things they are working on and a lot of technologies that are not yet there. They should probably work out a better reserve with their ecosystem of business partners and create wider and more in-depth qualities, third-party tools, and add-ons. These things really give immediate business value. For instance, there are many limitations in using SAP, EBS, or Micro-Dynamics. A lot of things that are happening in those platforms could also be monitored and allowed from the cybersecurity risks perspective. IBM might be leaving this gap or empty space for business partners. Some larger organizations might already be doing this.

It would be very nice if IBM can make some artificial intelligence part free of charge for all current QRadar users. This would be a big advantage as compared to other competitors.

There are companies that are going in different directions. Of course, you can't do everything inside QRadar. In general, it might be very good for all players to provide more use cases, especially regarding data protection and leakage prevention. There are some who are already doing some kind of file integrity or gathering some more information from all possible technologies for building anything related to the user and data analysis, content analysis, and management regarding the data protection.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

If the engineers are missing some technical knowledge from IBM documentation, then it might get interesting, but you can always rollback. Usually, when you are implementing innovations, as a system integrator, you usually do less on the test environment, and then you check if this works. If bigger organizations and customers want to do it by themselves, they should really stick to this approach and use a lot of material, community pages, and channels.

There is absolutely no problem with scalability. It works very fine, especially when you are running just clients. It doesn't matter how many variants you have all across the culture. You can practically have different continents. It doesn't matter how many collectors are running. You can easily distribute the current license to multiple users, and all the collectors can upload it without any restrictions.

We have worked with other solutions. Splunk is a long-term trap because it is very expensive, and it gets more and more expensive. It has different times, and it is integrated with different products. When you combine that together with licensing, it obviously fails. You are paying a lot more than QRadar.

LogRhythm has some problems with stability. We were the first partner to do some integrations with LogRhythm, but we had some problems. ArcSight was smaller at the time but not anymore. It is now a competitor. Fortinet is very good for those who are already using some software products from them.

It usually happens within two or three hours, but it also depends on the preparation. If good homework is done, then the initial setup is totally flawless. It is ready very soon. We then try it and wait for maybe a couple of days more. After that, we start fine-tuning, and then we do advanced installations.

For us, such projects usually don't start without any experience with technology and the concepts. When you are buying it, you need to know all the information systems, create a list of tasks and priorities, and understand the use case better. 

A lot of such innovations or implementations initially can be done by one person, two persons, or maybe a team of five dedicated administrators who later on will be using this technology or solution. You need to understand that there are different roles of people who are working with cybersecurity and threat management, such as an analyst, a simple technical maintenance performer, an administrator, a user behavior analyst, etc.

It is not something like a next-generation firewall, next-generation intrusion prevention, or the most complex tool that you have got, which you can install and configure and then see if it runs smoothly. It is a completely different story in QRadar or any similar technology. These solutions or technologies have to be managed continuously. 

The biggest mistake that innovations people usually make is that they don't plan the total cost of the technology tools for a period of five years, especially because they don't know what kind of new threats are coming out. Despite that, IBM is very early in doing some kind of new content packs and including data enforcement, etc. When new threats are coming in, you effectively need to adjust. The more complex use cases you have, the more complex the responses will be. You might have different systems or you might be working in different time zones.

When buying, people think that 70% to 80% percent of the initial purchase is the total they are going to spend within next year at this time, and then every next year, they will spend like 20% or 25% on the technical support, maintenance, development of the system, etc. When you are talking about a huge, complex, and central cybersecurity threat management system, it is more likely that you are implementing a document management system and some complex CIP systems, etc. The cost of the license and the cost of the hardware initially can make up around 20%, 30%, or less percent of the total budget that is needed for quality management of such solutions for a longer period of time. 

Some people think that if they buy this for 100,000 pounds or euros, the next year, they can buy just annual subscriptions for 25,000 or 20,000. You may have some internal costs for the license, etc. If you are buying for, let's say, 100,000, you might have to make your budget for 200,000 more, because it needs to have certain people who are doing everything with the solution. You need to train them and send them to the IBM international technology academies and events such as Visor to know about its management and maintenance. You probably also need to do some certification, so you need to go for a course for implementation. A lot of internal work should be done to adjust the solution with other departments, and those other departments usually don't like such central, overseeing, and controlled solution. They, later on, learn that they can get a lot of different, useful reports out of it without doing additional work. 

I would rate IBM QRadar an eight out of ten. Every technology has some weaknesses and strengths. It has a lot of points to improve, but based on everything that we have seen in the market and from other customers, this is, so far, at least in Europe, the best solution.

It is used to dive deep into threat analysis. It is a SIEM solution that can be hooked up with some of the endpoint security or threat discovery solutions such as Forescout, Qualys, Sophos, and MDM. After the endpoint security or threat discovery solution discovers the threat, QRadar takes it further from that point onwards and allows you to go deep into the threat analysis. It has a lot of integrations, such as with CMDB, and it can do the asset classification. It can also tell the CVSS score. These are the capabilities or use cases. 

Integrations are quite a useful and key feature of this solution. It has integration with the CVSS score, which is a central point for all the data and scores about the threats. There is an IBM Bluemix dashboard that is integrated with the CVSS score.

I don't look at only the features and benefits; I also look at the price. It is a bit expensive when compared with other solutions. It is expensive for specific deployment topologies, and the decision-makers go for alternatives like ArcSight. 

It should also have more AI features or capabilities for better threat intelligence. The more it uses machine learning, the better would be the dashboard, analytics, and other things.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

You can scale it easily in the cloud with a given deployment topology. We have somewhere around 50 plus users.

IBM is very strong on the technical support side. They have proper support available across different regions. After the implementation is done, the admin within the organization is in touch with IBM technical support for any day-to-day support requirements.

We have been switching for some time between Micro Focus ArcSight and IBM QRadar.

For cloud deployment, you need to go for IBM Bluemix Cloud, and you can deploy easily on a private cloud. You create the stack and use the Bluemix Cloud formation template. If you have the IBM Bluemix Cloud subscription, you can deploy it easily within maybe half a day or one day. You can create all the resources by using the Bluemix Cloud formation template.

For deployment, you need a small team of two or three because it just needs the team to provision the resources on the IBM Bluemix Cloud. For support, we need a bigger team of around 10 plus people.

It is costlier as compared to the other alternatives available in the market.

I would definitely recommend this solution. It is a good solution with good capabilities like integration with CMDB and CVSS score. The dashboard is also really nice. It can help with threat intelligence, and it also has artificial intelligence. It is a futuristic kind of technology because the more AI-driven a product is, the better are the results. We plan to keep using this solution.

I would rate IBM QRadar a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for deploying and integrating log sources and use cases.

We use it to generate offensives based on normal behavior and suspicious behavior from our security tools, firewalls, and other solutions.

We have applied a set of old and new rules to QRAdar that aim to detect persistent abnormalities in our environments.

Within our organization, our security operations center and users from our local security team — roughly 10 to 12 users — use QRadar. We plan to expand to other areas of the company so that other people can use QRadar for different use cases. But right now only the security teams use it.

It's more of what it has provided for our company. We have much better visibility into our environment now. It has become much easier to create an alert for suspicious behavior, to operate on security incidents when they happen, and to drill down on specific events and figure out exactly which machines and users were involved.

I think the log search is pretty good. It's very easy to create complex searches and aggregate results and create graphics, etc. 

The rule engine is very easy to use — very flexible. We can create rules based on whatever behavior we want. It's very easy to use compared to Splunk. 

When we analyzed Splunk, that was the criteria that we looked at. Splunk was a lot more difficult to use and to create rules.

The standard rules they have are very comprehensive. There are many content packs in the apps that enrich those rules. We are still using the native rules from QRadar because there are many useful rules there. I think we're going to have a very good experience with them.

One thing one has to be aware is that qRadar doesn't have a standard UI style, but older (clunkier) and newer (more modern and easy to use) screens. The QRadar UI involves a lot of clicks and pop-ups to get where you want, which is certainly not the best UX, but isn't totally a pain also. Although it's a bit difficult to navigate through screens at first, the UX is pretty good once you learn the "qRadar way", which takes about a few weeks to master.

I have been using this solution for the last three months.

We had some bugs and we had to handle them. They impacted our deployment timeline, but all of the bugs that we had were quickly solved by engineers from IBM. Currently, we are not fully satisfied with the stability, but the support from IBM is very good and they can solve our problems very, very quickly.

There seems to be a cap-limit regarding scalability. IBM limits the amount of data you can send into the collectors so scalability-wise, it's not that optimum because sometimes we have a resource or a machine that tends to think it gets more events per second than it actually gets. Because of how the solution is made, If we send a large number of events to these event collectors, then they will start dropping events because we can't queue them. That seems to be by design — we aren't entirely satisfied with that. In this way, IBM kind of forces their customers to buy a larger license.

IBM's customer support is very good. 

We don't have any comments about community support because we don't know any communities that we can use to look up information about QRadar; however, in general, we have used IBM's documentation extensively — I think it's very useful, it's very complete, but sometimes it's a bit outdated. 

We used to use ArcSight. I can't even begin to compare these two products because ArcSight was a solution managed entirely by our security operations center team. We didn't have full knowledge of what the solution was capable of. Now we're seeing a much larger universe with QRadar — I think it's a completely different thing. QRadar is much more capable than ArcSight.

Deployment-wise it's pretty easy already; it took us one hour to get QRadar running, and then a couple of days later, we had full deployment. We then began onboarding log sources — the process of onboarding log sources has been almost painless for 90% of our log sources, which are from different vendors and different tools, and within a month we had about 70% of all of our relevant security logs in qRadar, generating many interesting offenses on a daily basis. So that has been very positive.

We had little interaction with qRadar during the process of onboarding log sources — most log sources were automatically discovered, their events were mapped correctly and parsed to extract relevant fields. A few log sources required manual intervention or installation of content packs, and some of IBM's DSMs were a bit outdated, but these issues were rather quick to fix within qRadar itself.

We used a partner company here called IT.eam, which helped us with the deployment. They are very capable and professional and it's been overall a great experience.

It's very expensive but it fits our budget. Because it's very expensive, we had to come up with ways of filtering our logs before they get into QRadar because otherwise, we'd have to buy a much greater amount of events per second, and that would be very expensive.

Splunk is virtually the same price.

I'd recommend QRadar for security teams that are more from the IT world and not so much from the development or data-science world. I think other tools, such as Splunk, are really great too, but QRadar is natively concerned with providing security rules and use cases. If you're looking for a reliable solution for security purposes only, QRadar is probably the way to go.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

The tool helps with infrastructure, application, and network monitoring. 

There are areas in IBM Security QRadar that could benefit from improvement. Its ability to customize knowledge for specific purposes could be enhanced. Also, it lacks clarity in presenting details. It is also difficult to see the reports. 

I have been using the product for a year. 

The tool's technical support is good. 

Neutral

Implementing IBM Security QRadar is not overly complex. 

The product is expensive. We have purchased the perpetual license, but we pay for the support. 

I rate the tool a seven out of ten. It is a tough product. 

We are using IBM QRadar for log reviews, particularly logs that come and go from the IPS, firewall, etc.

We have different dashboards for different technologies such as our firewall, IPS, and domains for our main website, so we use IBM QRadar to observe the logs from our website, and we try to make internal and external connections for better domain security.

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.

IBM QRadar has outdated technology, and this is its area for improvement. When you try to implement an analytic expression, it's not updated. The solution doesn't support newer technologies, and it doesn't update regularly. For example, around the world, others implement new technologies, while IBM updates later than others.

There isn't any additional feature I'd like added to IBM QRadar at this point because it's sufficient for visualizing the logs.

I've been with the company for one and a half months, and I've been using IBM QRadar almost daily, but the solution was deployed five or six months ago.

IBM QRadar is a stable solution.

IBM QRadar is a scalable solution. My company currently has seven to eight different accounts on IBM QRadar, so it's a scalable technology. It has no problems with scalability.

I didn't have any problems with IBM QRadar, so I never contacted the technical support team.

I'm assuming that the main reason my company chose IBM QRadar is that IBM is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, so IBM products would be more secure and more reliable than other solutions.

As I didn't set up or deploy IBM QRadar, I have no information on whether it was easy or complex to set up.

I have no information about the licensing costs of IBM QRadar, and whether or not it requires a license.

I'm an intern at one of the biggest telecommunication companies, and my company uses IBM QRadar.

My advice if you want to use IBM QRadar is that you should use it because it's very scalable and it's easy to use. The solution also has many dashboards, and you don't have to write any code or write different scripts to get the information you need. You can do it from the UI of IBM QRadar. The only room for improvement in the solution is that it doesn't support newer technologies, and it's late when it comes to updates.

I'm rating IBM QRadar nine out of ten because my experience with it has been excellent. The only downside to it is that IBM is late with adding new features or supporting new technologies compared to its competitors.

My company is an IBM QRadar customer.

To be very frank, it's not that much help as of now. We are not getting that many insights from UVA, which we wanted, actually. As of now, we are exploring that UVA, and we have installed it. It's still quite new.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution is still new to us. Currently, it's a work in progress with this. I'm not in any particular condition to tell what exact improvements are required. I will let a few more months go by before analyzing the overall UBS solution QRadar to get to know and final understanding of this particular application.

There are a lot of things that require modification. That's my initial observation, however, I need more time and a few more months to get to know it and get a final understanding of the solution as a whole.

I want a reduction of false positives. I want crisp true positive incidents out of it. I want to see proper user behavior. Whatever algorithm is working in the background, that algorithm should produce accurate, true positive incidents and not false positives.

We are using QRadar as an appliance for the last four years, however, we recently, for the last six months, started using UBS.

I'm not sure about the stability just yet. We've observed a few issues and we raised a supporting ticket for it.

The scalability is very good. It's not a problem.

Technical support has been very supportive. We're largely satisfied with them.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward and simple. It's not very complex. 

We are using multiple features in QRadar. UVA is just one feature. We have overall 14 data nodes and we are almost 2,500 GB of data integrated with it and we are using multiple applications in QRadar. We have a nine-member team that manages the overall QRadar architecture, not only UBA.

We did a direct integration.

I'm an architect. Normally costs and licensing are handled by senior management.

For UBA, they haven't asked for any extra charges or anything. It's included in the licensing.

We're an IBM partner. We have platinum support with IBM.

We have segregated our data between on-prem and the cloud. All the on-prem data we have integrated with the QRadar. QRadar itself is an on-prem solution. We have QRadar hardware with us.

At this point, I would not recommend the solution to others. 

I'd rate the solution a six out of ten.

IBM Qradar's ability to simplify the number of events, not only on a technical level but by making that information easy to pan through the orchestration deduplication. It is very impressive given that we have hundreds of devices that send event logs through.

IBM Qradar could improve the reporting. The tool is not designed to report. It's a great operational monitoring tool. You put it on a screen and you watch it. If you want to have analytics out of it, that's a whole different story. You're going to need more people and tools. What should be added is reporting and integration into Power BI, into some capability that produces analytical reports from the source data. IBM does not seem to care to add these features.

I have been using IBM QRadar for approximately 10 years.

The stability of IBM Qradar is good.

IBM Qradar is a scalable solution.

The technical support from IBM Qradar could improve.

I rate the support from IBM Qradar a two out of ten.

The initial setup of IBM Qradar is difficult, you need to know what you are doing to be able to complete the task. It is not easy.

We used three to four specialists to do the implementation depending on how many integration levels you're going to have. If you're managing the flows and going to be managing applications, logical access, patch management, vulnerability management then it can take more time and more people. It depends on the scale that you want to integrate. 

IBM Qradar doesn't come ready for plug and play, for your APIs, integration, and all the other elements you will need a person that knows how to do the IBM QRadar setup. From that perspective, you need to make sure that integration points to the license keys, for validation, and that can be a different challenge if it doesn't work.

My advice to others is they have to have IBM Qradar set for purpose and it depends on the role that you see your SIEM solution playing in the company. If you're offering it as a service to other companies, or you're an IT service provider or security solution provider, then yes, you probably need an enterprise base that is scalable but not with smaller enterprises.

I do think the IoT component of IBM Qradar is lacking. IBM tried and IoT is not specifically aimed at only cameras or what I call physical access points, integration into what I call scale technology. They are areas that would depend on each business to map out what the requirements are. This is not a McAfee endpoint or a Symantec endpoint device that gives you an alert.

There is more competition and innovative application development in this area we've seen in the last few years.

I rate IBM Qradar a seven out of ten.