LogRhythm SIEM Reviews

We utilize the LogRhythm solution to monitor most of our servers and our users to make sure that nothing anomalous is happening. What I really love about the LogRhythm platform is the fact that when something anomalous happens, I can see it almost immediately through the ability to collect a massive amount of logs in a very small footprint as far as hardware goes.

We do utilize everything. I think one of the most recent things that I've really enjoyed about LogRhythm is the ability to utilize smart responses published by LogRhythm. For example, one of our use cases is that when we have a termed users group, that when someone is placed in there, we want to monitor to see if their account is ever activated again. So we have a smart response set up that when a termed user is enabled, the smart response immediately activates and says bam, that user is getting disabled again. We don't want anyone to have access to that at all.

We've seen mean time to detect and to respond go down pretty significantly. We actually recently implemented the CloudAI solution, which allowed us to look into our users' anomalous behavior. Recently, we actually had some user who's a remote user, he traveled to somewhere else in the US, and CloudAI flagged it and was like, hey, this user is authenticating from somewhere new. This isn't somewhere we've seen before. I jumped right in, and I'm saying, "Hey, what's this user doing?" We emailed their manager who emailed them, and they said, "Oh, no, I'm just on vacation in California. It's okay." We had CloudAI learn about it, and now, it's really easy to see when a user does something anomalous.

CloudAI has been something in our environment that I have enjoyed immensely. It takes really a lot of the guesswork out of what our users are doing. Right when we implemented it, our CEO was actually out of the state, and we were having a hard time getting a lot of his user data because he was out of the state on vacation. When he came back, immediately CloudAI flagged him in the 80s with a threat score being from 0 to 100. Immediately, I was like, oh crap, our CEO's account has been compromised. But no, CloudAI was still learning our environment. It took it about a month or two to learn what was happening in our environment, what was going on, and then all of our threat scores, they kind of hover around the 20s now.

When something does something anomalous, when they work out-of-state, even when they authenticate to a different Microsoft server, it lets us know immediately what's going on, and it lets us know, and it lets us understand what our users are doing. CloudAI has definitely enhanced our security operations. It helps me understand what the users are doing almost instantaneously. It helps me understand what these users are doing in a daily report, and it helps me really feel why our users are doing certain things, why they're authenticating to certain servers. It helps me understand what their job would really want them to access or what their job has them access.

When they do something different from that, I really want to know why they're doing that. CloudAI helps me know what our users are doing. Rather than what hosts are doing or what servers are doing, it helps me know what the users are doing with their accounts. I think somewhere CloudAI would have room for improvement is maybe correlating hosts with IPs because often, I'll have a user, it'll come up with an anomaly score saying it's been authenticating from different hosts, but really what it is is it'll have the user's computer, then the user's IP that they're coming from, and sometimes their hostname with our domain name afterwards. Sometimes, CloudAI will usually be alerting us on some things that are really just the user's computer IP coming up multiple times.

LogRhythm has really improved, I think, my personal sense of security as far as our organization. I feel that I can trust the data that it's pulling in. Through its metrics, I can see when something isn't reporting so I know immediately if, maybe say one of our core servers isn't feeding its logs to us, I can remediate that almost immediately, and then feel secure again knowing that that data is coming to LogRhythm, and LogRhythm is correctly dealing with it. I can know that our security is in place.

We haven't used any of the LogRhythm built-in playbooks yet. Stability has been really good. The LogRhythm platform in our environment actually sat for three years with no one really using it. I came in about six months ago. I was able to pull it from generating about a thousand alarms a day that were just heartbeat errors, or critical components going down, to it actually only generating about 100 alarms a day, some of those being diagnostic alarms, but most of them being very helpful alarms that rarely ever point to having a component being down. With some short maintenance daily, LogRhythm has been a very stable platform.

I think condensing and consolidating what a user accesses over and over again and just having CloudAI understand that that's all of the user's, and you can consider it as one thing rather than multiple things, and alarming on it, and alerting me on it, having me have a mini heart attack every time it tells me that this user is authenticating from a new place.

Scalability with the LogRhythm platform has been immensely easy. We went from about five system monitors to over 200 in a week. We implemented that through our system management thing, but rolling out 200 system monitors in a week was incredibly easy through the client console, which LogRhythm has documented immensely well.

Tech support with LogRhythm has been great. I've only ever had one bad case out of about the 15 or 20 tickets I've put in. They usually immediately get back to me, and even if it's something outside of their scope, there always willing to help refer me to the person that I need to talk to, and my issue is always resolved within the week. LogRhythm's support for log sources is great. We have about 3,000 log sources right now that we're taking in. Most of that is coming into our main data collector, but anytime we've had any new log sources that we need to onboard, it's been pretty seamless, and we haven't seen any performance hit on our main box.

With our LogRhythm solution, we're processing anywhere from 800 to 1,500 messages per second. With the LogRhythm platform, we're processing anywhere from 800 to 1,500 messages per second, and we don't see a performance hit at all.

We've had CloudAI implemented into our deployment for about three months so far, and out of that three months, we've only had one day of downtime. That was with a scheduled transfer from how they were hosting it before to where they're hosting it now. Stability and uptime has been 99% plus. It's been something that I can count on every day to come in and see this report and rely on it. We really haven't had the chance to scale CloudAI. We're a growing organization, but we're not ballooning, and we're not adding on new users. CloudAI is a great option to sync with AD to pull all your users and, and you can just set up the identities and run with it on day one. The reason why we went with CloudAI and decided that it was something we needed in our environment was because we had the log data for a lot of our servers, a lot of our hosts.

We had the authentication data from our domain controller on the users, but we really wanted to understand what the users were doing and why they were doing it. So we looked into other artificial intelligence programs that would do some of the similar things, but we realized that CloudAI would do what we wanted but then feed the data right back into the LogRhythm platform. With that, we were able to see what the users were doing along with what our servers were doing, what the hosts were doing, and we would have all that data correlated, and we could understand it in one big picture right in the web console.

The implementation of CloudAI was incredibly easy. We just ran a script, added a certificate, and all of the sudden, we were sending the data to them, and we had a report the next day. When we choose a vendor to work with, the number-one thing that we want to understand is that they understand the product. We aren't just going to go to a vendor and say, "Here's our money, please go learn about this product and then implement it in our environment," because I'll just implement it, I'll just learn about it myself and do it. But if I go to a vendor and learn that they know about this product, they've implemented something before, I'm going to go with them nine times out of 10 because they will do something that I can't do myself because I don't understand what's going on.

If I had to rate LogRhythm and CloudAI out of 10, I think I'd give it an eight. There's still room for LogRhythm to improve, and they've laid out a pretty great roadmap for what they want to do in the future. I think if they continued to innovate and continue to implement the things that they've talked about, that they'll continue to grow in my eyes. There is some room for improvement, but overall, if you want a very solid platform with stability and scalability, LogRhythm is definitely the way to go.

The primary use case is tying all of our log sources together between all of our Windows servers, network devices, and we've recently added all of our cloud infrastructure as well. So it's really tying all those together, correlating all those logs and getting us one central pane of glass really as it relates to all of our logging activities.

I think the biggest way that it's improved us from an organizational standpoint is giving us a single view into all of our log sources and all of our infrastructure devices. Whereas before we didn't ever have that. It was always a hodgepodge of stuff put together, so I think it's the best thing is that it brings everything together so that we can all one view of it.

The playbooks are definitely something I see a lot of value and so look forward to when we do get upgraded to be able to using those playbooks. I think that's a way of automating and making sure that we're standardized in the way that me and my team or are utilizing the LogRhythm. I think playbooks are very valuable.

We really aren't tracking our mean time to respond or mean time to detect as of now, that's kind of something that I want to get better at, to kind of formalize that process. So as of now, it's hard to say how much it has, but I know just from an anecdotal standpoint, I can guarantee that we're doing a lot better in responding now than we did before, before we had the SIEM in place.

I think the biggest thing is tying all of our log sources together, whereas there was a lot of manual work before of reviewing Windows logs or you know, firewall logs. Bringing it all together so that way my team, the information security team, as well as the infrastructure team can kind of view all of that from a single pane of glass and see everything that's going on in the environment.

As of now, we're not using all of the full analytics capabilities that we know the logarithm SIM can do. So it's one of the things, areas of that we need to improve on. We have all of our log sources in there, now making sure that we're getting the value of all that together is something we still need work on, so.

I would say the thing that I'd like to see the LogRhythm do a better job of is staying ahead of the curve as it relates to like things like cloud. It seems like from that standpoint that maybe the cloud stuff was a little bit of an afterthought or wasn't done kind of as people started to move to cloud quicker. It's one of those things of where we kind of are doing it now, but it seems like some of the cloud connections are still buying, kind of being created as we go. So I think that's one area I think they could improve in.

Stability has been great. We have not had any unplanned outages, all the upgrades that we have done have gone as expected. So from that standpoint, stability's been great.

Scalability's been great as well. We've got a very disparate environment and the original servers that we have are from three years ago, are still in place. We haven't had any performance issues at all, so it scales to our solution, understanding that as we bring on additional devices, we know that it will scale up to be even bigger than where we're at right now.

Tech support's been great. Every time we work with them on any upgrades or any questions about any of the anything we want to add a new log source or whatever, they've been excellent on that and they're always right on top of it and always get us to where we need to go.

I was involved, actually one of the first. It was one of the first products involved when I started with the company. We didn't have a SIEM, didn't have any really from a monitoring standpoint, didn't have anything. So LogRhythm was really the first major product that we bought and the installation was awesome. I mean it went as expected, moved it along quickly, and it provided value as soon as we were done with the installation. So the install was amazing.

We're about 20 different log source types. I mean all total log sources, we're probably in the 400-500 range, so I mean it has a log source, there are log source types for everything that we have right now. One of the challenges we have had is adding all of our cloud infrastructure in there as well. So I know that's something that logarithm was working on.

We're doing about 2000 messages per second.

When we looked at putting a SIEM in place, we kind of realized that we wanted somebody that was a neutral vendor, where they're not tied to specific vendors that, you know, we wanted to make sure that with the SIM we were buying would monitor all the devices that we had in place. So finding somebody that's kind of an independent, not tied to specific hardware manufacturers, really important to us to make sure that, you know, the SIEM could monitor everything that we had in place.

So I think from a security program, maturity level, logarithm really got us started in that direction. As I mentioned, you know, it was one of the first products we bought and when we first started I really started the information security program myself. So it was kind of the first product we bought that we built everything around. So it really is the kind of the central repository for everything we're doing from an information security program standpoint.

I would say LogRhythm, on a scale of 1 to 10, it'd be a nine. I think it's a really solid solution. I think one of the things that they could probably improve on, as I mentioned, was being kind of a little more proactive when it comes to things like cloud and things like that, so I think that they are getting better, but I'd say a nine right now.

From my point of view, at a organizational level, we're able to get that insight into what users are doing, what our applications are doing, whether there is any untoward traffic coming in, whether the applications are misconfigured. It's also used, dare I say, to tick a compliance box.

The most valuable feature for me is that it's a single pane of glass for all of the analysts in my team. It gives us complete eyes and ears into what's going on within our environment. We run two separate installations. One is in our datacenter where we handle all of the sensitive data, and one is on the enterprise side, so it gives us a real good visualization of what's really going on.

In terms of the product, what really needs to improve are the metrics that you can get from it. We're all about mean time to detection, mean time to response, pulling those metrics out so I can put them into my KPI packs to present to the board. Everyone in a CISO role is having the same challenge. We've got multiple spreadsheets. Being able to leverage the SIEM to give us the information would be invaluable.

The other area is Office 365. We're cloud-first as far as our enterprise goes, and what we lack at the moment is being able to pull that information into the SIEM. I understand that that's coming, so we're looking forward to that.

On the whole it's been fine. We've not had any issues with volume, with the system going down. There are a couple of tweaks that you get with older systems. Patching time is always interesting. When you want to do an upgrade, if you're going from a minor version it's fine. If you're going from a major, then it's always good to use the autopilot services.

In a previous role of mine, we had an IT department that thought they could do everything, and virtualization was the way to go. That definitely didn't work. In the current organization, we found the two instances are very, very scalable. Being able to get additional licenses for agents works well, very easy to do.

The feedback I get from the analysts in the team is the first-line support is your traditional first line support, they'll log a call. We often get the responses in a timely manner. If it needs to be escalated, we've got good contacts within the wider organization and it gets escalated from level-one to level-two, definitely don't have any issues there. 

It's nice to see that the vendor listens. If something does go wrong, they're on the phone giving you the support that you need. Other vendors don't necessarily do that as quickly as LogRhythm.

If we go back nine to 10 years, we had the advent of PCI. The standards council says you needed to use file integrity. The only real solution at the time was Tripwire. That's when I got introduced to Ross Brewer (Vice President and Managing Director of EMEA for LogRhythm). From that point, we knew this was the right solution. We wanted to gather the logs into a central place.

In the various guises that I've had over the years, we've gone from multiple installations across 54 datacenters, globally, into our smaller setups. It's easy to install, it's pretty much, as they say, "out of the box," but it needs to be fed and watered on a daily basis. You do need a team to look after it, which I think is the same with any SIEM out there, but this is much easier to use. And because it's out of the box, you get the information you need within the first couple of hours.

With the new organization that I've been with for three and a half years, we spent seven months looking at other solutions out there; looking at Splunk, looking at ArcSight. We did a trial, we stood them up next to each other. Straight away it was fairly evident that the LogRhythm application itself, and the agent roll-out, was straight out of the box. Like I said, it needs feeding, watering every day, but in terms of being able to take the box, put it into your datacenter, get it up and running, they're definitely light years ahead of the competition.

In terms of the criteria for selecting a vendor, it always comes down to cost.

And usability. I like to make sure that my analysts are hands-on when we look at these tools. What's the interface like? How easy is it to use? What's the after-sales like? What's their tech support like? These are all things we need to look at. 

Also, which operating systems do the agents run on? Can you integrate into all the hardware that you've got? What syslog feeds can it take? Can it take SNMP as well?

If colleagues were looking to purchase a similar solution, the guidance that I'd give them is make sure that they draw out what they're looking to get from the solution. Make sure they have an inventory of hosts. Don't go all out, don't put everything on at once. As they said, don't try to boil the ocean at once. What are your critical hosts? Feed that information in first. Build case studies. What do you want to get from it, what are you looking for? And then work your way through it.

What I've done in the past is I've asked them to come over to our office and take a look at our implementation. I'm happy to share that information with others. I'm able to give them some case studies on what we've found with the Windows operating systems and some of the other hardware out there.

It has improved our ability to see incidents when they occur, instead of maybe a few weeks or a few months down the road.

Overall effectiveness is very good. I like how it is oriented to both analysts and technical support people. It's easily adopted by end users as much as by technologists.

Key challenges are going to be maintaining visibility as the technology changes, especially with cloud coming onboard, probably fairly soon. Also, the implementation of a SOC, which is relatively new to what we've been doing.

• The overall view of the solution: It encompasses end-to-end analysis and response.
• Log management
• Threat management: Threat hunting is going to be a large topic for us as well, which being a big data engine, will go a long way for us, too.

We have not move into cloud security so much, but eventually we will be there.

I would like to see case management become more independent from LogRhythm itself. Right now, it is very oriented to LogRhythm based events, but not manual events, such as user reported things and incidents where we might have large volumes of data that we have to store as part of the case. It works real well as a workflow device, but not real well for overall case management for an organization.

It's highly scalable, though we have not really been able to take advantage of all of its scalability yet. We're moving into the new architecture as we speak with having separate data processors and indexers. I am hoping to find out how scalable that becomes.

We're currently between seven and 11,000 logs per second. By next year, we'll probably be close to 20,000 logs per second. We have 14,000 branch offices and two large data centers. We're growing rapidly and trying to improve our visibility.

As far as technical support, professional support, and overall organizational support, LogRhythm has probably been one of the best companies that I have worked with since I have been in technology.

We did not have a previous solution.

When we originally put in this solution, it was for log collection and analysis of all of our branch network devices, but it has evolved over the last seven years to encompass pretty much anything that provides some kind of security visibility.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward, but it was seven years ago. We have gotten more complex as the system's evolved.

The SIEM solutions comparison we did included QRadar, RSA, and LogRhythm.

LogRhythm stood out due to ease of deployment, cost of ownership, and ease of use.

Look at all of the factors, including total cost of ownership and your roadmap of where you are going, and compare those to the needs that you have going forward. There are a lot of solutions out there that are either way too complex to manage, don't have a good roadmap, are a secondary solution in a larger company, or are going to just be astronomically expensive when they get to a useful state.

If the solution is a unified end-to-end platform, it helps with the overall management, skill set training, and retention. It does provide some long-term benefits.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Usability
• Growth potential based off of cost.
• Architecture.

So, where could we grow the system, because a lot of systems were either too complex, too expensive, or very oriented for that particular network-based solution. I was looking for some kind of compromise in the middle.

The web interface, especially since the move to the open source storage system in v7, allows almost instant access to detailed log data from across the platform.

I work in the IT Security channel, reselling LogRhythm and associated consultancy services. The improvements from implementation of LogRhythm are to my clients' organizations.

The reporting engine is poor in comparison to other areas. It should be moved to the web interface to improve its functionality and usability.

I've been using it for over four years, since v3.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability. We haven't experienced instability.

The scalability before v7 was sometimes difficult due to the hardware performance required. Since v7 was released, the clustering and scalability options have improved significantly.

The UK-based technical support is good, and the engineering and lab teams based in the US are great.

I have experience with Splunk and ArcSight. LogRhythm's correlation capabilities (part of the AIE component) is much better than Splunk's, and the solution as a whole is generally cheaper and easier to implement than ArcSight.

The initial setup is straightforward. Follow the initial setup guide and the solution works within hours. Easy to use configuration tools are included.

I work for a reseller and consultancy firm in the IT security channel. I would recommend using a vendor or reseller to assist in the deployment, as although the basic build and set up is easy, on-boarding log sources and setting up the system to report and alarm on events requires experience and expertise.

As part of your plan for SIEM, identify what you expect the SIEM to be able to do for you / your organization. SIEM is not a silver bullet. SIEM will take a considerable amount of use by a security analyst or similar to get the best out of it. SIEM managed services offered by resellers or system integrators may be good value and should be seriously considered to ensure the best outcomes from the SIEM.

• Advanced Intelligence Engine (AIE) for threat intelligence, 9/10
• LRM for logging and compliance, 8/10

Custom rules/alerts in LRM and AIE provide insight into network for internal users as well as InfoSec. Proactive account lockout alerts for SecAdmin, alerts to DBAs on domain admin access to SQL servers, PCI and GLBA compliance alerts/reports for InfoSec and Audit.

Adding an entity (should be able to create a template and/or eliminate locations) could be much faster/streamlined. The wizard could be improved to specify OU/Groups to search for new entities.

• LRM – four years
• AIE – three years

No issues encountered.

There have been issues with the hardware which has resulted in the LRM going down a few times.

No issues encountered.

It's the best there is.

It's the best there is.

We had Tripwire, but we needed logging and SIEM, not just logging.

It was straightforward as the training provided all the tools. Also, the UI has gotten better with time.

We had a mix of an in-house team with one from LogRhythm.

Literally impossible to quantify. We haven’t had any events or deficiencies in audits, which is invaluable.

Pricing (especially considering feature sets) is best in the market, though HA/DR is tough to justify for a SMB. Even with two outages due to hardware we haven’t invested in a backup.

• QRadar
• RSA
• Tripwire

Implementation time, hygene/maintenance time, functionality, and cost make it the clear choice in a competitive market.

I use the solution for logistics and metrics. We use LogRhythm SIEM for our company and our clients. The solution is deployed on separate machines.

The log correlation is the most valuable feature.

Our clients enjoy having one dashboard to monitor their environments in real time.

The coordination and load bussing has room for improvement. 

There is room for improvement with separate running sources or better integration.

I would like to have a better way to investigate the logs by adding correlations to the dashboard.

I have been using the solution for one and a half years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support is responsive and always resolves our issues.

I previously used IBM Security QRadar and switched to LogRhythm SIEM because it is the best in the market.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes between nine to twelve hours.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution is for medium and large organizations.

Mostly, the use cases involve detecting lateral movements, malware infections, and insider threats.

We serve small, medium, and large companies, mostly in the finance sector, here in Sri Lanka.

It's very easy to create the correlation rules with LogRhythm, and there are some advanced features like SIEM and UEBA, which are also very valuable.

LogRhythm NextGen SIEM is currently based only on the Windows platform. This means that some of our customers have to purchase a Windows license elsewhere. If LogRhythm can move to a Linux platform or a proprietary platform, it would be very helpful.

I've been working with LogRhythm NextGen SIEM for around five years now.

We have deployed both to the cloud and on-premies, but we've mostly deployed on-premises.

It's very stable, unless something happens on the Windows storage side.

The performance is good, and we don't often get any complaints from our customers.

LogRhythm NextGen SIEM is horizontally and vertically scalable, so scalability is not an issue.

We have six people working with LogRhythm directly in our organization.

The technical support has been very good. They are very supportive, and I'd give them a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

When compared to other SIEM solutions, LogRhythm is very easy to use, and I like the correlation rule building.

The initial setup is a bit complex because we need to be certified first. Otherwise, we have to get their PS for the deployment process. Even if you're certified, they shadow us. There are some processes for which we need to obtain their advice.

The initial setup and configuration can take around half a day. That is, a single box deployment can take 6 hours.

If I were to rate my deployment experience, I would give it a four out of five.

LogRhythm's licensing is based on MPS. There are some add-on features like advanced UEBA, the cloud component for advanced UEBA, and SIEM.

When you implement, you need to know LogRhythm's architecture because it is quite difficult and different from that of other SIEM solutions. So, you need to know the architecture, how the processes work, and how the logs are processed.

Overall, I would rate LogRhythm at eight on a scale from one to ten.