LogRhythm SIEM Reviews

My primary use case is for log retention. I've been using it for analysis, and to troubleshoot potential issues on my network and infrastructure. To find out what I have in my network that may be causing problems.

We can sit and see what's going on, as well as to be able to see errors as they populate immediately since spending time looking at logs is ridiculous, trying to put all that in place.

We will be using the playbooks in the future as we get everything implemented and put in place. The idea is it's going to help automate a lot of what we're doing and make it more efficient, as well as be able to preempt, potentially, a lot of other errors.

The most valuable feature has just been the log reporting. Within three hours of installation of LogRhythm, we were pulling error reports that actually indicated we had a switch about to fail. It saved us about ten thousand dollars of a potential failed switch.

We are ramping up the analysis and the analytics part of the LogRhythm. We're in the process of building a lot of that. We're trying to build out as clean as possible, so what we have in place is a lot of the intrusion detection and basic PCI compliance.

For me it would be the efficiency and signing up and standing up systems, as well as a little bit cleaner on case management. That can be a little bit complicated to go through and actually be able to analyze it and compile the information that I have. At least that's what I've found so far. Those would be the two biggest things.

Stability thus far has been really good. We've had it up for about six months and I've had no failure points with it. Little bugs here and there, but that's expected as you're working through and getting everything stood up. But it's been pretty stable and pretty rock-solid.

I'm probably gonna be around seven hundred and fifty sources that I'm using right now. Somewhere in that realm. It's been robust enough to handle everything that we've been putting through it. I have about 150 to 200 more that I need to stand into it, but it's been pretty stable there.

The times I've used tech support, it's been really efficient. I've gotten responses usually within 24 hours.

The initial setup was actually me and the technician. I did 90% of the installation myself and he basically came on board and verified everything I did and gave me some pointers as I went through.

Installation was incredibly straightforward. I was able to get it set up. I said, I stood it up on my own about ninety percent of the way, without any input from anybody else and just the final pieces of staging was done with somebody else.

We needed to set up a new solution based on our company requirements that were being ruled out. We needed to step-up and add something. When I came on with the company, I wanted to add-on a SIEM solution immediately, I just got the funding and benefit because the company said we had to. There wasn't anything in place before hand. So it was just very much me saying this is what we need and this is how we need to roll it out. Through my research is where I fell back on to LogRhythm.

The most important criteria on a vendor is ease of use. Since I have a small team, it's pretty much me running everything, so I need to make sure that I am able to do it efficiently and be able to pass it off to somebody when I need to be able to hand it off to do. Next piece is what it can provide and the amount of tools they can provide to me in a very short order.

My short list for SIEM solutions would have been Splunk. Also looked at Spiceworks, SolarWinds, and a few other smaller ones out there. But basically Splunk and LogRhythm are my primary two.

My security program was non-existent when I started, so this was basically one of the first implementations that I did to step-up my security implementation. Before this there really wasn't anything to work with. So it's slowly building its maturity through LogRhythm and a couple of other sources.

I would rate this product an eight out of ten, just because there's always room for improvement and there's always room we can work on. So there's always benefits, but it's been really good with what we needed and it's been very stable for our implementation.

My advice to somebody who's looking to stand-up a SIEM solution is to do your research, look at the white papers, look at their documentation they have available on how other people have responded and how many people have stood it up on their own. Get this information and then start playing with it before you start doing implementation. Gives you a lot of foundation and makes the implementation part a lot easier.

The primary use case for our LogRhythm product is to maintain PCI compliance across all of our environment. We also use it to monitor authentication and monitor our perimeter for security threats.

The product is improving our organization, giving us a lot more visibility. It also gives a lot of our smaller different IT organizations that we partner with better understanding of their environment and also a way to kind of structure the access to that data.

We are using a lot of the analytical capabilities. One of my favorite features is the AI engine that allows us to take multiple data events, tie them together in different patterns and different baselines in order to identify more complex threats in our environment.

Our security program is still pretty immature. It's a pretty immature company, we've existed for less than a year. We're growing very rapidly, we're trying to start with the foundational policy and compliance requirements that we have and trying to tie those and map those into LogRhythm. So that's gonna be our main tool to tie all that requirements into.

The most valuable feature I get out of the LogRhythm platform is being able to take machine data and present it in a format that's easy to understand, easy to analyze, easy to pivot through to get answers to the questions that I had that I'm investigating, whether they're security related or operationally related.

At this time, we're not using any of the playbooks in LogRhythm because it's currently not available in our version. However we are very excited about that feature coming out in the near future and we're definitely looking at using playbooks to do phishing, unauthorized access and our other use cases we're gonna identify in the future to make sure that our analysts are responding to the threats in similar ways and that the correct actions are being taken.

We have around 75 different types of log sources coming into the environment right now. The log source support is good, there's always room for improvement. One of the areas that LogRhythm's kind of pushing really hard right now is to integrate more cloud solutions, so your Office 365, your Azure, your AWS, making sure that those SaaS and other cloud platforms are getting the data you need into that platform. It's getting better but there's definitely still work to be done.

We currently have 3000 messages per second in our environment but we still have a number of different resorts to onboard in our tenant. So we're definitely looking to push above, probably the 7, 8000 range.

The biggest one in my mind that I want to implement is some of the AD controls. Reacting to a threat where an account password needs to be changed, or an account should be disabled, to react to that threat. Moving into first a phase where an analyst is gonna see that, review that action and then once we get comfortable, make that an automated action.

The big two big areas for improvement is TTL. Making sure that the data that we're collecting is available for a longer amount of time. So I know with some of the new releases coming in LogRhythm, that's gonna be improved which I'm really excited about. The other one that's kind of getting back to the fundamentals of why LogRhythm was chosen as a solution, being able to take your machine data, understand it, index it, classify it and give you that visibility.

I'd like to see them focus on that because there's so many different security tools being spun up these days that being able to keep up with that and having more partnerships with security vendors to make sure that security tools have new releases in their environment, they're able to keep up with those logging changes.

Stability in the LogRhythm product has been very solid for me. I'm a very experienced user, I've used the product for about five to six years now. I have a lot of administration and analyst experience with the tool. The other great feature is that LogRhythm support is really excellent, they're easy to get a hold of, they're very talented and if they aren't able to answer your question right away, they have a very good internal escalation process to get an answer to resolve your issue.

Scalability is pretty solid with LogRhythm, I know that's one of their biggest issues, is if you have a huge enterprise environment, there might be scalability issues, but for a small, medium, pretty large sized businesses, I think LogRhythm's gonna be a great tool to match that environment.

I wasn't part of the evaluation at this location, I actually took the job because I knew they had selected LogRhythm and I had the experience there. I know they did some SIEM tools comparisons with Rapid7, Splunk and QRadar which was the incumbent when evaluating LogRhythm as a replacement SIEM solution.

I was involved in the setup at our organization replacing QRadar, our previous SIEM. It was a very straightforward implementation, the TMF team at LogRhythm helped make sure we got everything deployed, gave us some examples of how to onboard the log sources and then kind of gave us a playbook to move forward and gather the rest of the data from our environment.

I'd give LogRhythm a nine out of ten because of the ease of use, especially as an analyst, being able to twist and turn all that data, drill down on it, really get an easy understand of what's going on in the environment.

From the administration side as well, it's a lot easier to use than other products that I've had and it has all the built in knowledge, whereas with some tools you dump all your data into it and it's up to you to do that classification and indexing and understanding of that data, where the value that LogRhythm's gonna provide for you is that prebuilt classification for all the data sources in your environment.

If I had a friend that was looking to implement a new SIEM solution, I would have them understand what log sources they're trying to bring into their SIEM solution and make sure that the one they chose supported those log sources. On top of that, understand your use cases that you're gonna use this SIEM for, have those ready in hand and be ready to start billing those out as you get that data in the environment.

Our primary use case for LogRhythm is using the log ingestion and analytic features.

LogRhythm improves our organization by giving us insight into user activity and potential security threats.

Our mean time to detect and respond has really improved with LogRhythm. We've got more people, more visibility, and on our team, looking at security incidents, and we're able to act on things more quickly.

I see room for improvement in the log ingestion. Customizing a log source is very technical, probably more technical than it has to be.

Our security program's maturity is, I would say, fairly advanced. LogRhythm uses a maturity model of crawl, walk, run, and I think we're just about to move from walking to running.

The most valuable features, for me as user, is probably the AI engine rules and dashboards, which give us a lot more insight into our security.

The playbooks functionality will be valuable down the road, but right now my team is too small to really take advantage of it.

Our messages per second right now is probably about 4,500.

I see room for improvement in the log ingestion. Customizing a log source is very technical, probably more technical than it has to be.

Stability of the products is mostly pretty good. Like anything else, there are incidents that we have to respond to. Some very small amount of downtime, some system administration that goes along with any implementation like that.

Scalability, for us, has been very good. We've had two appliances in five years. We've been able to upgrade without too much of a problem.

We have to use tech support pretty regularly and it is sometimes not very good. We've had issues where we can't get immediate responses that we need, and cases are open for far too long.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I inherited it from a previous admin.

We probably had close to 2,000 log sources at this time. Setup for them is variable. Some are straightforward, supported out of the box, some take a little more technical expertise.

If I had to rate LogRhythm on a scale of one to 10, I would probably give it a solid eight.

My primary use case is threat detection.

LogRhythm SIEM has improved our organization by allowing us to bring in very widely diverse log sources, correlate them, and very easily create rules around alerting. We also use the case management features of the product to easily integrate both products into a single pane of glass for our analysts so they don't have to use two different products for alarming, as well as case management.

I would say we have seen a decrease in mean time to detect and respond over our previous SIEM. Basically, I think it can be attributed to the integrated case management. We are able to create cases, get eyes on those cases much more quickly than we were before.

The most valuable features are probably the AI Engine is very valuable, as well as Netmon.

We plan on using the playbooks, and the value I think we'll get is automating the or scripting their responses that our analysts use, rather than using our existing playbooks, which are somewhat incomplete. I think the playbooks will be a lot of out of the box pre-scripted playbooks that should be extremely helpful to us, as well as integrating some of the smart response capabilities into the playbooks.

Definitely expansion on log parsing. There are some obscure log sources that we don't currently have parses for. We needed a new solution when our previous solution, the licensing expired on it. Hardware was out of life, as well as it wasn't scaling very well. Didn't provide a lot of the features that we needed.

Stability has been pretty good. We've had some road blocks, or some, I'm sorry, some road bumps, in terms of A&E stability, as well as with some log parsing with some of our larger log sources.

Scalability seems great. We actually did an expansion recently, and so far, it seems to be scaled well.

Tech support has been extremely helpful. They are generally very quick to respond. If the first level is not able to resolve the issue, they generally escalate pretty quickly, gather logs. They seem to be hands-on. They generally will take over your session, actually do a WebEx, take over your WebEx section and actually do most of the driving, to make things run a little smoother, a little more, than, you know, directing you to where to find logs in Linux or things that can be kind of obscure. They generally will do everything for you, short of making, you know, impactful changes.

As far as for supportive log sources, we find it to be very good for very common log sources, Palo Alto firewalls, you know, Windows log sources. There have been a few security tools that we've found that weren't supported out of the box, so we've had to either use professional services, try to create those parsing rules ourselves, or opened cases with LogRhythm support to have those created.

The reason we switched to LogRhythm, one of the core reasons, was the case management, and, as well as the Netmon. We liked having the integrated Netmon, and the case management, again, gave us a single pane of glass for our analysts to view the data, import the relevant data into the cases without having to use separate systems.

LogRhythm is definitely influencing. Since investing in LogRhythm, we've seen a lot more visibility into our product, into LogRhythm. We have a lot of non-security operations teams that are using the SIEM tools, just to view logs, Windows logs, troubleshooting issues, troubleshooting security events, so we're getting a lot of by-in from other teams into the program, which has accelerated the maturity of our program.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was fairly complex. We did use a professional services to do most of the work, but, yeah, it was somewhat complex compared to some other solutions I've used in the past. However, with the capabilities of the product, it wasn't surprising, because, you know, with the feature-rich product, you're gonna have some complexity with it, as well.

I would probably rate it as an eight or a nine, currently, mainly, probably due to the complexity of importing log sources that aren't natively supported.

My primary use case for this solution is to basically monitor the network to make sure that we don't have unknown users or individuals that should not be in our network. So we use it basically to aggregate our logs within our system and to watch it for possible threats.

It has improved the organization a great deal. Now we're able to see what activity that's actually being used, or what activity is actually being found in the network. So we're monitoring our firewall systems and different areas like that. So it's a great help to us because we're able to see whatever that's out there that would not have been seen previously because it aggregates all the logs together and it flags us according to the alerts that are being triggered at that time.

Right now we have just grown to eight security analysts in our group, but all have different roles. Now there's two individuals that's mainly responsible for SIEM and that's myself and my coworker and he's been cross trained. He just recently went through the LogRhythm University training which is great. So right now we do have about four analysts in this system but the main number is two.

Currently we haven't seen a measurable mean time to detect because we're not using that at this time. But after this session, we will probably go ahead and start using that for metrics.

Our security improvement or maturity level definitely has increased. We started out with three security analysts and it has grown to eight. LogRhythm has improved it because we're able to see much more data. We're able to see much more of what's out there, what type of threats we're encountering, different things like that. So it's been a great improvement.

The most valuable features for me is just to be able know who's in the network, being able to drill down on the alarms, to being able to look at the different rules or whatever that's been impacted within the network for anyone being in the network.

At this point we don't use the full spectrum of analytics. We're still fairly new and trying to tweak our system to get the information that we want out of it. So we're still at the beginning stage.

We are not using the playbooks, we're still on a version that doesn't support them. But yes, after going through the session today, the preview session, we definitely want to use the playbooks.

For me, room for improvement is the upgrade process. Whenever we have to do an upgrade to the next version, we're a little nervous and apprehensive about that.

Stability, it's very stable within our organization. What we're at is 7.25 right now, we do wanna go up to 7.4. we're a little nervous about that at the point because it's so new but eventually we will make that jump.

Scalability is very good for us. We are able to use it in different areas within the organization. Different groups and stuff like that.

I have used tech support in the past and it is great. I definitely recommend tech support, we do go to the LogRhythm Community first but with me, when I was first introduced to the SIEM LogRhythm, I was new to the environment and so I leaned on tech support to help me understand the environment, and as I was making those calls with them I was like "Okay, teach me like I'm a two year old. Walk me through this so I can do this on my own."

On a scale of one to ten, I rate LogRhythm as a nine because it is a wonderful tool that definitely helps with identifying different threats within the organization. I would definitely recommend this tool. It's a very, I would say beasty application, you always will be on top of things when it comes to LogRhythm because it's always changing, but that's a good thing because the environment, the threat environment is always changing. So I'd definitely highly recommend it.

The target I would give to an individual that's looking for the best SIEM tools to put in their environment would be definitely look at one that's growing, that's not stagnant and LogRhythm is definitely one of those too that look for ways to improve it, user friendly and the different things that's out there in the environment to be able to catch the types of the bad guys or the different threats. They always try to stay on top of things. So I definitely recommend LogRhythm in that case.

Our primary use case for using the LogRhythm SIEM product is reviewing alarms, events, and managing our cases for forensic investigation.

The LogRhythm platform has helped my organization by being able to have 24 analyses on logs and events from all the various systems that feed into the LogRhythm platform. It gives our analysts the capability to assess rapidly and be able to respond to events in almost real time.

We currently have over 500 log sources inside the platform. Managing those is relatively easy. The main feature that we do take advantage of with our log sources is setting up silent log source alarms, so that way we can identify if a log source is not feeding logs as it should be.

Currently, our messages processing rate is around 2,000 messages per second.

Our mean time to detect threats has been going down, which is a good thing. Lately, our main focus has been on handling and reducing the mean time to resolve phishing incidences within the company.

Our security maturity program has been overall positively influenced, mainly in the HIPAA healthcare spectrum, by meeting third-party auditing requirements and having those tested, too, and confirmed by our third-party auditors.

The capabilities that we mostly take advantage of in the LogRhythm platform is the wide array of log formats that we can bring in from various systems, and the capability to create custom role processing capabilities for log sources that may not already be a part of the platform.

Currently, LogRhythm, the playbook's functionality is not in my version, so we're looking forward to utilizing playbooks. That's part of the main draw for me to come here, was to learn more about the playbook functionality and how we can incorporate that into our platform. But right now, the functionality is not there.

The largest room for improvement would be inside the web platform, being able to have a longer log live time. Currently, we manage about five days of live log data inside the web console. Ideally, that should be 30 days-plus.

Stability is very good, so stability for the LogRhythm platform has been very positive. We do have pain points around upgrades, but we have been able to engage with support and get rapid response to how those issues resolved.

Scalability for the LogRhythm platform for my company has been very positive. We've been able to ingest logs from very high-traffic log sources without any type of issue, congestion, so very positive.

I was not initially involved in the setup. I came in to manage the SIEM solution three years after its deployment.

I would rate LogRhythm a nine out of 10, primarily because of the current functionality within the system and the direction that the company is going. I feel it's appropriately aligned with security today and being prepared for tomorrow.

The primary use case is to provide security analytics for the SOC and empowering all of our SOC operations for day to day business.

LogRhythm's improved our organization by allowing all sorts of members of the organization to be able to access this data in a much easier way than they have been able to in the past. So instead of more obscure SIEMs, or things out there like Splunk, where you might have to learn an entire language for how to interact with your data, it's all very visual based.

I'd say that's a big difference right there, but also just the ease of use of getting it into and getting it indexed by the SIEM. The other piece of it that I think is pretty huge for us is just how fast it executes on that data. So in previous SIEMs, I've seen where we've had to take up to three or four minutes for a simple query. I have that back in seconds. That's definitely a huge performance improvement for us.

I would say that the maturity of the organization that I'm with now is it kind of straddles a couple of different zones. On the one hand, we have a security team, and members on the security team that have been doing what they're doing for a very long time, and a couple of them even doing that a very long time at that organization. However, the security landscape has changed just dramatically in the last few years. And that definitely sounds like totally hackneyed, but it's true, especially when it comes to cloud integrations, AI, data science, all of this stuff has changed the game so much. So I would say that we're very much behind the curve in terms of we're a team of six or seven people trying to keep up with the industry. And we really look to these next gen tools like LogRhythm's SIEM to bring us there.

New functionality like playbooks are exactly how we're going to raise the maturity level of our team through automation and playbooks. That's absolutely the direct path that we see getting us to a more mature place. We've got the experience on our team, but we don't have 100 people working for us either. And so, we're really kind of looking for LogRhythm to fill that gap there.

Specific to LogRhythm SIEM, I would say the dash boarding capability is pretty spectacular, so having the advanced UI available to just instantly drag and drop widgets into the browser and get top 'X' whatever field you're looking for just in real time is incredibly powerful. It's very fast. That's one of the things that I love about it is that we can get trending information at a moment's notice for just about anything that we have packed into the SIEM. So it's incredibly quick to get very easy high level information on any field we're looking for in the SIEM, and then be able to drill down into that through the log feature at the bottom.

We are using their AI engine, we're using the actual web console itself. We're using lists in some of their automated list for generating content of blacklisted hosts or known malware sites and things like that.

Most of those features are turned on at this point in time. We're actually pretty new, I think that says a lot to the amount of use we've been able to get out of it. We've only installed it maybe three or four months ago. And the amount of data that we have going into the SIEM at this point in time, which amounts to nearly 20,000 events per second, plus all the different features we have turned on is pretty impressive. So I think that that speaks a lot to the ease of getting it stood up and running, which is something that I've seen be way more difficult in other SIEMs in the past.

We will be using the playbooks immediately, on day one, as soon as they're available. I've attended some of the playbook sessions here already and we're looking at which ones are already out there for use and how we're going to integrate them into our environment. So, playbooks are going to be a huge point of focus for the next year for sure for us.

I think LogRhythm definitely has some opportunity to grow in its documentation space, particularly like if I just use Splunk as an example. Splunk has amazing documentation. It's great. It's almost second to none in terms of the quality of its documentation. I would almost use that as an industry standard and say, "If you can do this ..."

There's no reason someone can't copy that pretty much exactly and say, "Let's do the same thing, but for LogRhythm." That way, when I have a new engineer or even an analyst come on board, I can point them to the documentation and say, "Get to work." That's not really possible today. We definitely need a little bit more hand holding when it comes to administrative features that aren't nearly as obvious when we're using the thick client or something like that. 

We've got a lot of work to do in terms of training people up there. But the documentation, I would say, is probably the biggest, one of the biggest things that I've come across to say, "This definitely needs some improvement here in terms of its clarity and availability."

Even just finding the right documentation that you're looking for can be tricky sometimes. My best bet is usually just to do a search of the forums and hope that I can find something and get lucky on the first try, as opposed to having every part of the system thoroughly documented out in an almost open source like way, in the way that open source projects have often gone about documenting and Wiki-izing, if you will, their content. I would love to see LogRhythm do something like that.

I would say that stability for us, overall, considering we're a brand new customer of LogRhythm, it's been very stable. We've had a couple of things come up, and I'd say those are more than anything just a "Oh, we didn't know that this should be tuned to a particular way or that the database wouldn't auto grow on its own". And there've been a couple of things like that, but there's been no major issue of, "Oh no, we threw too much data at it and the whole thing just died."

That's one thing that I'm pretty grateful for is that the whole thing hasn't come crumbling down upon us. And that can happen with a SIEM, particularly when you've got multiple data streams feeding in. As one piece of the puzzle breaks down, there's a downstream effect of killing every other part of the SIEM further on down the line. That hasn't happened yet. So, we haven't had any cascading failures or anything like that. It's actually been really stable so far and we've enjoyed that.

Scalability has been good. We have general guidelines on how far we can take it with with the hardware that we've purchased and installed. And we can sustain even above a little bit, we've found, a little bit above what we're even scoped out for our hardware. So, we've been able to really expand the scope of logging to the endpoint level, so we can take logs from every end point in the company and throw that at LogRhythm for the installation that we've set up. And it can keep up with that and we haven't had any issues of it just starting to drop stuff or anything like that. And so I would say it's definitely a top tier vendor in terms of being able to handle scale in my experience.

I've personally used a bunch of them and we've also, in just our QA process, we've interviewed several before settling on LogRhythm. Splunk would be the big one. And I think in that case the, the licensing mechanism kind of disqualified them. And it's a good system with a large community around it. But the ease of use for the end users wasn't quite there as it was with LogRhythm. Plus the licensing scheme felt a little bit out of date and cumbersome in comparison to LogRhythm.

I have only needed support a couple of times so far, we've opened a few cases with tech support. I can't sing too many praises of tech support so far. And they definitely have a tendency to want to try to lead you towards professional services, which isn't completely unusual in these cases, especially for new users.

I would say that the information is out there somewhere, but they don't have the best support site. They just don't. A lot of the information is just kind of in a forum somewhere buried somewhere in that forum probably, or in somebody's head. The documentation isn't quite as greater or spectacular as Splunk for example. But LogRhythm Community does have a passionate community. And if you find the right person, chances are you're going to be able to get your question answered.

I was hired just after they did the initial setup. But I immediately, because I'd missed that, set up a dev environment for us using all of the same components, so the differentiated data indexers and the platform manager and all that. So I set up a whole version of that on my own in virtual environment after the fact. And I did it by myself without too much help. So, that really did go pretty smoothly. I only needed to contact support once for that whole process. So it wasn't too bad.

A couple of others that we've considered, IBM QRadar that's actually one that we had in house previously, and we'd had stability issues with that platform. And so it was one that we were kind of looking at the market to see what we could replace that with. And I would say again that the ease of use of LogRhythm, for new analysts as well as management people, and the licensing scheme were two things that made it pretty attractive for us

We do have quite a few log sources. Currently we've got around 30 or 40 completely different kinds of log sources and roughly six or 7,000 different devices currently reporting in. We set it around 20,000 events per second sustained for our new infrastructure. That's kind of a lot for us. We've gotten that up relatively quick, up and running. So the stability for that has been great. And as far as parsing goes, we have generally stuck to platforms that we know would parse out of the box. And now, we're just starting to get our feet wet with, okay, what are some platforms where maybe it doesn't have out of the box support for the parsing messages" Or we might want to write our own parser or something along those lines.

We know that it supports things like common event format. And so generally, I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to get everything in there that we want. I wish we had that information. Unfortunately we don't have mean time to detect or any of those soft things. Prior to LogRhythm, it wasn't even an option for us to get those sorts of things. Now with playbooks coming out and some of the new tagging features and case management features that are going to be in seven point four for LogRhythm, that's our first target is to start actually putting numbers around that. And we just haven't had LogRhythm in house long enough to stand up a program around getting those metrics.

As far as the rest of 2018 and 2019 goes, that's one of our number one goals is to get those metrics in place. And certainly, the case management features and seven four are what we're looking to get us there. 

I can tell you for sure that that saves at least an hour of analyst time every single time that occurs and that might happen three or four times a day even for just potentially unwanted software and things like that. So we know that we're saving a lot of time. I have no idea how much exactly we're saving just yet, but I know it's going to be a lot more in the future because we're really starting to get sped up with smart response options and automation, especially when it comes to playbooks. So we'll see a lot of that in the future and that's another one of the big reasons that we've looked to LogRhythm to say, "Okay, we know that we still have yet to see some of what we've invested in here, but we're confident that we're seeing it already."

I give it a nine out of ten right now. The only only minus being for documentation, that's it. But I think that they can get there. So I have faith in them. The advice I would give to somebody looking for a new SIEM or to invest in SIEM technology would be obviously they have to keep in mind the price. We always have to work within that constraint. As a technology person, I hate to think from that perspective, but it's our reality and so things like Splunk really work against that in terms of being able to have to pay for ingestion of data. LogRhythm is great in that area. And that's one of the reasons why we've definitely looked towards LogRhythm for that. A couple of the other things that I look at for them is automation capabilities and API's. 

Everything these days has to have an API. So how good is your SIEMs API? And LogRhythm definitely seems committed to continuing developing their API out, particularly with playbooks and automation. And so, generally, I'm going to say that's where you should be looking for SIEM right now is automation. Most of the SIEM software solutions can do 99 percent of what's out there. Can It parse a message? Can it store it? Can it index it? All of those things, they all generally check that box somewhere along the lines. But how closes is that ecosystem? How available is the API? How good is the support gonna be and things like that, that not necessarily every SIEM does equally? I would say that's where they need to look to find their value.

Our primary use case for bringing on a SIEM in general was the need to correlate our data across dozens of different solutions that were spitting out logs. We got to a level of complexity where it became mandatory.

This solution has been almost like a transformative change in how we detect and then respond to incidence. Quite honestly before, we didn't know what was going on and we couldn't detect anything other than  a random virus that sent an email from our AV solution. For us, it really took off when I was a little onboard the Office 365 logs and then we were able to start monitoring locations of login and we actually detected multiple accounts that were logging in from countries that had no business being there.

That led to some investigatory work and actually led to some password resets. It was really positive and we continued to detect that type of activity and enhanced the rules, changing here and there. That was a big one for us because we had never even looked at the Office 365 audits because we didn't have a way to do it. LogRhythm brought that in and within a day or two, we're like, "These three accounts are popped and we need to get these guys off the network now." It was amazing.

We're currently processing about 3,500 messages per second. We have experienced a massive decrease in our mean-time to detect. It's actually hard to improve on nothing. It's hard to get worse than no detection, so we went from being able to like, "Oh, a virus happened," to, "This user went to a weird website. We got that from your DNS logs and then 10 minutes later, their antivirus fired on something." And now we know that we can go over there and triage that system quickly as opposed to maybe not getting the virus log for a day. The other thing is detecting when we think breaches are happening, which is something we just didn't have the capability to do before we brought in LogRhythm.

When it comes to our security maturity, I was the first person at my company to do security, and the company had been around for 30 years. I bet that started from scratch, and I started where we were bleeding which was our endpoint detection for malware and ransomware. And then be added on more layers. We added on like IPS and we added on a lot of perimeter type stuff.

While LogRhythm was probably the last component that I have onboarded in like first two-year time frame, it's now the center of the program. Everything feeds into it and that's where I go for just about everything. There are a few solutions that I still have to go out to those solutions to look at stuff but even like from a purchasing perspective, even my IT operations team, my IT applications team, my company asks vendors two questions right out of the gate. Do you have a cloud offering, and do you natively support LogRhythm? And those two are heavy, heavy hitters when it comes to whether or not we're going to put you in the running to buy your software.

The most valuable features in LogRhythm, honestly for me, the single most valuable feature is the web console. That is actually the primary reason we chose LogRhythm over some of these other solutions because I was able to leverage web console usage across multiple layers of IT, and I didn't have to sit back and teach everybody complex SQL queries. Just that point-and-click interface, it's nice and bouncy and it's beautiful to look at has really driven the adoption of the use of the software. Secondarily, I think another really great feature is the LogRhythm community. And the content that that provides has enhanced our adoption over the years.

We don't use the full-spectrum analytics capabilities of the SIEM mainly because I'm a lone wolf in running it. It's just a matter of timing and focus. We do a lot of analytics around user behavior although we're not a cloud AI customer yet. We're doing a lot of what they call the AI engine to do user behavioral modeling and we're starting to onboard some network behavior modeling analytics as well.

It honestly comes back to me for log sources. The time to get support to onboard a log source runs about 18 months, and that's just too long. Like I said, I'm a lone wolf running the system. I don't have a lot of free time to write ReGex and build out my own policies, and I tend to write bad ones that are very inefficient. It is tough when I get a critical source or when a part of the business went out and just bought something, never consulted IT, and now we have to audit it and it doesn't support LogRhythm or it doesn't even like have a function that gets us the logs. We have a cloud solution where we can't even get the logs out of it. It's crazy bad. But when we do get those logs in, it would be really helpful if we could get a supported log source policy from LogRhythm in a shorter amount of time

I have had a lot of trouble with stability, perfect timing. We onboarded way too many log sources on the get-go and overran our appliance's capabilities. And I've spent probably the last 12 months working to stabilize the damage that I caused the system when I did that. It's been a rough year for stability. Even just before I came to this conference, I think I got it finally stabilized. I'm cautiously optimistic that I can take a deep breath and start focusing more on the logs instead of the appliance itself.

We've scaled the solution twice. I haven't done a whole lot of like large-scale build-outs. We're still a single appliance. What we did scale was we scaled the memory and we scaled our NPS license and then I added in some external storage. And all of those things went great. We're to a point now where they're recommending that we buy what they call a data indexer separately. My leadership is more interested in moving it to the cloud than buying more hardware, so I'm working to get a POC started up to get it up into Azure and see if we can scale horizontally in Azure as opposed to buying more hardware. I might have a lot more to say about scalability next year.

Tech support LogRhythm is one of my favorites. Of all the solutions I deal with, those guys and girls are insanely good at their jobs. And so when we bought the solution, my leadership did not buy professional services to help me deploy it. I did it blind, basically, with the user guide. And I think in the first year, the number was about 75 tickets that I opened in the first year. And they still answer me when I call them, so that's great. And they're very willing to stick with you as long as you need.

The only challenge I do have with their tech support is the time shift because their tech support is all based here and I'm on the East Coast. They want to meet it like 5:00 p.m. Denver time, it's like, "Oh, no. I'm at 7 o'clock, dude. I'm done for the day." One little annoyance but it's well worth it in the end to get the support that we get.

The support for log sources is fantastic. It is challenging because you're always going to come up stuff that you need that is not recognized, and writing my own policies has been very challenging. As far as log sources, the last time I checked on Friday, I think we were at 2,900 log sources. It's a lot for this little appliance.

When we went shopping for a SIEM, I had come from a Splunk shop. I was very familiar with Splunk the interface. I like the software, so Splunk was number one on my list. And who was number two? SolarWinds had a SIEM solution that we had played with a little bit at my company, so they were also in the running. And then actually one of my partners talked to me about LogRhythm because I'd never even heard with LogRhythm before and so we did a demo.

And ultimately, it was two big factors. From a Splunk perspective, cost. Cost to build it out and then cost of licensing, it's just unattainable for us. And number two, LogRhythm's WebUI and the speed with which you can run searches in it was hands down my primary reason for going with LogRhythm.

I'm going to give them an eight. It's a fantastic solution and I totally support what they're doing and I like where it's going. But there is room for improvement, and there are some pain points and honestly I've had a rough year. That kind of influences it too. It's been a lot of time on the phone with support this year.

I will tell them what I wished I have known the day I started onboarding logs, and that is when you're looking for a SIEM, put all the features and everything to the side. Go talk to your business people and find out what's important to them because that's how you're going to know what to bring on initially. And once you know those things that are critical and the things you have to do, then you can evaluate the different solutions to see who has the native support because we didn't do that.

We bought it simply because it was awesome and fast and less expensive than Splunk. And then I onboarded 1,500 log sources in a week and brought the system to its knees. And I'm even now today still cleaning up and removing log sources that just bring no value. It's just noise.

Take the time and plan that out before you even go talk to vendors. Figure out what logs are out there, which ones are meaningful to you and the business and then find the solution that fits best with that.