Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

On Azure, we have workloads on virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and SQL Servers. The way Sentinel works is that logs from our Kubernetes services, virtual machines, and database servers go into what is called Log Analytics on Azure. Log Analytics connects to Azure Sentinel, then all the logs move from the resources to Log Analytics down to Sentinel. Sentinel is configured to do some form of threat detection on these logs. For example, there is a firewall log connected to Log Analytics. Sentinel looks at those firewall logs for repeated IPs that are trying to either do an attack on our system or get access into our system. There is some form of machine learning and AI implemented in it to be able to tell us which particular IP address is trying to do this. 

It is mainly used for securing our platform. As the infrastructure person who works on it, I have some automated ways of seeing threats. We have seen a few possible issues that might come up. So, our customers are safe on some level when we are using Sentinel.

It improves our security posture by using automated threat detection.

Having your logs put all in one place with machine learning working on those logs is a good feature. I don't need to start thinking, "Where are my logs?" My logs are in a centralized repository, like Log Analytics, which is why you can't use Sentinel without Log Analytics. Having all those logs in one place is an advantage. 

We have not really had any major threats. We have had alarms about four times. In the end, they were false positive alarms. Over time, the machine learning feature understands that something is a false positive, then you don't see them anymore. So, it reduces the number of false positives.

The learning curve could be improved. I am still learning it. We were able to implement the basic features to get them up and running, but there are still so many things that I don't know about all its features. They have a lot of features that we have not been able to use or apply. If they could work on reducing the solution's learning curve, that would be good. While there is a training course held by Microsoft to learn more about this solution, there is a cost associated with it. 

We have been using it in our organization for six months.

It is quite stable. It is one of the most mature SIEM solutions that I know.

Currently, I am the person maintaining the solution since we are a startup. However, it probably needs a team of four people to work on it. It needs an infrastructure person to configure it, a security analyst to tell us what they want configured, and a business person to tell us what kind of security targets are needed.

Scalability is good. We are increasing usage for different use cases. For compliance reasons, we will probably expand usage in the future.

Also, there are a lot of features that we have still not tested.

I have not had to use the technical support yet.

We were starting from scratch with Azure Sentinel.

We started using it because we were trying to get PCI certified. The updated PCI requirements requested that we have a security information and event management tool. If it wasn't for PCI compliance, then we probably would not have used Sentinel.

The initial setup was complex, not straightforward. Connecting it is easy once you have an Azure resource on the cloud. We also have on-prem resources, but we have not been able to connect those. Trying to create your on-prem resource with Azure Sentinel is not straightforward. I have not seen many implementation videos that I can watch on YouTube to learn how to do it. 

It is not just Azure. Other SIEMs solutions are a bit complex when trying to connect them. 

Deployment took no more than 10 minutes. Configuring it in our workloads was the major issue, not the deployment. The configuration timeframe depends on the number of resources that you are connected to and your prior knowledge of Sentinel before starting your configuration. 

I did the deployment.

From a cost perspective, there are certain Azure resources that we don't need to additionally pay for when using Sentinel.

When we looked at other SIEM tools, they were quite expensive. Sentinel is also expensive for a startup, but we were able to configure it so there are some logs that Azure frees up, like your firewall, Office 365, or Kubernetes logs. From a cost perspective, this works well financially for us.

Sentinel is a bit expensive. If you can figure a way of configuring it to meet your needs, then you can find a way around the cost.

We looked at so many tools, like Elastic Search and IBM. We went with Sentinel because the majority of our workloads were on Azure already, so the integration was easier rather than going with something external and integrating it. 

If you are purely on Azure, Sentinel is the way to go. Also, it easily works with on-premise workloads from what I have been able to determine. When I look at connectors, it integrates with other cloud providers. I see it integrates with GCP. 

I would rate Sentinel as seven out of 10.

Security incident and event management. Threat detection and automated response.

It is a software as a service from Microsoft.

Reduced mean time to detect and resolve

Quickly able to cover a majority of mitre att&ck techniques

Free to ingest Azure logs with E5 license

Free ingestion for Azure logs (with E5 licence)

It is easy to implement (turn on) - does need a skilled analyst to develop queries and playbooks.

It has basic out-of-the-box integrations with multiple log sources.

Add more out-of-the-box connectors with other SaaS platforms/applications.

12 months

No stability issues encountered.

It is scalable as a SaaS offering, but there is a consumption cost to consider.

Cybersecurity team uses this on a daily basis.

We work together very well with local MS Team.

The initial setup was simple. All that was needed was to put agents onto our infrastructure.

Integration more complex for non-MS SaaS and OS, but do-able using middleware.

It was done in-house.

It is an evergreen service.

What is the cost of lack of visibility?  Average cost of breach = $$$

It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure

Good monthly operational cost model for the detection and response outcomes delivered, M365 logs don't count toward the limits which is a good benefit.

Others were considered however being an E5 M365 and Azure user this was by far the preferred solution.

It is fairly new but making a charge up the market anayses.  Should be considered if you have E5 licence due to native and 'free' ingestion of M365 logs.

We haven't used all of its capability yet because we haven't had the time yet to implement it all, and it appears that the MS roadmap for Sentinel is being actively invested in.

Azure Sentinel is a SIEM solution. It offers security information on an event management solution and also security orchestration automation response. It actually looks into events coming into your environment and events from a lot of sources, or whatever you might have in your network.

There are a lot of events and logs generated by all of these resources - sometimes in the thousands or millions. Azure Sentinel helps you investigate a lot of these logs faster. It uses artificial intelligence, called threat intelligence, to look into all the events that might be coming into your environment.

For example, on a daily basis, you might be receiving two million events coming from all the resources you have, including your users. If you're a very big enterprise and you have thousands of users, there are logs coming in from each of these users. You also have some resources, such as your web application, virtual machine, and a lot of your resources that span across both Azure AWS, GCP, and other solution providers like Sophos, Fortinet, Cisco, and your on-premise environment. You can get all these logs together with this.

The solution is still new, and there are a lot of new things coming out each and every day. Microsoft is trying to improve the solution constantly. In the last two weeks, there was a section of the Azure Sentinel code solutions that was integrated. It's something organizations could explore. Recently, they just included automation rules that you can use with Logic Apps to automate threat responses.

Azure Sentinel works with artificial intelligence. With AI by your side, you are able to investigate everything very fast. Within a blink of an eye, it's going to help you look into all these things. Before it can do that, however, you need to set up some form of analytics rules to help you look into all the events that might be coming into your environment.

There's also a security orchestration and automation response. Sentinel is able to identify and spot threats in our environment. We can also set up some automation rules to be able to automate when there is any form of an incident in our environment. For example, if there is a brute force attack on a user account, we can automate a response such that we can block the user account for a time while an investigation is done on that account. There are automation rules that can help to automate responses as well.

There are a lot of things you can explore as a user. You can even go and actively hunt for threats. You can be on the offensive rather than on the defensive.

It's quite different from a traditional SIEM solution whereby you need to have a couple of security analysts to be able to help you manage it. All of these traditional SIEM solutions don't have the capability to look into threats as fast. For instance, if a DDoS attack was placed on our web application hosted with a cloud solution provider and we hosted this web application on our virtual machine, if we have a DDoS attack (a denial-of-service attack), we can spot the threats very quickly. AI will also help to stop these attacks before they can do damage.

You can bring in your own machine learning algorithms to help you look into the threats community environment. If you are someone who's very fast at developing AI, you can have your own custom machine learning set up to help you look into any form of threat. It’s a very powerful tool.

Recently, I deployed Azure Sentinel for a client. I could tell immediately it was able to spot a lot of threats. Just within an hour, it was able to spot about five to ten threats. Also, at that very moment, Sentinel recorded around 500,000 events coming into the log analytics workspace. Typically, if you have something like 500,000 events coming into your environment and you have to involve the physical human efforts to be able to look into 500,000 events, it's going to be a lot of work - too much for one person.

The product has a lot of built-in features. There is a lot that it adds, and there is a lot it can do. It's the kind of solution that you can even bring in your own model.

We have a machine learning model that we train. Apart from it having some kind of already made solution, you can even create your own custom rules and custom machine learning.

Having to analyze threats every day, as a person, can be stressful. However, when you have something like Sentinel, which uses threat intelligence to be able to help you respond and remediate against threats at scale, it takes the pressure off.

It can span across your on-premise resources. If you have your own data center, you can deploy Azure Sentinel in the cloud, and you can have it monitor your data center. You can have it working as a solution to your data center.

As a user, you are able to integrate your on-premise with the data center to Azure Sentinel, in just a few clicks. It’s very simple to use. In just a few clicks, you'll be able to connect Azure Sentinel with your on-premise resources, web server, or SQL server - anything you can think of.

It can help you investigate threats coming into your laptop. You can connect Azure Sentinel to your personal computer.

It doesn't affect end users. They don't have access to Sentinel. They don't even see what is happening. They don't know what is happening.  

A lot of organizations have lost a lot of money due to a loss of virtual information. With this kind of strong security system and some strong security protocols, they are well protected.

New things are already being incorporated just to improve on the already existing solution.

There is a GitHub community for this solution. There are a lot of contributors worldwide and a lot of people building playbooks and building machine learning models. Someone can just build a machine learning model and say, "Okay, just mention in the model, 'Do this,' and it does this." There is room for improvement. However, things are improving in Sentinel with the help of this community.

I've seen playbooks where people have pushed to the GitHub repository, and I've been able to make use of one or two of these solutions on GitHub. That said, it may not be possible to eradicate all of the cyber threats.

There are webinars going on almost every week. Last week I attended a couple of webinars on Azure security. When you are doing things, you also need to be thinking about the security aspect. You have to be thinking about the security aspect of a cloud. You need to enforce a zero-trust model. You can't assume something cannot harm you, as everybody is a threat to your security.

The only issue is that sometimes you can have a false positive alert. For example, sometimes it detects something is happening, however, you're actually the one doing that thing. If someone is trying to sign into their environment and provide an incorrect password, they will try it a few times. The system will look at that event and think it's an attacker and it might be an indication of a threat. However, it's just a user that got the password wrong. I consider that a false positive alert. 

I have been using this solution for about a year now.

The stability seems to be fine for now. It's not an issue. 

I have not really used technical support. That said, on the first day when I was starting with Sentinel, I used technical support for some free advice.

In the past, I've worked as a Microsoft technical support engineer. I was very good at what I did then. The support person that I spoke with when I needed free advice on that first day was helpful. When I raised a support request to ask a few questions, the support engineer was able to do justice to all those questions and shared some things to put me in the right direction. I appreciated their helpfulness as I used to be that helpful as well.

There are a lot of solutions Microsoft has that have to do with security. However, they are not what I would describe Sentinel to be. Nothing I have used in the past has been similar to Sentinel.

For every project, you need to have your functional requirements. Once you have that in place, the initial setup depends on the number of things you want to bring into Azure Sentinel. It's a powerful tool.

You can set it to AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean, Sophos, Fortinet, Cisco - even your PC. You can set it up for everything and there is no lagging. It just takes just a few clicks to connect these things. For instance, if you need to get the logs of a user, you just go to the data connector. Once you are in the data connector, you click on Connect. Once you click on Connect, a lot from that environment just comes into Sentinel. Once it's coming into Sentinel, you can create various analytics rules.

I don't know of similar solutions or if any really exist.

The company I work with now is a Microsoft partner.

It's a very, very powerful tool that I recommend to my customers. I work as a consultant. I advise customers. I do not sell it directly.

It's something that organizations should use. I would advise people to use it. It doesn't look into only your Azure environment. It spans other cloud solution providers.

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

It is a tool for compliance for us. Every department and agency in the government is trying to get to the cloud as fast as they can. Because of that, there's a lot of SA&A work—service authorization and accreditation. In that, you're assessing the environment against a set of controls. We use Sentinel to provide us with a core piece of evidence that ensures these environments are compliant.

If you know how to do KQL (kusto query language) queries, which are how you query the log data inside Sentinel, the information is pretty rich. You can get down to a good level of detail regarding event information or notifications. It's all about how detailed and accurate your queries need to be and what log sources you are actually ingesting log information from. Sentinel is that central piece that allows you to correlate security events across your Azure environment. It's a pretty critical piece of the puzzle.

You can create both custom connectors as well as use the canned connectors that Sentinel ships with. When you start the service, those connectors will look at on-prem log sources and ingest them. So Sentinel works both in the cloud and on-prem.

There is some relatively advanced knowledge that you have to have to properly leverage Sentinel's full capabilities. I'm thinking about things like the creation of workbooks, how you do threat-hunting, and the kinds of notifications you're getting. There are a lot of pieces in motion with Sentinel to use it effectively. It takes time for people to ramp up on that and develop a familiarity or expertise with it.

Does it need to be simplified? There is that old saying: "The simpler the front end, the more complex the back end." A novice would probably not be able to effectively use Sentinel unless they were able to ramp up pretty quickly on a lot of its functionality. You need to understand the interfaces and all the components that are part and parcel of the service.

I've been involved with Sentinel since early 2018. Sentinel was only acquired by Microsoft four or five years ago.

I own a professional services company and I do a lot of government consulting and engineering work for clients. I've had good exposure to Microsoft technology, whether through their support services, or through Azure, or through a myriad of on-prem solutions as well. My partnership efforts have really been around AWS because, outside of government, AWS has a far larger footprint than Microsoft, as far as the cloud is concerned.

The stability of Sentinel is fine, as long as those who are configuring the service and using it have a good grasp of its operational nature. It takes time to develop that knowledge, but it's a pretty stable service.

Microsoft has a service called FastTrack, which basically pairs my clients up with a local Microsoft partner. That FastTrack partner is the intermediary between the client and Microsoft. If there's a problem or a support issue, that partner will typically be the client-facing entity.

Larger departments will purchase Premium Support and that provides them with a more face-to-face support experience with Microsoft personnel, specifically. Many of my clients are larger departments and, generally speaking, there is pretty good support in place for them from Microsoft.

Most clients are looking at getting E5 licensing, which opens up a whole bunch of security features and support services. But E5 licensing is pretty darn expensive. So bigger departments with bigger pockets have a very good support experience with Microsoft. The smaller departments, which may need to take advantage of services like FastTrack, assuming that the Microsoft partner has good resources available, may not have a problem at all. But I have heard some feedback that FastTrack is not a great program. Support is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.

My job as a consultant is to work with many different departments and agencies, whether it's on their architecture or assessing their environments, as they all move to the cloud. I've seen many different environments and a lot of them have some common overlaps in terms of security services. Sentinel can be expensive. When you ingest data from sources that are outside of the cloud, you're paying a fair amount for that data ingestion. When you're ingesting data sources from within the cloud, depending on what your retention periods are, it's not that expensive. For certain customers, depending on the requirements, it can be a pricey service.

Personally, I like the tool. From a SOC perspective, the visibility into government operations in particular is key, and I'm seeing a lot of advanced usage of it for some of my clients.

The federal government, here in Canada, has primarily centralized on Azure as opposed to AWS. That's because most of these departments also have SaaS environments that are M365-centric. As a result, because they are already Microsoft on the SaaS side, a lot of departments maintain that Microsoft synergy, even if, in my opinion, AWS is a better platform.

As a cloud SIEM, I would rate Sentinel at an eight out of 10. The only reason I'm not ranking it higher is that, as I said, there is some complexity with it. You have to tweak the service to get the outputs you want, by doing things like creating workbooks or rules for Sentinel, doing the threat-hunting, setting up the connectors, the log analytics, and workspaces. There's a lot of "heavy lifting" done to get Sentinel into a state where you can effectively use it. But as far as the actual outputs are concerned, if you know what you're doing with the queries, Sentinel is a great tool.

Microsoft offers training around Sentinel. In our region, among the support guys that deal with the government departments and agencies, there are some Sentinel subject matter experts available. And when more advanced knowledge is needed, Microsoft can provide what are called "support ninjas." They have more advanced knowledge and can be flown in from wherever. There are a lot of opportunities to learn how to properly use Sentinel's tools. Once you get that familiarity, Sentinel is a valuable tool for your cloud security posture.

We primarily use the solution for security operations. 

It has a lot of great features. 

The integrations on offer are very good. They have a lot of frequent updates on the integrations as well. 

We also use other Microsoft products with it, such as Active Directory and Defender for Endpoint and Identity. Everything is well integrated together. The integration itself is seamless.

Its connectors are helpful.

We get good logs from the solution.

Threat visibility is good so far. We are able to prioritize threats based on many factors.

The comprehensiveness of the solution is good. 

The alert response could be better. We'd also like a better ticketing system, which is older.

I've been using the solution for two years.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Log management is the primary purpose of Microsoft Sentinel to help us monitor the environment and detect threats. That way we can stop them at the first opportunity so that they do not impact the environment.

We take data from the data connectors. Some of the devices are default devices in Microsoft Sentinel, but we can easily add others. For some, we need to use an API or we need some extra help to add them into our security solution. At times, we need an agent.

It is a great tool for log management. It uses KQL (Kusto Query Language) which makes it very easy to find out anything in the environment by writing code.

If we have found some threat intel apart from Microsoft, we can add that to the watchlist category. We have a MITRE ATT&CK framework category and we can map the new threat method methodology into our environment through Microsoft Sentinel. There are multiple features in Microsoft Sentinel that help us add threats into the environment and detect threats easily and quickly.

There are multiple things integrated with it, like CrowdStrike, Carbon Black, Windows and Linux devices, and Oracle. We can see threats from all the environments. If an attack happens on the AD side, we can see that things are signed off. All those sources are integrated and that's a good thing.

On a weekly basis, it is saving us 10 hours, because we get results from the solution very fast.

There are many features, including watchlists and analytics. We can also use it to find out multiple things related to log management and heartbeat. All the features have different importance in those processes. 

The analytics have a lot of advantages because there are 300 default use cases for rules and we can modify them per our environment. We can create other rules as well. Analytics is a useful feature.

Another good feature is the data connectors, where we are collecting the logs from external devices and mapping them into the security solution. That feature is helpful.

The information Sentinel provides is of great use. Microsoft has its own threat intelligence team and they are mapping the threats per the IoCs. It lets us see multiple things that are happening. These things are a starting point for any type of attack and they are already in the solution's threat intelligence. Once something has been mapped, meaning whenever we get an alert from a threat actor, based on IoCs, we can analyze things and block them. There are multiple use cases and we can modify them for our environment.

We need to map things through the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Sentinel is a detection tool. Once it detects things, that is where human intervention comes in and we do an analysis. It is giving us ideas because it is generating events. We can see what events are happening, such as what packets are being analyzed, and what processes are being created. We can analyze all these aspects, including EDR cloud, because they are integrated with Microsoft Sentinel. It lets us see third-party sources. It is a very nice security monitoring tool.

The comprehensiveness of Sentinel's security protection is really great. I don't think it has SOAR capabilities, but it has UEBA.

Sentinel still has some anomalies. For example, sometimes when we write a query for log analysis with KQL, it doesn't give us the data in a proper way. We are trying to improve it and write the query in a manner that will give the desired results. We're trying to put in the conditions based on the events we want to look at, and for the log sources from which we are getting them. For that, we are working on modifications of our KQL queries. Sentinel could be improved by Microsoft because sometimes queries are not giving the desired results. This is something they should look into.

Also, the fields or columns could be improved. Sometimes, it is not giving the desired results and there is a blank field. 

In addition, while the graphical user interface of Microsoft Sentinel is good, there is some lag in the user interface.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for the last year. I have been more into the analysis part and the creation of use cases by using the analytics.

It's a stable solution.

The combination of the ease of accessibility and the free cost of the service is great. But we buy storage based on our events per second and on how many sources are integrated into the solution. We have to store the data in our environment to do analysis on past events or to check past threats.

We use Sentinel to monitor events and incidents that occur on our tenant. It covers all the servers and applications in the cloud, too. 

We can use Sentinel's playbook to block threats. It covers all of the environment, giving us great visibility.  

If Sentinel had a graphical user interface, it would be easier to use. I would also like it to be more customizable. 

We've been using Microsoft Sentinel for nearly 20 years. 

Sentinel isn't very easy to set up, especially when we're trying to connect to a server at the entry point. We run into some configuration issues when connecting. 

I rate Microsoft Sentinel eight out of 10. 

We actually use it for queuing logs and checking log systems that we have downloading from other devices to see if there are any issues. For example, if we get an alert, then we triage it and query the logs and the devices that we're looking for.

Microsoft Sentinel has greatly increased our security. We can quickly complete our investigation by using Sentinel and get to the results and escalation points.

The log query feature has been the most valuable because it's very good. You can put your data on the cloud and run queues from Sentinel. It will do it all very fast. I love that I don't have to upload it to an Excel file and then manually look for a piece of information. Sentinel is much faster and is good for big databases.

Microsoft Sentinel is able to figure out what type of attack is occurring. It will tell you whether it is a DDoS attack, whether someone's trying to scam the site, or if someone is doing a group force attack. That is, Microsoft Sentinel will actually tell you what it is based on the type of activities it's seeing on the web server. It's a smart tool.

If I'm typing queries, it knows what I'm looking for.

If I can use Sentinel offline at home and use it on a local network, it would be great. I'm not sure if I can use Sentinel offline versus the tools I have.

I just started using Microsoft Sentinel and have used it for two months.

As for availability, I haven't seen any downtime or any issues with the services yet. The stability looks like it's 99.9% and is great.

I believe that Sentinel is good at scaling up their database or services. We are a large company with big data and have thousands of users.

I have used Splunk, which has similar log type of queries. I feel that Sentinel is smarter. It is able to detect what type of attacks are occurring, unlike Splunk, which is just a query log tool.

There's Elastic ELK, which is similar to Splunk, but it isn't a smart tool like Sentinel is. 

Sentinel is at the top of the tools that I've used so far in terms of smart tools.

Pricing is pay-as-you-go with Sentinel, which is good because it all depends on the number of users and the number of devices to which you connect.

If you're using the cloud and Azure, I would really recommend Sentinel as it will keep making sure that the devices that you have in your environment are safe. Sentinel is very smart at detecting what type of attack is occurring and is actually able to detect and tell us the type of hash file. It is is able to go on the internet, look at the virus total, and see if this is a virus, scam, or phishing. I like how it's able to detect it and how we can make it learn what type of spam or email issue query it is. So, it's a very adaptive type of tool.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel at ten on a scale from one to ten.