Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

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.

We primarily use many Microsoft products, including Microsoft 365 with a focus on the security aspect. We have Defender for endpoints and Defender for servers. We also use Azure Sentinel with these.

This product has improved the way our organization functions. I won't be able to provide exact metrics as I don't directly work with metrics, however, from an improvement perspective, it is just a more streamlined deployment. 

We also use Intune as part of the MDM. If there are any agents that need to be deployed, then we can use that or we can just configure Windows from MDM directly. A lot of things can be just set up out-of-the-box and are ready to go and it sends logs right to Azure Sentinel. Therefore, while I don't have hard numbers, it's definitely made deployments easier and is much less time-intensive for our organization.

Coming from other SIEM solutions, Sentinel seems to be pretty good. 

It's pretty powerful and its performance is good.

The most powerful aspect is the whole integration with the Microsoft ecosystem. If you have the Microsoft 365 subscription, E5, then it integrates pretty seamlessly with everything you're trying to do. 

You obviously have connectors with other third-party, non-Microsoft stuff as well. They have pretty good integration with those. 

Azure Sentinel has a lot of built-in analytics rules, that help us get started in terms of triggering anomalous activity. In terms of performance, they're pretty fast. I've used QRadar and Splunk. Compared to Azure Sentinel those are pretty slow. Some searches in Sentinel are pretty instantaneous. For bigger searches, it's a very noticeable and impressive turnaround.

There are a lot of features that I don't touch just because I'm in the SOC. That said, I know customers have deployed different items that are quite useful. 

The end-user experience is good. It's just pretty seamless. When I was onboarded, it was just a simple download and then a sign-in to my account. It'll basically configure everything for you and download the necessary stuff that the company has defined - including Defender, et cetera. 

Microsoft needs to stop renaming their stuff. A lot of their products are very confusing due to the names they choose. The first time I heard of Defender I assumed it's just their antivirus, anti-malware, or a package that covers those things. However, there's Defender, Windows Defender, and then there's Defender for Endpoint, and there's also Defender for servers, et cetera. That really needs to be streamlined. As far as Defender's concerned, they want just a protective device. The differences are confusing.

Maybe it's a transitional choice, however, they've been doing a lot of migrations to a new portal in the security center or office privacy center. There's a bunch of portals where some things are repeated or duplicated. You have the same features in the portals, yet, in some cases, there are some things that you have to go to one portal and not the other, as it hasn't been migrated or the feature is just not there.

If their UI was a bit more streamlined and easy to find when I need it, then that would be a great improvement.

I've been using the solution for one year.

The stability is pretty good. However, there is one flaw. We did have an issue where Microsoft had some issues with some components that caused issues with their cloud. It might have been an authentication issue or something like that, however, it basically took down everything. We weren't able to work. While integration is good if something comes from one vendor and if that vendor goes down, then everyone is pretty unhappy.

While at my previous organization we had about 50 or 60 users, as a small company, we had customers that could have users in the thousands.

I didn't notice any scalability issues, and therefore I assume it's quite good. With respect to Azure Sentinel, I've never had an issue.

As far as I know, we're using pretty much everything that Microsoft has from a security perspective. I don't know how we can expand anymore.

I've never had to call technical support or reach out to technical support, therefore, I can't speak to how they operate.

I've previously used SentinelOne for endpoints and antimalware, et cetera, and Splunk for the SIEM.

I was specifically working in SOC; I was more responsible for the day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, I cannot speak to the deployment so much. I would not have information on the implementation strategy, for example.

We handled the deployment internally.

I was in the SOC. I don't deal directly with that pricing. They do have multiple licensing levels. It's just about knowing what you need. One good thing about Microsoft is that they do have quite a few options depending on your needs. That said, sometimes it could be hard to pick because there are so many. 

As an organization, you need to understand the company's needs. For example, if you don't have a security team to look at your alerts or to set up all the stuff, then you probably don't need some of their most expensive services. You need to purchase the subscriptions accordingly if you're able to leverage them.

They have premium and enterprise subscription levels. I don't know what the standard would be. They have E3 and E5 level licensing. I don't know off the top of my head the differences, however, E5 likely has more security features. Companies need to be aware of all the differences.

I was not part of any evaluation process. I came to the company afterward. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're on. We have another team that does the deployment and they would take care of the versioning, et cetera, however, we usually run the latest.

Microsoft makes Windows. They know their stuff. Having everything streamlined can be time-saving. It's good to have an integrated system rather than using something else. You don't need to jump through a lot of hoops or install additional software in order to get everything up and running.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use the solution as more of a security management tool. It's a combination of monitoring and security management.

The most valuable features of this solution are the analysis and the automation. The security automation and orchestrations are great. Other tools, which I can't really name right now, don't have the potential automation this has. They do to a certain extent, however, we have to go ahead and integrate other different solutions on top. On the other hand, with Azure Sentinel, we have out-of-box solutions within Azure using Azure playbooks, where we can automate, filter, and complete tasks that reduce the manual effort. That comes under security automation and orchestration. An incident or an alert can be generated, a playbook can be triggered and completed. The manual effort can be reduced via automation.

The analysis is an important feature. It gives us a deep analysis of not just the alert, but also checks on the dependent resources or to ensure dependency matching is correctly done. We can see, with any issue, how deep it's affecting us, for example.

Sentinel has features that have helped improve our security poster. It helped us in going ahead and identifying the gaps via analysis and focusing on the key elements.

Sentinel has not affected the end-user experience in any way. These are basically integrated with solutions from Microsoft or vendor solutions. Therefore, the end-user experience doesn’t change.

The solution could improve the playbooks. As of now, we are customizing those playbooks for our needs. However, if there were out-of-box solutions available, which could automate a few tasks by default, that would really be of great help.

I've used the solution for over two years.

Performance is not something that we need to worry about as this is a service from Microsoft, and the underlying infrastructure of Sentinel is fully managed by Microsoft. All we need to do is go ahead and get started with the service. Once we have enabled Sentinel, it's all about integrating it with other logs. That's it. 

Scalability is something that's pretty easy in terms of integrating it with other log workspaces. I know there is a cost involved, however, in terms of scaling, it's pretty easy.

We have huge applications with a user base of about 10,000 to 25,000 users for this application. In terms of the end-users who have resources like VDI solutions or other solutions, there are about 5,000 to 7,000. Therefore, end-users and application users are different. 

Technical support is pretty straightforward. It's a no-brainer around that. They have standard SOPs they follow. There's nothing out-of-box that they provide as a solution as such as that is something that needs to be customized. If there is any customization, support, they would not be able to help us. It's all about going ahead and following the standard SOP.

They know what they're doing. However, when it comes to Sentinel, a lot of customizations are required, which support doesn't provide any assistance around.

I've worked with various other SIM solutions. There are only a few other competitors or SIM tools, which also have AI-based analysis.

With Microsoft, the advantage is that it can correlate with a lot of other solutions as Azure itself is a cloud provider and they have a lot of environments that they go ahead and manage in terms of the SIM. They can go ahead and have correlation on alerts. The AI can go and learn from other infrastructure and can also analyze everything in a better way. That's not the same case with other vendors or other competing SIM tools.

In terms of the automation part, for other vendor SIM tools, we'll have to go ahead and integrate it with a third-party provider and basically build a custom script for automation. With Sentinel, we have out-of-box solutions for automation where Azure playbooks really come in handy.

It's a service from Microsoft, so there is nothing else that needs to be deployed. We just go ahead and enable it. It hardly takes five minutes to get started by enabling Sentinel.

Sentinel is a pretty straightforward product. In terms of the advanced configurations, security automation and orchestration, that's a bit complex. That said, getting started with Sentinel is an easy process.

I would say that there's definitely a Return of Value. I can't really comment on Return on Investment yet.

We have seen a lot of manual codes being reduced and a focus on real issues, which are really impactful rather than going ahead and analyzing or monitoring each and every alert. With our Sentinel AI-based analysis, we can go ahead and focus on the critical issues rather than monitoring each and every alert or incident.

Licenses won't work as this is a pay-as-you-go model. Companies pay in terms of the number of logs being integrated within Sentinel, and the price is quoted that way. Sentinel is pretty pricey compared to the other competitors where they have licenses. For Sentinel, it's a bit pricey when it comes to big environments.

For those who want to adopt Sentinel, I'd advise that it's a really one-stop solution for all the security needs. It can be integrated with all solutions out there. It can be one single control where you can go ahead and manage the security from. You don't have to go ahead and log into different endpoint portals, or threat-protection portals, or any third-party vendor solutions as such. 

I would rate the solution at about a nine out of ten. There is definitely a scope of improvement in terms of the feature sets or the possibilities that we could go ahead and unlock.

It's a SIEM tool. Our process right now is to put as much data as we possibly can from all of our network devices into it. We use it as a centralized logging mechanism and the feature that is nice there is that it's agnostic against the types of devices you're using. I have firewalls that can log onto it. I have Linux boxes that can log onto it. I have Windows boxes that can log to it and I can collect a variety of logs from around the organization into it. I can analyze those logs, I can get detections against those logs and use them to take a look at the security footprint of the organization.

All of the different security centers within Microsoft are alerting systems like Azure Defender ATP, the Security Centers, and Azure. All of those products, when they generate incidents and alerts, send feedback into this tool. With this product, you get a single dashboard for managing your security footprint, both from the 365 Azure environment, as well as your on-premise environment.

From a security perspective, it has clearly improved our alerting in our incident management processes. We've also been able to improve other processes for network monitoring and for trouble remediation within the environment. Our infrastructure team and some of our application team are now plugging into the data that's in that tool as they can use it to find issues within their applications rather quickly - a lot more easily than the other tools that they've got, which has been a huge boom. 

We also see that some of our help desk processes have now been informed by it. We have queries that run against the data set that's behind that same tool and they are built specifically for the help desk. For example, if a user's account has been locked out due to the fact that we have all of the data from all the different systems plugged into that tool, we can give the help desk a complete picture of authentication failures against that device so that they can quickly identify where the problem is and resolve the issue for the user.

This system has a list of data connectors and you choose what connects to it. By default, it has access to any of the core Azure data that you have access to, however, those are due to the fact that it lives in that environment. It would naturally have access to that data. Then, you choose which data sources you want to connect to it. Many of them are very easy to set up. They're within the 365 of the Azure portion and a point and click away with a lot of the third-party services. You click a button and do authentication and things connect right up. With some of the Linux, there are setups of Syslogs.

Microsoft has pretty good documentation. It doesn't take long. It's not hard to set up.

The biggest feature we've got out of it is visibility into our environment and what's going on across our estate. Being able to see, for example, anomalous RDP logins, to be able to see deviations from our standard traffic flows on the firewalls, things like that, give us insight into when we may have potential issues or a breach type situation.

The second thing you get is when you’re managing security within the Microsoft environment with Azure 365 you're on-premise you're bouncing between three or four or five, six different tools to do that. This centralizes the management of all of those. You get one pane of glass in all of those tools that give you a very easy way to see what's going on.

It also allows you to correlate between those tools. I can see if I have, for example, a low-priority incident in one tool. If I have another low-priority incident on the other tool made against the same user, that may force me to say, “Hey, maybe those things combined generate a higher level incident that I maybe need to put up for investigation.” That's the advantage of the tool.

The solution does not have specific features that have helped improve our security posture. Rather, the whole idea of making security a little bit easier while also being able to correlate data between multiple disparate systems has, as a whole, improved our security posture overall.

We’ve got process improvement that's happened across multiple different fronts within the organization and within our IT organization based on this tool being in place.

We were tracking in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 incidents a month coming out of one or two source systems within the environment. What Sentinel has given us the ability to do is move up. We're now evaluating somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 12 a day.

They're much more robust as a product. What we've been able to do is tune the alerts so that the things that are common, that are false positives that we see all the time, we've been able to filter those out and give ourselves this complete picture as things change and work but we're filtering out the standard data sets. There are things we’re going to look at and walk away from as we know they're false positives.

In terms of receiving false positives, it does take some work to tune the environment, to get it to get rid of all those false positives. It's not ridiculous work, however. I didn't find it to be the hardest problem. It took us a couple of months, doing an hour or so a day to clean them up. Going through that process offered a tremendous amount of learning about the environment. In looking at those false positives, you start to learn things about how people use the environment - things that we didn't realize before. That's extremely valuable for a security team to understand how your assets are used and what your users are doing.

The end users are barely involved in the process. They see our security team more proactively reaching out to them when they may have a problem. For example, I may have a user who has got an excessive amount of login failures against their ID and it's coming from, say, a mobile phone. We'll see that in the SIEM and what we'll do is reach out to the user proactively. Maybe they've been seeing lockout events, or, most likely, they have been seeing lockout events but they haven't quite figured out what's going on and we'll be able to proactively go to them and say, “Hey, we're seeing this, here's the device it's coming from and here's the action you should take and see if we can fix the problem.” It's given us the ability to reach out to the user. In some cases, it's an incident where we want to reach out, get more information from the user to understand whether it was them or not. In other cases, we're reaching out to them proactively and helping solve problems for them that they may or may not even be aware they're having.

Microsoft has a number of detections that they bundle with the product and there's a number of detections that are out against GitHub that are available. We have more and more of those going out every day. Microsoft periodically is releasing more updates. I love the fact that they're giving it to us. They're giving us the queries so we can plug them right into Sentinel. 

We have to do very little editing of the plugins, however, I would love to see the ability to have those queries immediately, as Microsoft updates them. They need to have a streamlined process for updating them in the tool and knowing when things are updated and knowing when there are new detections available from Microsoft.

I've used the solution for two years.

The solution has been extremely stable. We haven't had any downtime that I can recall.

The scalability is great. It's all backed by the log analytics infrastructure. All of the data that we stuff in it is stuck with the log analytics retention times and data storage capabilities which scale wonderfully.

We are using it pretty heavily. At this point, we're plumbing pieces of data from all of our systems into it. We're actively in it every day.

We're constantly adding new data sets too.

I haven't used technical support yet.

In general, the Microsoft technical support unit is okay. There are times when you get help and it's wonderful and there are times when things are not as good. It's not what I would consider the best support I've ever received. That said, they're trying. They could work on their response times.

We did not previously use a different solution. We did a little bit of data consolidation, however, nothing at this level.

We adopted Sentinel as we were looking to mature our security footprint. We started looking at tools that could help us do that, and Sentinel was very easy to dig into, primarily due to the fact that you could bite little pieces off at a time. I didn't have to consume a massive cost. I could throw a little bit of data and consume at a pretty minor cost and prove its value before I started increasing my cost.

The initial setup is very easy.

It's a point-and-click Azure environment. You just click the button and say "yep, I want this."

The solution does not need a lot of maintenance. Once you have the log analytics infrastructure configured, as in your retention times, et cetera, there's your maintenance of the systems that becomes the analytics that you're using. There's a little bit of work that needs to be done there. That was the part that needed some streamlining, however, that's about it. It's managing your rules and your playbooks, et cetera, that needs to be handled.

It's hard to measure ROI on these types of processes. I can't give hard numbers on what the return is. What I can say is that the organization is much better off having this tool in place than not having it in place. The fact is we are improving processes around the organization and the visibility. We recently had some huge vulnerabilities in Exchange that were being breached, and knowing that we have tools like this in place that have detections to help us establish whether we were having an issue or not was useful. The product helps to make us aware of issues and we're not guessing and not spending too much time digging.

We did evaluate other options. Most had a larger acquisition cost associated with them. That was obviously a big factor. The other thing that helped the decision was that we live in a Microsoft-centric environment and most of the Microsoft tools were prebuilt and correctly connected very easily.

The product is part of the Azure platform - now the Microsoft platform. It's all fully managed by Microsoft at that level. We're using it as a SAFe solution.

I'd advise potential users to take a good look at your analytical rules and feed it with data. The more data you give it, the more valuable it becomes.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Azure Sentinel is a next-generation SIEM, which is purely cloud-based. There is no on-premises deployment. We primarily use it to leverage the machine learning and AI capabilities that are embedded in the solution.

This solution has helped to improve our security posture in several ways. It includes machine learning and AI capabilities, but it's also got the functionality to ingest threat intelligence into the platform. Doing so can further enrich the events and the data that's in the backend, stored in the Sentinel database. Not only does that improve your detection capability, but also when it comes to threat hunting, you can leverage that threat intelligence and it gives you a much wider scope to be able to threat hunt against.

The fact that this is a next-generation SIEM is important because everybody's going through a digital transformation at the moment, and there is actually only one true next-generation SIEM. That is Azure Sentinel. There are no competing products at the moment.

The main benefit is that as companies migrate their systems and services into the Cloud, especially if they're migrating into Azure, they've got a native SIEM available to them immediately. With the market being predominately Microsoft, where perhaps 90% of the market uses Microsoft products, there are a lot of Microsoft houses out there and migration to Azure is common.

Legacy SIEMs used to take time in planning and looking at the specifications that were required from the hardware. It could be the case that to get an on-premises SIEM in place could take a month, whereas, with Azure Sentinel, you can have that available within two minutes. 

This product improves our end-user experience because of the enhanced ability to detect problems. What you've got is Microsoft Defender installed on all of the Windows devices, for instance, and the telemetry from Defender is sent to the Azure Defender portal. All of that analysis in Defender, including the alerts and incidents, can be forwarded into Sentinel. This improves the detection methods for the security monitoring team to be able to detect where a user has got malicious software or files or whatever it may be on their laptop, for instance.

It gives you that single pane of glass view for all of your security incidents, whether they're coming from Azure, AWS, or even GCP. You can actually expand the toolset from Azure Sentinel out to other Azure services as well.

The most valuable feature is the performance because unlike legacy SIEMs that were on-premises, it does not require as much maintenance. With an on-premises SIEM, you needed to maintain the hardware and you needed to upgrade the hardware, whereas, with Azure Sentinel, it's auto-scaling. This means that there is no need to worry about any performance impact. You can send very large volumes of data to Azure Sentinel and still have the performance that you need.

When you ingest data into Azure Sentinel, not all of the events are received. The way it works is that they're written to a native Sentinel table, but some events haven't got a native table available to them. In this case, what happens is that anything Sentinel doesn't recognize, it puts it into a custom table. This is something that you need to create. What would be good is the extension of the Azure Sentinel schema to cover a lot more technologies, so that you don't have to have custom tables.

If Azure Sentinel had the ability to ingest Azure services from different tenants into another tenant that was hosting Azure Sentinel, and not lose any metadata, that would be a huge benefit to a lot of companies.

I have been using Azure Sentinel for between 18 months and two years.

I work in the UK South region and it very rarely has not been available. I'd say its availability is probably 99.9%.

This is an extremely scalable product and you don't have to worry about that because as a SaaS, it auto-scales.

We have been 20 and 30 people who use it. I lead the delivery team, who are the engineers, and we've got some KQL programmers for developing the use cases. Then, we hand that over to the security monitoring team, who actually use the tool and monitor it. They deal with the alerts and incidents, as well as doing threat hunting and related tasks.

We use this solution extensively and our usage will only increase.

I would rate the Microsoft technical support a nine out of ten.

Support is very good but there is always room for improvement.

I have personally used ArcSight, Splunk, and LogRythm.

Comparing Azure Sentinel with these other solutions, the first thing to consider is scalability. That is something that you don't have to worry about anymore. It's excellent.

ArcSight was very good, although it had its problems the way all SIEMs do.

Azure Sentinel is very good but as it matures, I think it will probably be one of the best SIEMs that we've had available to us. There are too many pros and cons to adequately compare all of these products.

The actual standard Azure Sentinel setup is very easy. It is just a case where you create a log analytics workspace and then you enable Azure Sentinel to sit over the top. It's very easy except the challenge is actually getting the events into Azure Sentinel. That's the tricky part.

If you are talking about the actual platform itself, the initial setup is really simple. Onboarding is where the challenge is. Then, once you've onboarded, the other challenge is that you need to develop your use cases using KQL as the query language. You need to have expertise in KQL, which is a very new language.

The actual platform will take approximately 10 minutes to deploy. The onboarding, however, is something that we're still doing now. It's use case development and it's an ongoing process that never ends. You are always onboarding.

It's a little bit like setting up a configuration management platform and you're only using one push-up configuration.

We are getting to the point where we see a return on our investment. We're not 100% yet but getting there.

Azure Sentinel is very costly, or at least it appears to be very costly. The costs vary based on your ingestion and your retention charges. Although it's very costly to ingest and store data, what you've got to remember is that you don't have on-premises maintenance, you don't have hardware replacement, you don't have the software licensing that goes with that, you don't have the configuration management, and you don't have the licensing management. All of these costs that you incur with an on-premises deployment are taken away.

This is not to mention running data centers and the associated costs, including powering them and cooling them. All of those expenses are removed. So, when you consider those costs and you compare them to Azure Sentinel, you can see that it's comparative, or if not, Azure Sentinel offers better value for money.

All things considered, it really depends on how much you ingest into the solution and how much you retain.

There are no competitors. Azure Sentinel is the only next-generation SIEM.

This is a product that I highly recommend, for all of the positives that I've mentioned. The transition from an on-premises to a cloud-based SIEM is something that I've actually done, and it's not overly complicated. It doesn't have to be a complex migration, which is something that a lot of companies may be reluctant about.

Overall, this is a good product but there are parts of Sentinel that need improvement. There are some things that need to be more adaptable and more versatile.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Microsoft Office 365 E5 license right now, which means we are using Windows Defender ATP because of its cloud application security platform. We also have Exchange Online Protection. The main thing is we are replacing all of our on-prem solutions with Microsoft Office 365 and Azure solutions.

Our use case is for Azure Active Directory, Advanced Threat Protection, Windows Defender ATP, Microsoft cloud applications, Security as a Platform, Azure Firewall, and Azure Front Door. All of the Azure Front Doors logs are coming to Azure Sentinel and correlating. However, for our correlation rules that exist on the QRadar, we are still implementing these rules in Azure Sentinel because we have more than 300 different correlation rules that exist from the QRadar.  

It is always correlating to IOCs for normal attacks, using Azure-related resources. For example, if any illegitimate IP starts unusual activity on our Azure firewall, then it automatically generates an alarm for us. 

We do not get so many attacks, but if any attacks occur on our Azure Firewall site, then we are able to understand where the attack came from. Sentinel lets us know who introduced it.

It is perfect for Azure-native solutions. With just one click, integrations are complete. It also works great with some software platforms, such as Cloudflare and vScaler. 

The rule sets of Azure Sentinel work perfectly with our cloud resources. They have 200 to 300 rule sets, which is perfect for cloud resources.

They need to work with other security vendors. For example, we replaced our email gateway with Symantec, but we couldn't collect these logs with Azure Sentinel. Instead of collecting these logs with Azure Sentinel, we are collecting them on Qradar. We couldn't do it with Sentinel, which is a problem for us.

It is difficult right now because there are not so many consultants who exist for Azure Sentinel, like there are for QRadar. We are not able to find a Sentinel consultant right now.

In Turkey, we are the biggest energy generation company for the public sector. We head more than 20 power plants right now and have more than 1,000 people working in the energy sector. Two years ago, we started to work with Microsoft to shift our infrastructure and workloads to the Azure and Office 365 platforms. So, our story starts two years ago.

It is stable. We have had one or two issues, but those are related to QRadar. We are creating and pushing logs all the time to QRadar, because the Microsoft security API does not send these logs to QRadar.

One resource is enough for day-to-day maintenance of our environment, which has 1,000 clients and 200 or 300 servers. However, our servers are not integrated with Azure Sentinel, because most of our servers are still on-prem.

For Azure- and Office 365-related products, it is perfectly fine. It is scalable. However, if you want to integrate your on-prem sources with Azure Sentinel, then Azure will need to improve the solution. 

We are using Microsoft support for other Microsoft-related issues. They have been okay. They always respond to our issues on time. They know what to do. They solve our issues quickly, finding solutions for our problems.

Positive

Right now, we are using QRadar for on-prem devices. On the other hand, we have Azure Sentinel for log collecting in the cloud products. All of the Microsoft components give logs to Azure Sentinel, but all of the on-premises resources are being collected on IBM QRadar. So, Sentinel has been helping us because this is causing complications for us. While it is possible to collect logs from QRadar to Sentinel to QRadar, it is difficult to do. So, we are collecting incidents from our QRadar, then our associates monitor Azure Sentinel-related incidents from QRadar.

We have been starting to use Azure Kubernetes Service. However, our developers are afraid of shifting our production environment to the Azure Kubernetes so this whole process can continue. At the end of the day, our main goal is still completely replacing our on-premises sources with serverless architecture. 

We also started to use Azure Firewall and Azure Front Door as our web application firewall solutions. So, we are still replacing our on-prem sources. Azure Sentinel works perfectly in this case because we are using Microsoft resources. We have replaced half of our on-premises with Azure Firewalls. The other half exists in our physical data centers in Istanbul.

The initial setup is getting more complex since we are using two different solutions: One is located on-prem and the other one is Azure Sentinel. This means Azure Sentinel needs to inspect both SIEMs and correlate them. This increased our environment's complexity. So, our end goal is to have one SIEM solution and eliminate QRadar.

The initial setup process takes only one or two weeks. For the Azure-related and Office 365-related log sources, they were enabled for Azure Sentinel using drag and drop, which was easy. However, if you need to get some logs from Azure Sentinel to your on-prem or integrate your on-prem resources with Azure Sentinel, then it gets messy. 

This is still an ongoing process. We are still trying to improve our Azure Sentinel environment right now, but the initial process was so easy.

We had two three guys on our security team do the initial setup, which took one or two weeks. 

We are not seeing cost savings right now, because using Azure Sentinel tools has increased our costs.

Pricing and licensing are okay. On the E5 license, many components exist for this license, e.g., Azure Sentinel and Azure AD.

I am just paying for the log space with Azure Sentinel. It costs us about $2,000 a month. Most of the logs are free. We are only paying money for Azure Firewall logs because email logs or Azure AD logs are free to use for us.

In Turkey, Microsoft is more powerful than other vendors. There are not so many partners who exist for AWS or G Cloud. This is the reason why we have been proceeding with Microsoft.

QRadar rules are easier to create than on the Azure Sentinel. It is possible to create rules with Sentinel, but it is very difficult.

There have been no negative effects on our end users.

I would rate Azure Sentinel as seven out of 10.

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.

For users that have been observing some malicious actions with their product and getting malicious mail, Azure Sentinel allows them to create a rule, which will show who exactly among their users is exposed to phishing attacks so that they can make some mitigation on that particular account.

There are about five people using this solution in my organization.

It helps to implement connectors for Microsoft solutions, available out of the box and providing real-time integration, including Microsoft 365 Defender (formerly Microsoft Threat Protection) solutions, and Microsoft 365 sources, including Office 365, Azure AD, Microsoft Defender for Identity (formerly Azure ATP), and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and more. In addition, there are built-in connectors to the broader security ecosystem for non-Microsoft solutions

The most valuable feature is the onboarding of the workloads. You can see all that has been onboarded in your account on the dashboards.

It has been a challenge with Azure Sentinel to onboard the Syslog server from FortiGate. Azure Sentinel can work better on that shift between the Syslog server and a firewall.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It's quite stable compared to other automation SIEM and SOAR solutions.

It's very scalable.

Technical support is good. Microsoft has engineers that are readily available to help you with a challenge.

Initial setup was user friendly. I would rate it a 4 out of 5. 

It's deployed by you onboarding your deliverables on the workload. For example, if you're using Office 365 or another third-party solution, you're going to upload those onto the server and have it protected with your Azure Sentinel.

It will draw logs from those your activities, and then bring it up as a workbook, where you can see into the actions on those programs you have onboarded on the Azure Sentinel.

We use a third-party for implementation.

For ROI, I would rate it 4 out of 5.

It's costly to maintain and renew.

It depends on how you want to pay for the solution. You can pay it on an annual basis or pay as you go, but I feel it's better to just keep it running as a product on your Azure subscription. If you have a $500 subscription, it will take part of your subscription.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.