Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

Our two primary uses for the solution are incident management and threat hunting. We use Sentinel and other Microsoft security products for security investigations, threat, team, and incident management purposes. The tool is deployed across multiple departments and locations, with around 8,000 total end users.

We use multiple Microsoft security products, the full Defender suite including Defender for Cloud, Cloud Apps, and Identity, all integrated with Sentinel. 

Integrating multiple solutions is straightforward; as they are all Microsoft products, it's easy for Sentinel to ingest the logs and data connectors. The process is very simple, and we can configure log sources or data connectors in Sentinel in a couple of clicks.  

As a next-generation AI-powered SIEM and SOAR tool, Sentinel provides an all-encompassing cyber defense at the cloud scale. The solution's machine learning capabilities make threat hunting and identification rapid across the entire cloud environment.

The solution provides excellent visibility into threats; it's integrated with Microsoft's threat intelligence platform, which forwards information to Sentinel. We have robust threat detection 24/7.   

Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise, an essential function that lets us focus on investigating and resolving high-priority incidents first. When the most significant threats are dealt with, we can move on to the medium and low-priority issues.  

The multiple Microsoft solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment; they work very well together, and we trust these products to investigate matters further. 

The Microsoft solutions provide comprehensive threat protection across our entire organization.  

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem, which is crucial to our security operation. We require the data not just from Microsoft products but also from different firewalls and other security products, including firewall proxies, web proxies, logs, etc. We can quickly integrate multiple data sources in just a few steps. 

The solution's threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps. Sentinel's intelligent and fast threat detection allows us to respond rapidly to critical and high-priority incidents by leveraging built-in automation and orchestration tools. 

Using Sentinel gives us time savings of 30-40%.  

The solution also decreased our time to detect and respond by 30-40%. 

Sentinel is a SIEM and SOAR tool, so its automation is the best feature; we can reduce human interaction, freeing up our human resources.

The built-in AI and machine learning are excellent; they reduce the number of false positives by around 90%.

The centralized threat collection is a valuable feature. 

The solution is cloud-native, so it's faster and easier to deploy as there is no hardware or software to implement.

The product is flexible enough to deploy in the cloud and on-prem, which is an advantage over other SIEM tools.

Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place, which is crucial because time management is essential during a security investigation. Having all the relevant data in one place enables security analysts to investigate and resolve quickly.   

The solution's built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence capabilities provide comprehensive protection. The SOAR capability is excellent and better than other products on the market, reducing our dependence on security analysts, and IT takes less investigation time. We can leverage the UEBA to focus on risky users and entities first during an investigation, which is an integral part of the process. 

Compared to standalone SIEM and SOAR products, Sentinel reduces infrastructure costs by around 50% due to the cloud and reduced maintenance relative to legacy solutions. Sentinel is also approximately 70% faster to deploy than legacy solutions with the same rules. 

The solution helped to automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts. This reduced our dependency on security analysts and their workloads because the solution reduced false positive alerts by about 90%. This freed up our analysts and is the most significant benefit of automation.  

The product helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and gave us one XDR dashboard, which provides us with greater visibility and a reduced time to investigate and resolve.  

The data connectors for third-party tools could be improved, as some aren't available in Sentinel. They need to be available in the data connector panel. 

The solution could have more favorable pricing; the cost is relatively high compared to other SIEM tools, which can be prohibitive for smaller organizations. 

We've been using the solution for over a year. 

Sentinel is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is good and responsive, but in some cases, it took a long time to resolve our issue.

We previously used IBM QRadar as a SIEM tool and switched because Sentinel is cloud-native and has more comprehensive capabilities, including SOAR capabilities. Sentinel fits our clients' requirements better, as many of them utilize the MS Defender security suite, which gives them a specific grant for free data ingestion. The solution also provides greater visibility.

I wasn't involved in the solution's initial setup, and in terms of maintenance, it's very lightweight; updates are Microsoft's responsibility, so we don't need to do anything.

Sentinel is expensive relative to other products of the class, so it often isn't affordable for small-scale businesses. However, considering the solution has more extensive capabilities than others, the price is not so high. Pricing is based on GBs of ingested daily data, either by a pay-as-you-go or subscription model.

The product saved us money, but actual savings depend on the project size, as the pricing is per GB of ingested data. Our savings are approximately 40-50%. 

We evaluated various solutions, including LogRhythm SIEM, Splunk, and Sumo Logic Security. We chose Sentinel because it's more advanced, cost-efficient has greater capabilities and fulfills our requirements better than the other products.

I rate Sentinel nine out of ten. 

To a security colleague who says it's better to go with a best-of-breed strategy over a single vendor's security suite, it's better to go with multiple vendors. This provides better visibility and avoids a single point of failure.

My advice to others considering the product is it depends on the project requirements. For larger organizations, I recommend Sentinel, as it's very advanced. However, for smaller-scale industries, Splunk and IBM QRadar are good options. For primarily cloud-based organizations with the majority of users in the cloud, then Sentinel is again an excellent choice.

We use it for our security operations center. We have private and multi-cloud environments.

It enables data integration within our hybrid, multi-cloud environment, and it makes this data integration very easy for our security operations center.

Sentinel has helped improve our visibility into user and network behavior. It helps in identifying risky users, creating a watch list for specific users and their activities, which is very important.

It has also been saving us time. It's a complete cloud-based solution, so there is no time wasted on setting up servers, infrastructure, et cetera.

It also reduces the work involved in event investigation because it puts together detection logic through detection rules. That helps in automating incident identification.

The features that stand out are the 

• detection engine
• integration with multiple data sources.

And while it does not give the tools to detect and investigate, it provides
the ability to integrate multiple tools together on the platform. This is very important for us. Sentinel provides very good integration with Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate. That is a very handy feature.

It provides a good user interface for an operations analyst and makes it easy for an ops analyst to do incident analysis and investigations.

One key area that can be improved is by building a strong integration with our XDR platform.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for over a year. I'm a product manager, and I do not do hands-on deployment, but I do product definition, platform selection, and product feature definition.

It is a stable product.

The technical support team is good. They have account managers aligned with our customers. It is a good, scalable model.

Neutral

We started with Sentinel only. We have had some experience with Splunk, but Sentinel is more mature, flexible, and scalable.

The install or setup time is very small. Without Sentinel, it would usually take 15 to 30 days to set up a SIEM solution in an environment. With Sentinel, it is very easy. A completely production-grade environment can be set up within a week.

Setting up Sentinel is straightforward. Because it is a cloud-based solution, there is no infrastructure deployment involved. Much of the implementation can be done in automated ways. We leverage that automation for implementation. It doesn't require much staff. It is very automated.

It requires maintenance, and that is part of what we cover by providing our customers with managed services.

Our team does the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

The licensing cost is available on the Microsoft Azure calculator. It depends on the size of the deployment, the size of the data ingestion. It is consumption-based pricing. It is an affordable solution.

Our organization is an SSP, a service provider for manual threat detection and hunting. We use Microsoft Sentinel for threat detection. We have a few clients using Microsoft Sentinel, and we provide SOAR services to them.

Having the ability to respond holistically from one place with Microsoft Sentinel is very useful. We don't need to log into different security consoles. It is less hectic and reduces our time to respond and resolve the issue.

The solution has helped improve our organization by detecting and hunting threats. The solution also correlates alerts from other solutions, such as Defender, Office 365, and other Endpoint solutions. Microsoft Sentinel has automated responses that help us reduce the number of analysts required for example, from ten to six because most of the tasks are done automatically.

The solution's automation of routine tasks helps us automate the finding of high-value alerts by reducing the manual work from 30 minutes down to three. 90 percent of the work is done by Sentinel which runs the playbook and provides us with all the data required to make a decision quickly.

The solution has helped eliminate the need to use multiple dashboards by incorporating SIEM plus SOAR into one convenient location. We don't need to log into each of the solutions individually. We can directly correlate the alerts and incidents from our Sentinel console. Sentinel reduces our time because we don't need to check multiple tabs for multiple solutions. All the information required to investigate and make a decision can be found in the solution's panel view.

We don't have any out-of-the-box threat intelligence from Microsoft, but with the integration of some open-source solutions and premium sources, Microsoft Sentinel helps us take proactive steps before threats enter our environment.

We have custom rules created to check IPs or domains for potential threats. Whenever an IP or domain is visible in our logs, the solution will automatically correlate with the threat intelligence feed and create an alert. If we skip the correlation portion and an alert has been created for a malicious IP or a malicious domain, the solution can check the reputation in different reputation sources such as a virus portal, or threat recorded future, and it will auto-populate the information for the analyst which helps us prepare for potential threats.

The solution has definitely saved us 90 percent of our time. Microsoft Sentinel reduces our time to detect, respond, and resolve incidents. Most of the incidents are detected automatically and we just need the data to make a decision. We don't have to go look for different clues or reputations over the internet or use other solutions.

Microsoft Sentinel has saved us from incurring costs related to a breach by protecting us.

The solution detects incidents and alerts us in real-time based on custom rules that we create or the out-of-the-box rules that are part of Sentinel. The information that auto-populates when we run the playbook reduces our response time in most cases because all the relevant data required for our investigation is provided on the incident details page.

Logic apps, playbooks, and dashboarding are all valuable features of this solution. 

Microsoft Sentinel prioritizes threats across our organization because the solution allows us to correlate using multiple solutions including Defender.

Integrating Microsoft solutions with each other is very easy. The integrated solutions work together to deliver coordinated detection and response in our environment.

The solution enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. We can write AQL queries and also create rules to detect the alerts. In the event that we don't have rules, we can proactively hunt through KQL queries.

The workbook based on KQL queries, which is the query language is very extensive compared to other solutions such as QRada and Splunk.

The solution requires no in-house maintenance because it is all handled by Microsoft. We only need to monitor the updates.

The playbook development environment is not as rich as it should be. There are multiple occasions when we face problems while creating the playbook. 

The cost is not straightforward and would benefit from a single charge model. 

The UI is not impressive, we need to train our analysts to conduct the investigation. Unlike IBM QRadar which has a different UI for searching, there is no UI where we can conduct searches with Sentinel. With Sentinel, all our searches require a KQL query, and if our analysts are not familiar with KQL queries, we have to train them. 

The data ingestion can use improvement. There are a few scenarios where we have experienced a delay in data ingestion.

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

Sentinel is quite stable because it's a SaaS-based offering, so we don't have to worry about our stability. The solution is available 99.99999 percent of the time. The only time we have an issue is if there is a problem with the Azure portal. Microsoft handles the stability well.

We can scale the solution as much as we want, and with a few clicks, we can increase or decrease capacity.

We currently have four engineering teams that handle the deployments and use case development as well as a SOAR team that consists of ten technical people who all use the solution.

Microsoft Sentinel support is really good. They respond quickly to our requests and they try to resolve our issues as soon as possible. From my experience, Microsoft has the best support.

Positive

For SIEM, we previously used IBM QRadar and Splunk Enterprise Security. For SOAR, We have used IBM Resilient, Palo Alto XSOAR, and D3 SOAR, which is a new tool. D3 SOAR is a startup based in Canada and we used it for POC, but we have not used it in production. Sentinel is a SaaS-based solution. There is less administration required and with a few clicks, we can deploy Microsoft Sentinel, whereas, with other solutions, we have to build everything from scratch. There are other SaaS-based solutions but Sentinel is one of the most popular and because a lot of organizations are already using Microsoft and Azure products, Sentinel is the best compatible solution.

The initial setup for Sentinel is straightforward and the best I have worked with to date. We are able to deploy within half an hour and we only require one person to complete the implementation. 

The implementation was completed in-house.

From a cost perspective, there are some additional charges in addition to the licensing. Initially, the cost appears expensive, but over time, the solution justifies that cost. The cost is not straightforward, but instead really complex. We are charged for data ingestion as well as data leaving the environment. We are also charged for running playbooks and for logic apps. Compared with SIEM solutions, whose cost is simply based on EPS or data storage, Microsoft Sentinel's cost is complex. Over time we can predict what the cost of using the solution will be. Other standalone SOAR tools have fixed licensing and their cost is simple. We don't need to pay for each command we run or each integration we have or each automation we do. With Microsoft Sentinel, there is a cost associated with each of the connectors that we use in our playbook. Every time we run that playbook, there will be charges, but the charges are minimal unless we run the playbook repeatedly, then over time the cost shoots up.

We occasionally test POC and we are still evaluating other solutions.

I give the solution nine out of ten.

My impression of the visibility into threats that Microsoft Sentinel provides is that the solution is not perfect, but since it is part of Microsoft Workspace, Microsoft already provides so many services to clients, and Microsoft Sentinel is one of them. If we are already using Azure and other services from Microsoft, then Sentinel is easy to implement and use compared to other similar solutions. If I was not using Microsoft Solutions, then I can use other solutions, such as IBM QRadar or Splunk, and when it comes to XSOAR, Palo Alto XSOAR is a much better solution.

We use multiple solutions from Microsoft within our organization including Defender and Endpoint. We have integrated Endpoint with Defender and Microsoft Security Center to receive alerts.

Microsoft Sentinel has out-of-the-box support for up to 90 percent of solutions where we can find a connector to ingest the data directly, but for the remaining 10 percent, we need to write custom tables.

The ability to ingest data is the backbone of our security. If we don't ingest the data, we won't be able to perform anything at all in SIEM. SIEM is based on data ingestion. Once the data is ingested, then on top of that data, we can monitor and detect or hunt, whatever we want. We can create a reporting dashboard, but the data needs to be there.

Microsoft Sentinel's UEBA is quite capable. For SIEM, Splunk and IBM QRadar are slightly better than Sentinel, but Sentinel is catching up fast. The solution has only been in the market for two or three years and has already captured a large share with increasing popularity. For SOAR, Palo Alto XSOAR is much better than Microsoft Sentinel because Sentinel is a SIEM plus SOAR solution whereas Palo Alto XSOAR is a SOAR-focused solution only. What Microsoft Sentinel provides is one solution for SIEM plus SOAR, where we can detect and also respond in one place.

Currently, we have one environment based in a US data center, but we have the ability for multiple solutions in multiple regions within Azure, and we can integrate them using a master and slave configuration that will allow us to run all the queries from the master console.

Using a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor suite is fine if we have a SIEM solution, a SOAR solution, or an Endpoint detection solution until a time when they are no longer compatible with each other and we can not integrate them. If we can not integrate the solutions it becomes difficult for our teams to log into and monitor multiple solutions separately.

I definitely recommend Microsoft Sentinel, but I suggest basing the decision on proof of concept by gathering the requirements, security solutions, and additional log source devices an organization has before using the solution. There are multiple solutions available that may be more suitable in some cases.

We use Sentinel to manage data based on data connectors and log sources. We have to build the use cases. I create policies and periodically fine-tune them. There are a lot of cloud applications for that, like Microsoft Active Directory, Office 365, and Microsoft Identity Protection.

For instance, when a privileged account's password is changed frequently, it should trigger an alert and will create an incident. Another use case is the ability to summarize all DB activity.

We also use Defender for Endpoint, and I have experience with Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Identity Protection.

The cloud-native solution covers an entire IT organization. It could be located in China, Russia, Pakistan, or India. It doesn't matter.

This solution is mostly deployed on the cloud. The solution is used across our entire organization. There are more than 1,000 end users.

The solution increases security. It also reduces complexity because we can monitor everything from a single solution. We can manage a firewall, servers,  connected DOS, etc. Even if it's a third-party application, we can manage it.

The solution helps automate routine tasks and find high-value alerts. For example, we can create analytical rules and build the use cases so that any suspicious incoming traffic is blocked.

The solution has eliminated the need to look at multiple dashboards. Everything is accessible from a single dashboard.

Our team is currently being trained on how to use threat intelligence to help prepare and take proactive steps for potential threats before they hit. If there are any zero-day vulnerabilities, Microsoft will update the platform, so that all of the organizations that use Sentinel will have coverage. 

I like the KQL. It simplifies getting data from the table and seeing the logs. All you need to know are the table names. It's quite easy to build use cases by using KQL.

Sentinel provides visibility into threats. It provides anonymous IP and URL detection in our environment. We can easily get the logs.

It helps prioritize threats in the organization. We can build analytic rules. Microsoft Sentinel provides a lot of alternative use cases, but we have to prepare them.

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem because it's a cloud-native SIEM. We can integrate everything into Sentinel. In any organization, log management is an important aspect. For auditing and compliance, an organization has to validate the logs.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. There's an incident option that allows us to view information about a specific instance, an anomaly, and activities that have happened in the last 24 hours. It will show the specific incident, the host, the time, and what the user is accessing. It shows everything in a single pane, which is very useful.

There's a lot of technical documentation for automation. It's easy to understand. You can build it according to your needs. You can automate playbooks. You can integrate a number of digital platforms into your environment.

The performance could be improved. If I create 15 to 20 lines for a single-use case in KQL, sometimes it takes more time to execute. If I create use cases within a certain timeline, the result will show in .01 seconds. A complex query takes more time to get results.

I have used this solution for two years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't experienced any outages so far. There is a failover function. If a region has an outage, there is backup support, which is advertised in the software on SIEM.

The solution is scalable.

I would rate technical support as nine out of ten. 

We previously used Splunk. We switched because of the cost.

I wasn't involved in deployment. Maintenance isn't needed often.

Sentinel saves us time. KQL is fast. The response of the query output is quick compared to other products. We can create a lot of automation in that particular environment, which reduces the workload for a lot of false positives. 

Logic App allows us to create mini-automations. XOR plays a huge role in Microsoft Sentinel. It automates soft operations workloads.

The solution saves us time by 75%. By using automation instead of working on a specific incident for 30 minutes, it takes a maximum of five minutes. 

This solution saves us money. Microsoft offers discounts if you purchase GB per day.

Sentinel decreases the time it takes to detect and the time it takes to respond by 70%.

In a protected cloud, Microsoft is quite manageable. It allows you to pay as you go. If you're replacing cloud resources, you'll eventually have thousands of virtual machines, but you'll be able to pay for only 500 virtual machines.

The pay-as-you-go model is beneficial to customers.

My organization tried an open-source platform, but it didn't give a proper output, so we compiled some other solutions. We prefer Microsoft products, so we went with Sentinel. 

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

To a security colleague who says it's better to go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single-vendor security suite, I would say that if you have a single-bundle security solution, you can cover all of your security needs in an IT organization. It's beneficial for support, makes data visibility clearer, and improves security. I would recommend a single-bundle security solution as a better way to go for deployment.

My client has a huge environment in Azure. They have around 30,000 resources spread across the globe. They also have a huge presence on-premises itself. So, for on-prem, they have a SIEM solution already in place. But for the cloud, they didn't have anything. So, basically, no visibility into any kind of attacks or any kind of logging or monitoring in the cloud. We could not scale up our on-prem counterpart for it due to various reasons of cost and how much resources it would take. Microsoft Sentinel seemed like a pretty good solution since it's cloud-native, it's hosted by Azure itself. So we went ahead with the solution.

Microsoft Sentinel has given us great visibility into our cloud workloads and cloud environment as a whole. And not just that, but even, in fact, with the MCAS and email-security solutions also. We get a lot of visibility into what kind of emails we are getting and how many of them are malicious versus legitimate. From a visibility and compatibility perspective, it's really a nice product to have as a SIEM solution for your cloud environment. In fact, we have integrated this with our AWS, as well. At this point in time, it's just one account, but we plan on expanding more. So all the logs from our AWS environment flow to the solution. Microsoft Sentinel performs the analytics and gives us the alert for that.

The comprehensiveness and coverage of multiple different solutions, on-prem solutions, and cloud solutions, are the two aspects, Microsoft Sentinel really has an edge over other products.

Visibility into threats is above average. Since I also went through some slides of Microsoft and they receive a lot of telemetry because of their Windows platform, because of Azure. What I saw in those slides is that they benefit from this telemetry and create a rich threat-intelligence, kind of a backend service, which supports Sentinel and literally enriches the detection capabilities for Microsoft Sentinel.

Correlation is something that helps us instead of looking at every single alert. So, if we get a phishing email and five users click on it, instead of going through five individual detections, it correlates all of that and presents it in one single incident correlating all these five events. So, in terms of that correlation, it is pretty good. In terms of responding to these alerts, I know there is some automation. There were multiple calls with Microsoft when we were setting up this solution. They showed us how we can do this and they gave us a demo, which was really nice to see the automation. But from the response point of view, we haven't enabled any automation as of now because we are still in the nascent stages of setting this up. We have done multiple integrations, but, still, there's a lot of ground to cover. So, the response is something we would look at last. I think the response side also has a lot of automation and correlation, but we haven't worked on that as of now.

The time to detect and time to respond has been reduced considerably. Detect, because the analytics that is done by Microsoft Sentinel is near real-time, and response is based on us. So, when we see the alert, we respond to it, and we wait on the teams to receive an answer. Previously, the SOC guys were doing this. It was really slow and, sometimes, proceeded at a snail's pace. With Microsoft Sentinel, at least one part of it got addressed, which was running these queries with the SIEM and getting to analyze multiple events to go onto a specific security incident. That time has been saved by Sentinel. I would say 20 to 30% of the time to respond and detect has been saved.

In terms of Microsoft Sentinel, I think a large part of it has been automated by Azure itself. From a customer point of view, all you have to do is just run some queries and get the data. In terms of connections or the connectors for multiple data sources or multiple log sources, it's very easy to just set it up, be it Azure-native services or something customized, like some connection with the on-prem servers or things like that, or even connections with the other cloud platforms, such as AWS. The connectors are really one thing I appreciate. I think it sets Microsoft Sentinel apart from other solutions. Apart from that, the analytics that it performs and the built-in queries that it has, are valuable. A lot of automation on part of Microsoft Sentinel is really commendable.

Microsoft Sentinel definitely helps prioritize threats across our enterprise. I think Microsoft Defender for Cloud would also come in when we talk about this because Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel work in conjunction with each other. We can set it up that way so any alerts that are found in Microsoft Defender for Cloud are forwarded to Microsoft Sentinel. Then, the prioritization is set based on the standard criticality, high, medium, low and informational. So, from our sense, what we can do is, we can simply target the high incidents.

Another thing is that it very efficiently correlates all the events. So if multiple emails have been sent from a single email ID, which is supposed to be a phishing email, Sentinel identifies it, flags all the emails, and it can very beautifully track all of it from their console such as who clicked it, when did they click it, which ID was it, who received it. So, in terms of all that, correlation also helps us prioritize those events.

Prioritization is important. If we have a bunch of alerts and we started investigating some alerts that are not of that much value, some alerts would get ignored if the prioritization was not set correctly. So if it's a phishing attempt and, in another area, we find that there's a brute-force attack going on, we would first want to address the phishing attempt since, in my opinion, in my experience, the probability of getting a link clicked is high rather than a password getting compromised by a brute-force attack. So, in those terms, prioritization really helps us.

Microsoft Sentinel definitely enables us to ingest data from the entire ecosystem. Microsoft Sentinel has around 122 or 123 connectors. Although we haven't set up the solution for our whole ecosystem, be it on-prem, Azure Cloud, AWS cloud, or any other cloud for that matter, looking at the connectors, I feel like there's a whole lot of support, and possibly, we can cover our whole ecosystem, with some exceptions for some solutions. Exceptions are always there. From a coverage point of view, I think it's pretty good. We can cover at least 80 to 90% of our ecosystem. Obviously, it comes at a cost. So at that point in time, it could get very costly. That is one downside.

From the SOC point of view, everything depends on how good the data you are ingesting is and the amount of data you are ingesting. So, the more data we have, the better insights we would have into what activities are going on in our cloud environment, and in our on-prem environment. So it's very critical to have the right data ingested into things like Microsoft Sentinel. Otherwise, you could have a great solution but an ineffective solution in place if you don't have data ingestion configured in the right manner.

Investigations are something really remarkable. We can drill down right to the raw logs by running different queries and getting those on the console itself.

The number one area of improvement for Sentinel would be the cost. 
At this point in time, I feel like, simply because we are a huge organization spread across the globe, we can afford it, but small and medium businesses cannot afford it. Maybe it's not meant for them? I don't know; that's a debatable topic. But even for organizations like ours, a problem that we face and for some of my other friends that I have talked to, it's a great solution, but we cannot deploy it everywhere because, frankly, we overrun our budget.

One thing that would really help or benefit would be the alerts that get thrown up. I've seen multiple alerts. For example, external file activity or external user activity. I open those alerts and there is absolutely no information in them. If there's external user activity, then who is that user, what is something that they are doing, how did Microsoft Sentinel detect this, or what were the analytics based on this outcome that it was a malicious activity or there was something anomalous or something like that? There is some particular type of alerts where a bit more data enrichment would help us.

The alerts get thrown out, and this is something we generally see with any kind of SIEM or any kind of other detection-based solution. For example, in an EDR solution or a vulnerability solution, the typical problem is alert fatigue. We get so many alerts that we start to see a large amount of them, and then we don't know where to start. Although here, we have the prioritization already shared by Microsoft Sentinel, so we have a starting point, but then it never ends. Perhaps tweaking and reducing the number of alerts that get thrown out, and enriching those alerts with more data would help. A lot of these alerts are just very normal things. They are not security incidents in their truest form, but it does take up our time just viewing those alerts. And sometimes, it also lacks a lot of information, like who did what, at exactly what time, and why did Microsoft Sentinel think that it was a malicious incident. That is one question I see a lot of times myself and don't get an answer for, like, "Okay, I get this a lot, but why do you think it's a security event?" So, enriching those alerts with more data might be a good area of improvement for Microsoft Sentinel.

The number of dashboards is something we complained a lot to Microsoft about, "You have great solutions, but you have a different console or a different dashboard for everything. So, as a person who is responding to these alerts, it really becomes overwhelming juggling between multiple different screens, dashboards, tabs, and windows." They have acknowledged this and they have mentioned to us that a lot of other customers made the same complaint and they're working on integrating these dashboards. So, for example, if you are using Microsoft Defender for Cloud, in one click you can reach a Microsoft Sentinel page wherein it would show you the raw logs. It sometimes gets overwhelming viewing the same alert on multiple different dashboards. In one sense, if I had to give an example, you might see an alert on Microsoft Sentinel, but it won't have much data to it. To drill down to the very specific raw data, you would have to go to some other console. You would have to go to the source of that event or detection, be it Microsoft Defender for Cloud, MDI, or MCAS. So in those terms, we have to sometimes juggle through all these dashboards and tabs of multiple solutions.

I have been using the solution for eight months.

I think the solution is pretty stable. I didn't see any aberrations or anomalous behavior of Microsoft Sentinel. And that's the benefit of having a managed service. Downtime is quite less. Especially from providers like Microsoft. With Microsoft Sentinel, we didn't feel like there were any hiccups in the operations or any sort of problems we faced with the solution, as of now.

This is something good about having a managed product, you don't have to worry about scaling. And this is exactly the problem we felt with our existing on-prem solution LogRhythm: the scaling was not possible because of the cost included. With Microsoft Sentinel, you have to pay extra, but you don't have to worry about setting up more servers, configuring them, patching them, doing all the maintenance, and doing additional administrative work. The solution is pretty scalable.

Based on our interactions at the time of setup, after that, we didn't really require that much assistance from Microsoft. So, at the time of setup, they really helped us with insights and with decisions that we had to take based on our organization type and how we work. We have teams distributed globally across multiple time zones, and similarly, we have data and operations distributed all over the world. So this becomes a challenge when dealing with anything related to IT. So, Microsoft did really help us with setting it up. From a technical-assistance point of view, at the initial stages, it was a good experience.

Neutral

Our on-prem solution is LogRhythm and the reason we decided to add Microsoft Sentinel was scaling up of LogRhythm would have been a huge cost to us. Because right now, on-prem LogRhythm is running on multiple VMs, so their cost structure is very different. If you run the same setup on Azure, it's just an exorbitant amount of money. So that was one factor that we chose not to scale up LogRhythm to our cloud environment and looked for some other solution. The other reason we went for Microsoft Sentinel was that it is cloud-native. Since it's a managed service from Microsoft and from Azure themselves, not just time but also a lot of responsibility on our end gets transferred to the cloud provider of just setting up and maintaining that infrastructure, updating and patching all those systems, and doing that maintenance work. That overhead gets taken off our heads. That's why we were looking for a cloud-native solution. And hence, in our comparison, in our multiple rounds of discussion with internal stakeholders within the cybersecurity team, Microsoft Sentinel seemed like a perfect fit, so we went ahead with the solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We didn't face many problems or complexity. We had everything running in a couple of weeks. The deployment was just me and one other person from the security team. She had a lot more experience with Microsoft 365 and the MCAS side of things. And I was more from an Azure infrastructure point of view, Defender for Cloud and the like.

We started the deployment from scratch and we brought on Microsoft for assistance. We already have a huge presence in Azure, so we already had a Microsoft contact. We reached out to them. We mentioned that we want Microsoft Sentinel on board. We got in touch with their own cloud security and Microsoft Sentinel experts. They advised us, but I can say all the setup and all the operational side of things we did because if Microsoft did it then that would be handled by the consulting arm of Microsoft and that would be a full-fledged project, which would have its own cost. So Microsoft had to play a role as an advisor. We used to get about four IT calls to set it up. Whatever Microsoft recommended us to do, we went ahead with that.

First of all, we enabled everything that was free of cost. When you onboard Microsoft Sentinel, you pay some fee for the solution itself, and with that, you get some free connectors. So Azure AD sign-in and audit logs are one thing, Azure activity logs, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud are another. All these integrations don't cost anything extra over and above. So we started off with integrating all of that, and later on, slowly and steadily, we scaled up our integrations. There's still a lot of ground to cover. We aren't there yet with what we envisioned initially.

At this time I don't have an answer about a return on investment but it is something we have been contemplating inside our own team and we have been thinking of since we talked about how good a solution Microsoft Sentinel is. We cannot enable it across the organization, so we are thinking about creating a story of how much value, not in just terms of money but how much value in terms of security has the solution brought for us, and communicating this idea to other stakeholders in other teams and probably to the leadership, and maybe getting a little more budget for this project.

Microsoft Sentinel is definitely costly. If we factor in the cost of other services, MCAS, MDI, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, it gets seriously costly, to the extent that we cannot enable it across the organization. It simply overshoots the budget by a huge margin. When talking about the Microsoft Sentinel piece itself, let's say we have set up custom integrations and it does not cost us that much, it is definitely costly. If we talk about log retention, then it is even more costly. Comparing it to the other solutions, in fact, when we started off with the SIEM solutions for the cloud, we did do a comparison between which one would be the best: the classic Splunk, like we used in our on-prem, or maybe Microsoft Defender for Cloud. So, for our use case, Splunk was also a bit costly but less than Microsoft Sentinel. We went ahead with Microsoft Sentinel being a cloud-native platform on our side, the effort would be a lot less. Splunk would require to be set up from scratch. From a cost perspective, Microsoft Sentinel is quite costly.

We compared Splunk with Microsoft Sentinel.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

We have used and tested additional Microsoft solutions. At one point in time, we used Microsoft Defender for Identity, MDI solution, but it was for three to four months only. We discontinued it because it was more of an experiment and the guys from Microsoft gave us the license for that product for a limited time for testing. We were short on budgets, hence we could not leverage or we could not go ahead and purchase it. Another product was MCAS, Microsoft Cloud App Security. Primarily, we use Microsoft Sentinel. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is also used, but it has not been enabled on a lot of resources because it has a cost implication. So cost is a huge factor that we have to think about every time we do anything in security related to all these four products. 

Wherever it is possible, wherever we have identified some critical resources and we had the budget, we enabled Microsoft Defender for Cloud and then integrated it with Microsoft Sentinel. Integration is super easy for anything which is an Azure service. It's mostly about doing a couple of clicks or maybe running a couple of commands. For Azure-native services, it's very easy, be it integrating the Azure AD logs or Microsoft Defender for Cloud or things like that. If I remember correctly, I integrated Microsoft Defender simply by flipping a toggle on the console. So it was easy to integrate Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

The coordination among all these tools is really marvelous. Although my role is not exactly that of an incident responder or from a SOC point of view, if I was a SOC person or an incident responder, it really takes the load off of my work to look around and to correlate that, and open four, five tabs and just juggling through them and trying to make a story. Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, and MCAS, all of them do it for us. So you just have a single pane of glass. Although these are four different products and you sometimes do have to juggle around, but not to that extent. Many times, it happens that your job gets done with just a single pane of glass.

I think the coverage is comprehensive from a protection point of view for all these four, or five products from Microsoft.

The bi-directional sync capabilities of Microsoft Defender is an option that we get at the time of integrating the solution. This is exactly what I mean by using the toggle button to integrate Microsoft Defender for Cloud with Microsoft Sentinel.

I would say the sync capabilities are both critical and a nice add-on to have. Even if it's not critical and there was no sync between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel, we would still be doing our job of looking at two multiple portals. But since Microsoft does it for us, then it's really good to have. It takes the load off our shoulders and we could do other tasks and possibly look at more alerts instead of juggling through these portals between Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, MCAS, and MDI.

Investigations are something really remarkable. We can drill down right to the raw logs by running different queries and getting those on the console itself.
In terms of response, I do not have that much experience in automating the responses or letting Azure handle it, because we feel like the automation here might go wrong and we might have to face another incident caused by some sort of misconfiguration. So, at this point in time, we respond manually to the alerts. We don't use many of the response capabilities of Microsoft Sentinel. I did have a look at what I think, these are called playbooks, which are based on LogicHub. They do seem very promising, but we haven't used those functionalities as of now.

If I had to rank the three capabilities in terms of comprehensiveness, at the top would be SOAR. I would put threat intelligence and UEBA second. I haven't used both of these capabilities that much. We haven't enabled UEBA in our environment. Threat intelligence is the default one. Again, this is something we haven't enabled on a custom basis or something add-on; it's the default one that Microsoft provides.

In regards to proactiveness, I don't feel like there is anything proactive about the solution. It's mostly reactive. The nature of the whole SIEM is reactive: you analyze the logs, you get some alerts, and then you react to those alerts. I think in terms of prediction, I don't see it like that. But in terms of using threat intelligence, I definitely think that it really adds value when, for example, there's something legitimate in the email, there's something malicious. But when it comes to the unknown, when you cannot determine if it's good or bad, it adds value there, its threat intelligence, by simply stating that. Just a couple of days back, we had an alert that said that "URL was clicked," and it wasn't able to determine the nature of the URL: Was it malicious? Was it bad? So it gave us a low or an informational alert. Threat intelligence helps us in those situations.

The solution has saved us time in two aspects. A tremendous amount of time is saved in terms of integration. Nowadays every organization across any sector you talk about has a lot of IT solutions and security solutions in place. You talk about network devices, VPNs, security devices, these collaboration services, et cetera, all of these generate a lot of data integrating and investing all of that data into SIEM is really critical for the SIEM to function properly. That is something that Microsoft Sentinel does quite well. And I see that they are always working on not just creating those integrations but also making them very easy to configure, from a customer point of view. So, those integrations are one thing that I really like about Microsoft Sentinel. The second is the correlation of these alerts across multiple of these integrations. So, integrations and correlations are two aspects that I really like about the solution. I would say the solution saved me around 50% of the time. Simply, it's less of running the queries on a standard SIEM solution and more of clicking on the dashboards. So the typing time gets taken off and the loading time of getting the results back, and doing this over and over again with a typical SIEM solution, that has been absorbed, by the solution. Microsoft Sentinel does it for us. Our time has been saved in that sense.

I would say that, since the solution saved us time, and time is money, in that sense, the solution has saved us money. On the other, hand the solution's cost is such that it might have balanced out. So, I can say it saved us money in one sense, but I don't think it's because of the solution, it's because of how the processes are set up in our firm. When we find some detections primarily from Microsoft Defender for Cloud, we share it with the team and we get to know that "XYZ resource is not in use anymore," and it probably gets deleted. So, in that sense, resource getting deleted, obviously, would stop incurring the money and the extra cost that we would have been paying. In that sense, our money is saved, but I wouldn't really put Microsoft Sentinel there because if there was any other solution that would also do the same, the resource would eventually get deleted.

Microsoft Sentinel runs on top of Log Analytics. And right now, we have it just hosted in the European region, but logs get ingested from all over the world, and the logs are of all types. Such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure AD sign-in logs, audit logs, Azure activity logs, and MCAS. We stopped using MDIs. We also have AWS. From AWS, there is a couple of log types. I think it's the CloudTrail, and events around S3 buckets and Kubernetes, although we don't use Kubernetes. That is all that is configured as of now with Microsoft Sentinel.

Four people in our organization use the solution. We have a dedicated SOC team, two guys are from the SOC team: one is me, and one is another person who has experience with Microsoft 365, and two people from the cybersecurity team.

I don't think there is any maintenance required. But there is overhead administration. So far, what I have experienced, it's just about integration. If you have to get started with the integration, then that's the overhead administrative effort on your head. Otherwise, it's not much of a problem. Everything is pretty smooth and automated with regard to maintenance.

There's one guy in our organization who for some reason, doesn't really like Microsoft and its products. He thinks that it's a way for them to catch us in a net and then upsell all their services to us. But I have a different, opposing view. I think, yes, they do have their own strategy of upselling and cross-selling all their products and solutions, but I think they are pretty good when working with them with those solutions, be it Azure as a whole cloud service, or just one part of it like Microsoft Sentinel. It takes off a lot of overhead, also, in terms of when you want some support, since it's a one-vendor-based solution, they would be much more helpful to support you and give you the right resolution in comparison to having three different products from three different vendors. What happens is, more often than not, they all start blaming each other, and then there's a blame game going on, and we, as a customer, have to suffer with whatever problem we are dealing with. So, I would go with having one vendor's solution, provided the vendor is not the kind of vendor that just sees you as a cash cow.

The only advice I would give to someone is that when you are evaluating the solution, if possible, you onboard people from Microsoft so they can help you and guide you. It's their product, they know how to best use it. So you would be in a better position right from the get-go, and it would also save a lot of time and effort in case you did something wrong or you chose a bad design decision, which might end up wasting a lot of time in the future. So, one piece of advice I would say is, simply to onboard Microsoft and it won't cost you extra. I don't think it would cost you extra. If you are already using any good Azure service or Azure itself, then that could be possible with the help of the account manager and the relationship that you have already with Microsoft. 

We have multiple use cases based on the data sources we have onboarded, like Sophos UTM or Firewall.

We also use Microsoft Defender for cloud and Microsoft Office.

We have integrated MD with Sentinel to receive alerts. If there are any suspicious activities in any of our resources, MD will create an alert. Once an alert comes through MDC, it is converted to Sentinel.

It was easy to integrate the solutions. It took about two or three clicks. The solutions work natively together, specifically to give us coordinated detection and response across our environment.

There is a correlation with the mail-based algorithm. We have an AML model algorithm in Sentinel. It has the capability to catch the pattern of attacks and shows that to us in the Sentinel app.

We mostly have cloud-based solutions, so Sentinel gives us better security. There's a feature that allows us to capture all the data in a single console, which we can analyze from the cloud itself.

We don't have to use third-party services to check these activities. If we see that one of our accounts is compromised or anything has happened, we can remove that person from other groups.

There's a feature that allows us to see what is in a secure state and what is in a critical state.

Sentinel helps automate routine tasks and find high-value alerts. We can have a custom playbook and create automation rules through that. If there is a false positive address, we can do the automation from there. If we want an email notification based on high-activated rules, we can provide the automation rules that will notify us on Outlook or through Teams.

It minimizes our analyst's workload. Once a high activity comes up, we'll get a notification on Teams. As analysts, they will validate and send us the email or notification within 10 to 15 minutes with more valid data. If there's a playbook with the top 10 critical rules, we can create multiple playbooks and attach them with the data that we want to protect.

Once that incentive is triggered, we'll get notifications with the full details of that incentive. If high severity comes up, that email is sent to the client, and we do more analysis on that rather than wasting time on the first analysis. We can directly get into the deeper version of the automation.

If an incident comes up, we have to validate the load and find out the correlation of the users. We can focus on the advanced test rather than wasting time on the previous one. This saves five to ten minutes.

On a monthly basis, the analyst team saves at least three to four hours with automation. We have multiple rules based on our more critical test. From that perspective, analysts don't want to work more on low priorities because we'll be automatically notified of low and high priorities. We focus more on critical users where the threat is high. By focusing on what is a high priority, our analysts save five to six hours per week.

We have multiple dashboard views that allow us to see logs coming from different solutions and users who were involved in the previous incident.

The best feature is that onboarding to the SIM solution is quite easy. If you use cloud-based solutions, it's just a few clicks to migrate it.

The console is user-friendly. We have almost 120 different types of data, so the solution helps us to onboard different types of third-party services to the SIM solution. We have UB features, and the SOAR capability in the Sentinel server is also a good feature.

Sentinel's visibility into threats is very good. We have an investigation graph that allows us to see the correlation between the incident and the users. We can see if there are multiple incidents with the same IP address and if there are multiple breaches. We can correlate with the rules and check if any inside threat activities are going on with the malicious site or the malicious URL link that we have onboarded. The threat view provides good visibility.

We can prioritize threats based on our investigation assets. It's very fast. We're able to see the rest of the threat activities and how impactful they are. Based on the AML algorithm, we can get all the stages of the attack as well.

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem.

The importance of this ingestion of data to our security operations depends on the data and the type of solutions we have to onboard. We onboard our critical servers and assets to the same solution so we'll have good visibility.

We're able to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place.

We can validate the logs from where the logs have been received. By doing the log analysis, we'll be able to find them. It's a straightforward function and isn't very hard.

There's an incident pane in Sentinel. We have a query package, and we can have a deep dive alert through that, or we can have a deep look into the log. From the console itself, we have a great view of our threats and the current phase we're in.

We have multiple source features. There are between 20 to 30 in addition to data. Microsoft provides custom features through which we can connect with third-party solutions and correlate the incident. For example, if we have multiple incidents, we can use the SOAR capabilities and correlate them with multiple third-party threats. It's an easier way of understanding whether or not we have a malicious bug.

We can see how much time our analysts have taken to raise the ticket and how much time they have taken to resolve the issue assets. We can create a dashboard for that. They're able to notify us within five or ten minutes for high priorities. For the medium priorities, it is 10 to 12 minutes. Our detection time for low priorities is within three hours, but our team still performs under 15 to 18 minutes.

If we want to use more features, we have to pay more. There are multiple solutions on the cloud itself, but the pricing model package isn't consistent, which is confusing to clients.

We have been using this solution for almost two years.

The stability is very good.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

I would rate technical support a six out of ten. Technical support doesn't understand the features well enough. They will give us links to reference, so we go through those links as a team or Google the solution. We reach out to them if we can't find the solution, but they provide us with the same links and URLs that we've already referred to. It's a hassle because it wastes a week and a half of our time. Their solutions and response time aren't very good.

Neutral

The setup is based on our data sources. We have a segregated timeframe of two payments. It depends on the client or who is doing the operation. Onboarding on the cloud is pretty easy. It takes just a few clicks from migrating the data sources to getting the logs.

For an on-premises or third-party software servicer, it will take more time and troubleshooting to do the setup. It won't be hard if you have a good team for the onboarding process. It can be complicated initially, but the rest of the timeframe will involve fine-tuning the logs and creating the custom rules based on your requirement.

It doesn't require a lot of maintenance. It's pretty simple. We just had to play with it for a couple of months.

We haven't seen any financial ROI.

Sentinel is the best solution that we use. It's a pay-as-you-go model. We can fine-tune the features we want and choose if we want to remove logs. We can also segregate logs, which helps us minimize costs. Sentinel provides free Office 365 and Azure-based logs without pricing assets. When it comes to the third-party solution or our server logs, we just have to do the fine-tuning of the logs.

The pricing isn't very high. It depends on the number of logs you have. If you're expecting to ingest 50 to 60G in a day, but you're only ingesting 20 to 25G per day at first and you have a good team to analyze the logs, then you can segregate the ingestion at under 15G.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It's very user-friendly. The only issue is that Microsoft's technical support isn't very good. If you have a good team who can onboard the resources to the solution, then you'll be happy with the solution itself.

For us, it's better to go for multiple solutions rather than a single suite because we cannot strictly trust one client. If you only have one cloud-based solution, it's better to use Sentinel to secure it. It's helpful to have a good team that can do the monitoring and onboarding smoothly. You can go with one solution if you have a trusted partner. If you don't, then I would use multiple solutions.

You should purchase the features that Microsoft provides. It's a configured network, so they will correlate with the end resources, RMD, and receiver identity. The fusion-based algorithm rule will detect advanced multistage attacks to stop the attack.

We use Microsoft Sentinel to monitor many different environments for cybersecurity incidents, and we use it as our main alerting tool to let us know when this activity happens. It also interfaces with all of our other Defender products, such as Defender for Office 365, Defender for Endpoint, et cetera.

Almost all of our solutions are based in Azure. We use Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, Defender for cloud, Sentinel, and Azure Active Directory Identity Protection.

I use the latest version of Sentinel.

Sentinel is mostly used within our security operations center and our security team. We have about 50 endpoint users.

The backbone of our organization is built on Microsoft Sentinel, its abilities, and the abilities of our Defender stack. Ideally, we'd have more data, but a lot of data and functionality are in one place. The Lighthouse feature is outside Sentinel, but it allows us to have multiple environments integrated into one and to access lots of different Sentinel environments through that. It's very easy to manage a security workload with Sentinel. 

I would like to see better integration with CICD. It should be easier to use GitHub, Jenkins, or whatever our code management stack looks like. Whether or not you use Azure DevOps, being able to manage the code you have is fairly important.

Since using Sentinel, we've experienced a faster response time and easier development features. There aren't as many hurdles to moving a configuration.

I'm not sure how long it took to realize the benefits because it was deployed before my time here. It took me about three months to get familiar with what Sentinel has to offer and how we could leverage it, so it will be about three months before you start getting proper value from it.

There are still elements of Sentinel that I haven't used to their fullest potential, like the Jupyter Notebooks and internet hunting queries.

The solution is good at automating routine tasks and alleviating the burden for analysts.

Automation has moderately affected our security operations, although there is scope for it to significantly affect SecOps. There is definitely the capability for Sentinel to do pretty much all of your first-line response, which would be a significant improvement. It's a moderate effect because we only use automation in a few areas.

There are a few different dashboards for each of the Microsoft tools. We have a dashboard for Defender, one for Sentinel, and one for Active Directory Identity Protection. It consolidated alerts in some aspects, but a lot of information is still scattered.

It's fairly good for being reactive and responding to threats and looking for indicators of compromise. Overall, it helped us prepare for potential threats before they hit.

Sentinel saves us time. The automation feature especially saves us time because we can automate a lot of menial tasks. If other businesses could do that, it would eliminate a lot of their first-line response.

Sentinel saves us about 20 hours per week, which is the equivalent of a part-time staff member.

It saved us money. It's a very cost-efficient SIEM to use and still provides a good level of coverage despite that. 

Sentinel saved us about 50% of the cost of Splunk. It decreased our time to detect and respond by about 10-15%.

The automation rules and playbooks are the most useful that I've seen. A number of other places segregate the automation and playbook as separate tools, whereas Microsoft is a SIEM and SOAR tool in one.

It provides us with very high visibility. It allows us to see a lot holistically across our environment in Azure. It integrates very well with other products like Defender.

It helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. There are many things we can do to deal with prioritizing threats, such as having automation rules that automatically raise the priority of certain incidents. We're also able to make changes to the rule sets themselves and say, "I believe this to be a higher priority than is listed in the tool."

Prioritization is probably the most important thing to us because as an organization, we have a number of threats coming in at any moment, and each of them has its own valid investigation path. We need to know which ones are business critical and which ones need to be investigated and either ruled out or remediated as soon as possible. Prioritizing what to work on first is the biggest thing for us.

If you have the right licenses and access to all the products, it's fairly easy to integrate these products into Sentinel. Sometimes they don't pull as much information as possible, and I've noticed that there is a cross-functional issue where these tools will flag and alert themselves.

We can have it configured to create an alert in Microsoft Sentinel, but sometimes it doesn't create a bridge between them. When we finish our investigation and close the ticket on Sentinel, it sometimes doesn't go back to the tool and update that. That's the only issue that I have found with the integration. Everything else is straightforward and works well.

The solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection responses across our environment. It's probably one of the better-engineered suites. In other places, I've experienced an endpoint detection and response system that's completely different: proprietary coupled with a proprietary and different SIEM tool or maybe a different sort of tool. They are individual tools, and it can sometimes feel like they're engineered differently, but at the same time, they integrate better than anything else on the market as a suite of tools.

These solutions provide pretty comprehensive threat protection. A lot of them are technology agnostic, so you can have endpoints on Linux and Mac OS. It's pretty comprehensive. There's always a little oversight in any security program where you have to balance the cost of monitoring everything with the risk of having some stuff unmonitored, but that's probably an issue outside of this tool.

It enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. It's difficult to ingest non-native data. It's not as easy as in Splunk because Splunk is probably the leading SIEM tool. If you have a native tool that's out of the Microsoft security stack, you can bring it into Sentinel and have an alert on it.

This ingestion of data is vital for our security operations. It's the driver behind everything we do. We can do threat hunting, but if we don't have logs or data to run queries, then we're pretty much blind. I've worked in places where compliance and regulatory adherence are paramount and having logs, log retention, and evidence of these capabilities is extremely important. One of the more vital things that our organization needs to operate well, is good data.

A lot of the alerts come in from other tools, so sometimes we have to actually use that tool to get the proper information. For example, if we get an alert through Defender for Office 365, to actually see an offending email or attachment or something like that, we have to go into the Defender console and dig that out, which is inconvenient. As an aggregator, it's not bad compared to the other solutions on the market. In an ideal scenario, having more information pulled through in the alerts would be an improvement.

A lot of Sentinel's data is pretty comprehensive. The overarching theme with Sentinel is that it's trying to be a lot of things in one. For a UEBA tool, people will usually have separate tools in their SIEM to do this, or they'll have to build their own complete framework from scratch. Already having it in Sentinel is pretty good, but I think it's just a maturity thing. Over the next few years, as these features get more fleshed out, they will get better and more usable. At the moment, it's a bit difficult to justify dropping a Microsoft-trained UEBA algorithm in an environment where it doesn't have too much information. It's good for information purposes and alerting, but we can't do a lot of automation or remediation on it straight away.

Although the integrations are good, it can sometimes be information overload. A number of the technologies run proprietary Microsoft algorithms, like machine learning algorithms and detection algorithms, as well as having out-of-the-box SIEM content developed by Microsoft. As an engineer that focuses on threat detection, it can sometimes be hard to see where all of the detections are coming from. Although the integrations are good, it can sometimes be information overload.

Documentation is the main thing that could be improved. In terms of product usage, the documentation is pretty good, but I'd like a lot more documentation on Kusto Query Language. They could replicate what Splunk has in terms of their query language documentation. Every operator and sub-operator has its own page. It really explains a lot about how to use the operators, what they're good for, and what they're not good for in terms of optimizing CPU usage.

In Splunk, I would like to see some more advanced visualization. There are only some basic ones in Sentinel.

I've been using Microsoft Sentinel for about one year, but more heavily over the past five months.

It's pretty stable. We don't have any performance or capacity issues with it.

It's scalable when using solutions like Lighthouse.

I haven't needed to use technical support yet, but the documentation in the community is very good.

I previously used Splunk. The move to Sentinel was definitely cost-based. A lot of people are moving away from Splunk to a more cost-effective SIEM like Sentinel. We also chose Sentinel because of the ease of maintenance. Splunk's enterprise security has some good queries out of the box, but if I were a small organization, I would use Sentinel because it has more out-of-the-box features.

The log collection facilities must be maintained. Maintaining the solution requires a team of fewer than five people. It mainly involves ensuring that the rules are up to date, the connectors and log collection mechanisms are working correctly, and that they're up to date. It also involves ensuring that the right rules are deployed and the automation rules are in place.

Our ROI is 50% over and above what we spend on it in terms of what we can get back from Microsoft Sentinel, everything we use it for, and the time we save.

Some of the licensing models can be a little bit difficult to understand and confusing at times, but overall it's a reasonable licensing model compared to some other SIEMs that charge you a lot per data.

There are additional fees for things like data usage and CPU cycles. When you're developing queries or working on queries, make sure that they're optimized so you don't use as much CPU when they run.

We spoke with Google about Chronicle Backstory. It looks pretty powerful, but it wasn't mature enough for what we were looking for at that time.

The only other real standalone solution I've had a good experience with is Splunk and Splunk Phantom. In terms of cost, it's astronomically different. Microsoft Sentinel can sometimes be expensive depending on how many logs you're taking, but it will never be in the same realm as Splunk. Sentinel is easy to use, but Splunk is so expensive because it's very easy to use.

Microsoft Sentinel is a better SOAR solution than Phantom. Phantom has good integrations, but it isn't really built for custom scripting. If you're going to be paying more, you would expect that to be better. Sentinel is better in that aspect. Sentinel's cost-effectiveness blows a lot of other solutions out of the water, especially if you're already in Azure and you can leverage some relationships to bring that cost down.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten. It's heading in the right direction, but it's already pretty good and mature.

If a security colleague said it's better to go with the best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor security suite, I would understand that completely. Some people see tying yourself into a single vendor as a vulnerability. It's not quite spread out, but I think you can manage a single vendor security solution if you have a good relationship with the vendor and you really leverage your connections within that business.

It's good to diversify your products and make sure that you have a suite of products available from different companies and that you use the best that's available. In terms of this technology stack, it's pretty good for what it does.

My advice is to really focus on what's possible and what you could do with the SIEM. There are a lot of features that don't get used and maximized for their purpose from day one. It takes a couple of months to properly deploy the solution to full maturity.

Our team uses Microsoft Sentinel to monitor all security incidents. Security analysts working the intake process configure rules that trigger alerts based on specific criteria and route them to the appropriate team based on the event ID. This unified view within Sentinel allows me to investigate each incident, tracing its origin, path, and endpoint. By analyzing the information gathered, I can then determine whether the alert is a true positive or a false positive.

The visibility into threats that Microsoft Sentinel provides is excellent.

Microsoft Sentinel prioritizes threats across our organization, with levels P1, P2, and P3. This helps me determine how to investigate since some alerts, especially P1s, might seem critical at first glance. However, further investigation may reveal non-critical situations, like a P1 triggered by an authorized user's access from an unfamiliar IP or location. Analyzing logs can help identify these scenarios and ensure appropriate responses.

Microsoft Sentinel and Defender seamlessly integrate to provide a unified system for detecting and responding to security threats across our entire environment. This is crucial for meeting compliance standards and informing client communication. By investigating all security events and summarizing key findings in reports, we can not only highlight critical incidents but also demonstrate the steps we're taking to reduce the overall number of high, medium, and low-severity threats for our clients.

I would rate the comprehensiveness of the threat-protection that Microsoft Sentinel provides an eight out of ten.

Once data is ingested, the process begins with reviewing the ticket information. This can then lead us to Sentinel, where we can view logs. The depth of our investigation determines the next step: a login to Defender, which provides the full range of investigation tools to pinpoint the root cause of the incident.

Microsoft Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place.

I would rate the comprehensiveness of Microsoft Sentinel eight out of ten.

Microsoft Sentinel helps automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts.

Microsoft Sentinel simplifies security management by offering a single, unified XDR dashboard, eliminating the need to switch between and monitor multiple disconnected security tools.

The threat intelligence gives us a proactive advantage by anticipating potential threats, allowing us to prioritize and swiftly address critical incidents before they cause harm.

Microsoft Sentinel has helped save us time.

The detection is in real-time with Microsoft Sentinel. 

While Microsoft Sentinel provides a log of security events, its true power lies in its integration with Microsoft Defender. Defender extends Sentinel's capabilities by allowing for in-depth investigation. Imagine investigating a phishing email: through Defender within Sentinel, we can view the email itself, block the malicious email address and its domain, and even take down its IP address – all within a unified platform.

I would like Microsoft Sentinel to enhance its SOAR capabilities. 

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for two years.

I would rate the stability of Microsoft Sentinel ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Microsoft Sentinel ten out of ten.

I evaluated a few other SIEM solutions but I prefer Microsoft Sentinel because it is straightforward and I can also use Defender to investigate.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel nine out of ten.

While Microsoft Sentinel offers SIEM capabilities for security information and event management, it doesn't fully replace the need for a separate SOAR solution, which specializes in security orchestration, automation, and response.

In addition to Microsoft Sentinel, I've also used IBM Security QRadar, which I believe is a superior solution because it functions as both a SIEM and SOAR, offering a more comprehensive approach to handling complex security processes.

I advise taking the course before using Microsoft Sentinel to have a better understanding of the solution.

I recommend trying Microsoft Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel serves as a centralized hub for collecting and analyzing logs from various Microsoft tools and other sources. It eliminates the need to develop custom toolsets for detecting malicious activities across different Microsoft tools. Instead, Microsoft Sentinel provides standardized rules and playbooks to streamline the process of identifying and responding to potential threats.

For instance, consider a scenario where an employee clicks on a phishing link in an email, leading to the installation of malware on their system. While the endpoint detection and response tool on the endpoint might not detect malicious activity, Microsoft Sentinel, acting as a central log collector, receives the EDR logs and triggers an event based on pre-defined rules.

Upon detecting the suspicious activity, Microsoft Sentinel automatically executes a playbook, which may involve actions such as killing the malicious process or isolating the affected endpoint. This automated response helps expedite threat containment and reduces the burden on security analysts.

It is crucial that Sentinel empowers us to safeguard our hybrid, cloud, and multi-cloud environments. We employ a hybrid cloud setup, and securing our environment using Sentinel is significantly simpler than manual methods. We can gather events in the Central Point and develop playbooks and scripts to automate responses. This streamlines the process and enhances our overall security posture. Additionally, if an alert is triggered, we receive an incident notification via email, prompting us to take action and resolve the issue.

Sentinel provides a library of customizable content to address our company's needs.

Microsoft Sentinel has helped our organization with alerts. We'll receive alerts from Sentinel indicating that we're at risk. It's important to address these alerts promptly. We first need to review the information in the email, and then work on the issue in the office. After that, we'll contact the team members on the relevant shift. There's nothing particularly difficult about this process. It's based on our access privileges, which are determined by our role in the company. If we have a high-level role, we'll have access to all the necessary tools and resources. We'll even be able to receive alerts at home if there's a security issue. The company that provides this technology grants work-from-home access based on security considerations. If someone has a critical role, they'll also be equipped with the tools they need to work remotely and connect with their team members. So, the company that provided the technology can resolve the issue first, and then we can address it. Once we've taken care of the issue, everything will be much easier.

By leveraging Sentinel's AI in conjunction with our playbooks for automation, we can enhance the effectiveness of our security team, subject to the specific rules and policies we implement.

The logs provided by Sentinel have helped improve our visibility into our user's network behavior.

Sentinel has helped us save 60 percent of our time by prioritizing the severity of the alerts we receive. When we receive an alert with a high-risk level, we immediately address it to mitigate the potential security threat. Additionally, we have configured our anti-ransomware software, to further protect our systems from cyberattacks. In the event of a ransomware attack, our Halcyon system will generate an encryption key that can be used to unlock our system. This key is securely stored by Halcyon.

Sentinel has helped reduce our investigation times by enabling us to review an alert, generate a ticket, and resolve the issue simultaneously upon receiving the alert.

The most valuable feature is the alert notifications, which are categorized by severity levels: informational, low, medium, and high. This allows us to prioritize and address alerts based on their urgency. For instance, we would immediately address high-severity alerts. This feature, along with the ability to create playbooks, significantly enhances our workflow.

I would like Microsoft to add more connectors for Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel should provide an alternative query language to KQL for users who lack KQL expertise. 

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for one and a half years.

Microsoft Sentinel is a stable solution. 

Microsoft Sentinel is scalable.

We have to write playbooks to resolve our issues.

Neutral

The configuration of Microsoft Sentinel involved a complex process that required thorough familiarity with the available connectors and the policies to be implemented.

We have seen a 30 percent return on investment.

Sentinel is costly.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel seven out of ten.

We have five people in our organization who utilize Sentinel.

No maintenance is required from our end.

I use the solution to ensure proper security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise. The tool helps me to know the type of attack detection that happens and the kind of visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response we have.

We use the tool because we want a solution that can quickly analyze large volumes of data across the enterprise. Microsoft Sentinel is a one-stop solution for all our security needs. It gives threat visibility, enables proactive hunting, and provides investigation reports.

The product can integrate with any device. It has connectors. So, we do not have big issues in building connectors. Microsoft Sentinel gives us a unified set of tools to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. It also helps us recover things. It is very important to our organization. It centralizes our total threat collection and detection and generates investigation reports.

The AI capabilities must be improved. The product must efficiently leverage the AI capabilities for threat detection and response. The product does not provide auto-configuration features. So, we need to do configuration, policy changes, and group policies ourselves. If AI can do these functions, it will be easier for the customers.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The product is stable.

We have around 1500 users. We have only one administrator. The product is easily scalable. As long as the enterprise grows, we will continue using Microsoft Sentinel.

The technical support team is very good.

Positive

We were using Splunk before. We decided to switch to Microsoft Sentinel because we were unable to work on large data using Splunk. Splunk did not have AI capabilities and was not user-friendly.

The product is deployed on the cloud. It is a SaaS solution. The initial deployment was easy. We ensured that all the devices and the APIs were configured well. We needed two engineers from our team for the deployment. We have deployed the tool in a single location. The solution does not need any maintenance.

We took help from an integrator to deploy the tool. It was a user-friendly experience.

The solution is efficient. We could see the returns on investment immediately. It doesn’t take much time.

The product is costly compared to Splunk. When we pay for the product, we also have Azure Monitor Log Analytics as part of the package. It is economical for us.

We use the tool to help secure our cloud-native security solutions. By enabling us to secure our cloud environments, it acts as a single solution for attack detection and threat visibility for proactive hunting. The solution gives us a library of customizable content that helps us address our unique needs. It also gives regular patch updates. It helps us to be updated with the latest threats happening across the world.

We use the Microsoft Sentinel Content hub. Integration with Active Directory is also helpful for us. The content hub enables us to see the latest features. We have Extended Detection and Response in SentinelOne. It provides effective protection for the platform. It provides more cybersecurity by providing more visibility and protects our enterprise.

The content hub helps us centralize out-of-the-box security information and event management content. It discovers and manages the built-in content. It provides an end-to-end security for us.

Microsoft Sentinel correlates signals from first and third-party sources into a single high-confidence incident. It can extract the information through the respective APIs of the third parties. It has increased our threat intelligence, monitoring, and incident analysis efficiency.

We use Microsoft Sentinel's AI in automation. The generative AI features enable real-time threat hunting and detection. The solution has helped improve our visibility into user and network behavior. The generative AI provides better detection and response capabilities and faster response times with actionable intelligence.

The product has saved us time. It helps us get various log files. When there’s an incident, it enables us to do investigations faster. The tool saves us three days in a week. It reduces the work involved in our event investigation by streamlining the processes and making automation effective. Event investigation is much faster.

If someone is looking for a comprehensive solution, Microsoft Sentinel is a good choice. It will fulfill all our needs, including attack detection, threat visibility, and response.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.