Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

I'm an IT consultant, and I use Sentinel with two of my clients to monitor all their security signals and get alerts when things are happening that might be suspicious.

The fact that the solution helps automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts has made it possible for me to provide security operations. If I didn't have automation, I wouldn't be able to do that. Nobody is going to pay me to sit and stare at a screen for eight hours a day. But with the automation built in to let me know about and fix things, it becomes viable. The automations have an email option, and all the alerts show up as emails in my inbox. I'm busy with other things, and I'm not looking at Sentinel all day. And the automation in those emails is available to deal with things automatically. Automation is incredibly important.

Sentinel gives me one XDR dashboard. In terms of security operations, it's improved them and makes it easy for me to do my job.

It saves my clients time, on the order of 30 percent.

It also saves costs for me and my clients. If we didn't have Sentinel in place, and they were to get compromised, it could cost them tens of thousands of dollars due to ransomware, a BEC scam, or another type of attack. Without Sentinel in place, that could be a very big cost.

And it decreases the time it takes to detect and respond by days, if not weeks.

My clients are small businesses, and mine is also a small business. Traditionally, even the concept of using a SIEM in most small businesses was unheard of. It was an on-premises product, and you needed to install servers, and most normal IT consultants wouldn't even look at it because it would be very complex for them. The standout feature of Sentinel is that, because it's cloud-based and because it's from Microsoft, it integrates really well with all the other Microsoft products. It's really simple to set up and get going. You don't have to set up a server or do a lot of configuring and setting up storage. It just lives in the cloud, you turn it on, and connecting most things to it is really easy.

It's fantastic when it comes to integration with other Microsoft products. It's so easy. I've been in IT for 30 years, and integrating products was, up until a few years ago, something we would never want to do. It was so hard, we wouldn't want to touch it. We would have to write custom code and configure things. It was just horrible. Now, it's literally a couple of sliders in the interface, and you're done.

And once these solutions are integrated, they work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across my clients' environments. I follow this space very closely, but I am not an expert in any other solution. Still, at least for my clients, with the threats they are facing and the alerts we get from the real world, Sentinel's detection and response are very comprehensive.

Sentinel enables you to ingest data from the entire ecosystem. I have integrated some non-Microsoft products with Sentinel, and, predictably, it's not as simple as one click because these are third-party products. But it is definitely quite easy. For cloud products and services, it's still very simple. It might be three or four clicks. But for on-premises products, it's a bit more work.

My clients also use Defender for Cloud, and its bi-directional sync capabilities are very important. It makes things much easier.

Sentinel provides a clear view into the threats that are coming in, and, compared to what I had before, it is night and day. I heard somebody say on a podcast, "The solution we had prior to Sentinel was like a dark room and you had a torch, and you could shine the torch in different directions and see some things. Having Sentinel, combined with Microsoft 365 Defender, the XDR solution, is like turning on the lights and seeing everything." I completely agree. That's exactly what it feels like.

Another incredibly important factor is the solution's ability to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. Again, as a small business, I wouldn't have the time and energy to look in several different places. I need one place where it all shows up, and that's what Sentinel provides.

And with built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence, the comprehensiveness of Sentinel's security protection is good.

Given that I am in the small business space, I wish they would make it easier to operate Sentinel without being a Sentinel expert. Examples of things that could be easier are creating alerts and automations from scratch and designing workbooks. All of those are available as templates and community-produced content, but doing all that from scratch and keeping it up-to-date, is not easy. Because I have lots of other things on my plate, it would really improve things for me if they would make it more accessible for small businesses and non-experts.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel since it was in public preview, so that's at least three and a half years.

It's a very stable solution—rock-solid.

It's also very scalable.

I have only ever contacted them about Sentinel once, but I have certainly dealt with Microsoft support in various ways. Their response time is pretty good. But they have a difficult time providing good support, at the level that would cause me to give them a higher score than six out of 10, because things change so fast. And it's so much wider than it used to be 10 years ago. There's so much to cover, and that's difficult for them.

Neutral

We used ESET for one client, but it wasn't a SIEM, it was just endpoint protection. We replaced that with Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Identity, Defender for Cloud Apps, and Sentinel. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

The initial deployment is very straightforward. It took me four or five hours to set it up.

The product itself, obviously, does not require maintenance, but the alerts and rules require work.

Sentinel is fairly priced and pretty cost-effective. Compared to on-premises solutions, Sentinel is very cost-effective.

It's certainly possible, if you're not careful about what you connect, to shoot yourself in the foot by ending up with large data sources being ingested that cost you a fair bit of money. You do need to think about what data sources you actually need, which ones will lead to the detection of actual attackers, and how much of that data you need. You also have to consider how you're going to store it, because Sentinel has different levels. You don't have to store it all in the expensive "this will give me alerts" tiers. But, as I said, my clients are small businesses. They certainly don't have a budget for anything expensive, and they're very happy with the costs.

Do a proof of concept. It's really easy to set up and get started. You don't have to turn everything on to start. Do a small proof of concept, get familiar with it, and you'll see how easy it is.

Does it help prioritize threats across the enterprise? The short answer is, "Yes, it does." The slightly longer answer is that it is not a set-and-forget solution. And no SIEM is. You do need to configure Sentinel and fine-tune it. I have a calendar reminder every two weeks to go back in and make sure the right analytics rules are in place and change the ones that need changing, et cetera. It does prioritize threats, but it's not an automatic process that you never have to worry about again.

Sentinel's threat intelligence doesn't really help with proactive steps. The threat intelligence has indicators of compromise, such as IP addresses, URLs, and file hashes. They get detected, but that's not really proactive. Perhaps it's "proactive" in the sense that somebody else has figured out that those things are bad and let the system know. But Microsoft 365 Defender does the proactive part because it has threat intelligence in it. It will tell you, "A new threat that we have a report on seems to be targeting your type of client." That's proactive, but Sentinel isn't proactive. Meaning, if you read about a threat and then protect yourself before that threat reaches you, Sentinel doesn't really do that.

In the debate about best-of-breed versus a single-vendor security solution, if you pick best-of-breed individual security solutions and you have to integrate them, now you're an integrator. And that is hard. It's not easy to integrate different security products. And that's why, at least for my clients, Sentinel and Microsoft 365 Defender have been a huge shift. They're so easy to integrate. My clients could license separate products and then try to integrate them to get the same level of integration, but that would never work.

Every day, I log into Microsoft Sentinel to check the logs. I start by checking the incidents and analyzing them. If I need to create an automatic rule, I do so. If the logic needs to be changed, I make the necessary adjustments. I am responsible for managing Microsoft Sentinel for our organization.

For our organization, Microsoft Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across most of our environment because we have not yet fully integrated the solution into all aspects of our operations. Currently, we are working on integrating mutual source AWS into Sentinel, which will provide us with more visibility. Apart from that, there is already a lot of visibility in case of any failures or anyone attempting large deployments across other companies or similar activities. Additionally, if someone attempts to use login information from a different location, it becomes apparent, as it is impossible to travel that quickly. Sentinel covers almost everything.

We are using Microsoft Office 365 for email security in our environment. Our infrastructure engineers have integrated Microsoft Office 365 with Sentinel. When we view the old connectors in the application, it mentions Microsoft Office 365. Currently, it also indicates this in terms of firmware.

Microsoft Sentinel can enable us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. However, since we are currently receiving services from an external source, we are not integrating the tool right now. That's why we are looking for another tool that we can integrate with Microsoft Sentinel. Once we do that, I believe we will be able to see everything, including any malware-related issues, as well as other security and licensing concerns.

The ingestion of data into our security operations is of utmost importance. If we are not monitoring whether people are sending large documents to other companies, how will we realize it? We don't have any other tool for that. Of course, we have email security and EDR, which cover some aspects, but some of them are not effective or are too basic. Unlike them, Microsoft Sentinel is comprehensive. It records everything: every click, download, login, and search. Therefore, it is a necessary tool for our operations.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond quickly from a unified dashboard. A couple of months ago, there was a concern with the AWS environment, and our director asked us to identify any relevant code-related alerts originating from the environment. Since we didn't have the rules at that time, I looked into the recommended analytics section, which turned out to be quite straightforward. When we write Python or work with any logs, cells, or Java-related elements, Microsoft Sentinel provides us with insights and a logical approach to integrating our environment. During my investigation, I discovered some configurations related to the Python code, and it appears to be functioning well now.

Microsoft Sentinel's built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence capabilities work well and are further enhanced with the addition of a firewall for added protection.

Before our organization implemented Microsoft Sentinel, we only had an email security DLP solution and some other tools. While we could see the logs on our computer, they were often presented in a confusing manner, appearing like gibberish to us. However, with the introduction of Sentinel, we can now interpret and make sense of that information.

When I joined the organization, they were already in the process of implementing Microsoft Sentinel. However, I am familiar with other integrations with Sentinel, such as AWS, and the integration is not difficult. We simply create the necessary resources, and everything is well-documented, which is a huge plus. We can access all the information online, both in the AWS part and in Microsoft Sentinel. So, I believe it's not rocket science.

It helps automate routine tasks and aids in identifying high-value alerts. We have automated the tool to receive critical or high alerts and send us messages accordingly. This automation is currently active. Whenever a high alert is generated, it comes through direct messages. Even during non-working hours, I receive these alerts on my phone immediately. If it's an important alert, I can respond promptly. We had an incident where I had to work on weekends due to such an alert. However, if I'm not using the tool or haven't activated it, I generally don't turn on the computer after work hours. So, this feature has been beneficial for us. Some months ago, there was a Microsoft bug that created false positive alerts for every clean link, including company links. We made modifications to the alerts, and now we no longer receive those unnecessary alerts.

It helps eliminate the need to look at multiple dashboards by providing us with just one XDR dashboard. We no longer have to go to other places. However, there are instances when we receive alerts about failing servers, and we can't check them using Sentinel; instead, we have to use Azure Active Directory. It's not Sentinel's fault, and checking through Azure Active Directory is not difficult, but we still have to go somewhere else.

Sentinel's threat intelligence assists us in preparing for potential threats before they strike, allowing us to take necessary precautions. My weekly routine includes dedicating at least two hours to the accounting part. I am constantly searching for any threats in our environment that may have gone unnoticed. So far, I haven't found anything, but I'm always vigilant because we can never be entirely certain that there are no threats.

We have been enabled to save a significant amount of time. The log files consist of hundreds of pages, and to review them, we need to possess networking knowledge to identify the specific case. Without knowing what we are searching for, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sentinel migrates the logs and presents the visual information in a user-friendly manner, which has proven to be a time-saving solution for us.

Sentinel saves money by reducing the number of people required to monitor the alerts. For example, if there are normally 50 alerts per week, fine-tuning reduces them to just one.

Microsoft Sentinel helps decrease our time to detect and time to resolve. Sentinel provides a brief introduction to the events occurring in the environment when someone is causing instability in the AWS environment. Sentinel precisely identifies the issue and offers a link for accessing more information about the situation.

The dashboard that allows me to view all the incidents is the most valuable feature. Threat hunting is also valuable. Sentinel has a Microsoft framework, so we can experiment with numerous queries. There are almost 500 queries available that we can utilize based on our environment.

I believe one of the challenges I encountered was the absence of live training sessions, even with the option to pay for them. Microsoft insists that all information is available in the documentation, which I must admit is quite comprehensive and helpful. However, for someone without a coding background, learning solely from the documents can be challenging at times. It would be much easier to learn if there were practical exercises and instructional videos available. This aspect bothered me significantly. While I did come across a course, my preference was to access it through Sentinel since they are already providing us with their services. Having the team trained up would undoubtedly streamline my job and save a considerable amount of time.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for one year.

We have not had any scalability issues with Microsoft Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel is scalable. We can add as many services as we want, and Microsoft automatically increases the capacity by adding memory and storage.

I have used technical support many times. Sometimes, I have a really hard time understanding them. I am not sure if they are calling from India, but there was background noise at times. However, they are really helpful, even though they seem a bit indifferent. They frequently inquire whether we have addressed the issue and if it has been resolved—quite a lot, actually.

In a company, we are often very busy. They expect us to address the issues immediately, but sometimes it can take months. So, I inform them that I will follow up. They can be a little pushy, which is understandable from their perspective, but for us, it can be challenging because we have many other tasks to handle. Sentinel is just one of my priorities, and there are a lot of other things I need to take care of. That's why sometimes we need time, but to their credit, they are always responsive. Whenever we ask them a question, they promptly provide a response.

Positive

I had previously used Kibana, which is quite different from Microsoft Sentinel. When I used Microsoft Sentinel for the first time, I realized that this was the ideal solution. Microsoft Sentinel is user-friendly, unlike Kibana, which I found difficult to install and not very user-friendly. Microsoft Sentinel, on the other hand, is incredibly user-friendly, making it easy for everyone to understand and learn how to use it. It is a straightforward solution to comprehend.

I give Microsoft Sentinel a nine out of ten.

We are currently evaluating Microsoft Defender and CrowdStrike in our environment to determine which one is a better fit. As for Defender, I cannot claim to have a complete understanding of it since it's in a testing environment. I can monitor people's devices, but I have not yet received any alerts generated by the devices. It has only been around ten days.

I am responsible for creating documentation for all of our implementations, while other teams handle the infrastructure portion.

Maintenance is minimal for Microsoft Sentinel. There is a check button in the house. Sometimes I go there because we occasionally find that some things are not working properly. So we have to go there and address the issue, but it is not a common occurrence. Maybe it happens, like, three times a year which is not bad.

We primarily use the solution for analyzing logs, such as those from Azure AD. We have it integrated with Microsoft 365 and plan to integrate it with our firewalls so we can analyze those logs too. So, our main uses are for log analysis and to check for vulnerabilities in our system.

We use more than one Microsoft security product; we also use Defender for Cloud. 

Sentinel helps us to prioritize threats across our enterprise. 

The solution reduced our time to detect and respond. 

The log analysis is excellent; it can predict what can or will happen regarding use patterns and vulnerabilities.

Sentinel provides good visibility into threats. 

The product enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place, and that's important to us. 

Given the solution's built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence capabilities, it provides reasonably good comprehensive protection, and we are happy with it. 

Sentinel helps us automate routine tasks and find high-value alerts; the playbooks are beneficial and allow us to optimize automation.

The tool helped eliminate multiple dashboards and gave us one XDR dashboard. Having one dashboard is the reason we purchased Sentinel.  

Sentinel's threat intelligence helps us prepare for potential threats before they hit and to take proactive steps. It helps a lot, and that's another main reason we have the product.  

The solution could be more user-friendly; some query languages are required to operate it.

A welcome improvement would be integrations with more products and connectors. 

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

The solution is stable.

Sentinel is a scalable product. 

Microsoft support is good, I rate them seven out of ten. 

Neutral

We didn't previously use another solution of this type; when we moved to Azure, Sentinel was one of the products Microsoft recommended, so we started using it.

I was involved in the deployment of Sentinel, but my colleague did the majority. The setup was basic; some query language is required to implement it fully, and we could improve our configurations. Our implementation strategy was to cover the major products first, including Office 365 and Azure AD. We did that, and we're now adding the other tools we use in our environment.

Our setup is not particularly expansive, so we can deal with the maintenance requirements within our team; it only requires one team member. Our team consists of three or four admins; we manage the Azure AD logs, and Azure AD has 400 users.

The pricing is reasonable, and we think Sentinel is worth what we pay for it.

One of the main reasons we switched from on-prem to Azure Cloud was to save money, but at the same time, we kept adding on features and spent a lot doing so. We're now looking at cost optimization and removing unnecessary elements, as one of our primary goals is to reduce costs. I'm unsure if we are, but we are trying to get there.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem, though we are attempting to integrate all our products. It can ingest and analyze all the data, but we aren't using this functionality to its fullest extent yet.

My advice to someone considering the product is to use it. Start by integrating your primary applications, then slowly move on to others in descending order of importance. 

The company I work for delivers SOC-as-a-Service, so I set up Sentinel in the customer's Azure environment and then connect it to our central Sentinel through Azure Lighthouse.

Microsoft Sentinel has made it easier for us to sell SOC-as-a-Service to, more or less, any customer and not just the big ones.

A lot of our customers run Microsoft products, and integrating those with Sentinel is simple and easy. Sentinel can be quickly deployed as well.

As long as the customers are licensed correctly and have, for example, the E5 security package, then the insights into threats provided by Sentinel are pretty good.

Sentinel helps prioritize threats well. The option to dig deeper and go into the different portals is good as well.

Our customers are very happy with incidents being closed in Sentinel and across the tenant.

We are able to fetch data from almost any source with Sentinel. There are some customers who try to customize, but we try to keep it to the out-of-the-box preconfigured data connectors or to what we can find in the Microsoft content hub.

In terms of the importance of data ingestion to our customers' security operations, they only have access to what is in Sentinel. Therefore, it's pretty important for them to have all of their data stored in one location. If it's stored on-premises in Microsoft 365 Defender, then the SOC team won't be able to access that data. Giving a good analysis will then be harder.

It's very important to us to be able to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. We don't create several accounts for each customer. We utilize one account and then get insight into the Sentinel environments of different customers. It's great that we can do all this in one place.

The comprehensiveness of Sentinel's security protection is pretty good. The effectiveness of the web part of this depends on how well the customer has configured their Azure AD and what information they have included for each user, such as the phone number and the part of the organization where the user works.

One of the big issues for our customers is the need to look at multiple dashboards. Sentinel has eliminated this and made it a lot easier by having everything in one place.

Sentinel has definitely saved us time. It has also decreased our time to detection and our time to respond. We try to have an analysis ready within 30 minutes of an incident coming in.

Some of the data connectors are outdated, at least the ones that utilize Linux machines for log forwarding. I believe that Microsoft is already working on improving this.

I would like Microsoft Sentinel to have out-of-the-box threat intelligence because right now, the only option is to add your own threat intelligence.

I've been using Microsoft Sentinel for approximately one and a half years.

Sentinel has only been down once, as far as I know, as a result of Microsoft doing something with Azure Kubernetes, which affected log analytics and Sentinel. It was down for about 10 hours. Other than that, it's always been up.

The scalability is great. You can put unlimited logs in, as long as you can pay for it. There are commitment tiers, up to six terabytes per day, which is nowhere close to what any one of our customers is running.

I might be more fortunate than others, given the fact that I have easy access to Microsoft support. The only downside is that the support staff are not that technical, but there is a big community around Sentinel. I can ask the question on the forums instead, and I usually get an answer there. All in all, I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward. We try to utilize a baseline of analytics rules in addition to connecting any security products already owned by the customer.

We usually deploy one Sentinel per Azure tenant. Maintenance-wise, Microsoft updates the analytics rules and the engine behind Sentinel, and it may require some tuning if it creates a lot of noise. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward. Thus, in comparison to other SIEM solutions that you need to upgrade and then turn off for the functionality to be updated, Sentinel saves us time.

My colleague and I usually work with someone at the customer's location to deploy the solution.

Compared to standalone SIEM and SOAR solutions, it is easy to start off with Sentinel. For example, with QRadar there are minimum licensing requirements, EPS costs compared to how many logs are being ingested, etc.

It can become costly with Sentinel if you try to run all of the raw logs for an entire organization. If you prioritize, however, you can have a cheaper SIEM solution compared to the ones that have a starting price of 50,000 US dollars.

The pricing is based on how much you ingest, so it's pretty straightforward. There are no tiers, and you pay for what you use, unlike with other types of SIEM solutions that are usually based on tiers.

It's a great way to get insight into exactly how much you're using. If you connect a log source that utilizes too much, you could turn it off or tune it down. You could also buy tiers in Sentinel and can save money with tier commitments.

Overall, I'm satisfied with Sentinel and would give it a rating of eight out of ten.

As far as going with a best-of-breed strategy versus a single vendor's suite, Microsoft gives a pretty good solution, especially when you get the E5 security package. It gives you a good view of the security across the organization, so I don't mind going for a single vendor's suite and opting to go completely with Microsoft.

We require a comprehensive, scalable solution for cyber threat protection. 

The interface is simple. It was easy to click through and to refer back and assess things. 

We can do frequent training sessions so that people or end users are able to get used to the system.

Microsoft Defender is proven to be able to incorporate with this product. We also utilize the Power BI dashboard. We wanted to monitor the logins. It's helpful for threat investigations. We're able to use the session queue report to identify the frameworks having issues.

The workflow is quite smart. Incidents alerts can be generated automatically. It has good automation capabilities and that helps us respond to incidents quickly.

Sentinel provide our customers with a unified set of tools to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. It's actually a part of Defender. It's unified within the operating platform. This allows for the mobility of the end user.

Our customers use Sentinel to help secure hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. We do have a limited amount of space. Out of ten or so clients, five or six have adopted a cloud protection system.

We can use it with Microsoft Athena and we can manage compliance and see logs for analytics. Sentinel can correlate signals from first and third party sources into a single high-confidence incident. Since the process is automated, it makes our response times faster. This saves the team's time.

We do make use of the solution's AI capabilities. The machine learning is very mature. Its machine learning has been very good overall. It's also something that enhances response times and threat analysis. 

It's provided us with improved visibility into user and network behavior.

Sentinel has reduced the work involved in the event investigation by quite a lot.

From a client perspective, they'd like to see more cost savings. I'm not sure if Sentinel gives a POC for free.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't received any complaints and haven't had outages.

The solution is easily scalable. Of course, we do have to do due diligence with our Oracle system architecture.

We have an SLA that says there will be a receiving engineer that will respond if the system is down. Technical support is great. They might have different tiers of service.

Positive

I did not personally deploy the product. I just work with it.

There is some maintenance. We do have a resident engineer that's certified on troubleshooting.

We have a technical partner that helps with deployment. 

The solution is less expensive than an APM option. If the client wants to have a complete solution that covers the whole big organization, a good option will be going with Microsoft Sentinel. For the features it has, the price is justified.

We are an SSI system integrator.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

For those interested in adopting the solution, I'd suggest looking at the costing and billing and ensuring you have the budget and maybe doing a POC for 45 days or two months so that they can really experience the product.

The usual use cases would be starting from scratch, implementing Sentinel for clients, onboarding log sources, building analytical use case rules, and supporting the platform for operations.

The main benefit is the ease of integration. Having a cloud-based SIEM means scalability. We also received very good support and documentation from the vendor.

All of the features are great. In fact, when they add new features they are always valuable and interesting. There are so many features on offer.

I really appreciate that it is very well documented.

I also use Defender 365, including Defender for Endpoint. It's easy to integrate with Sentinel. In two clicks we can integrate them together.

I have experience with Defender for Cloud. I'm actually getting into the Center for Cloud right now, so I'm just Learning about it. 

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem.

It's important to have data visibility for our security operations. Sentinel enables us to investigate the threats and respond from one place. That is very important for operations. We need to be able to easily look and have visibility over what's happening.

Sentinel enabled us to automate routine tasks. It helps us automate the handling of trivial tasks related to alerts. 

With the solution, we no longer have to look at multiple dashboards. I wouldn't say it has completely eliminated looking at different dashboards. As it stands right now, there are two dashboards that we will have to look at. One is Sentinel, and the other one is a ticketing system.

Compared to what's being used, it's saved us some time overall. The ease of use and the clear documentation are helpful in that regard. Someone who doesn't know how to use it can easily go in and find out.

When it comes to ingesting Azure native log sources, some of the log sources are specific to the subscription, and it is not always very clear. Sometimes, if the individual doesn't know what they are doing, they might enable it only on one subscription and not on everything that they need to monitor.

I've used the solution for two and a half years. 

I haven't experienced any stability issues. I've experienced 100% uptime. 

I've never seen it scale up or down. If necessary, it likely happens in the background. It's not visible to clients, however, I haven't noticed any issues. 

My experience with technical support is good. It was an excellent experience. They were very, very responsive to the questions that we had. If they were not able to answer on the spot, during the call, they took it back and discussed the issue with their team. Getting an answer was fairly fast. Overall, I've had a good experience with support and I can't complain.

I'd like them even more if I was able to request support on behalf of clients without having to actually access the client's Azure or having to identify the client's tenants. 

Positive

I've used Splunk, ArcSight, and QRadar. Sentinel is excellent compared to those solutions. It could always be easier, however, it's pretty much there.

I was involved in the solution's deployment. The cloud deployment takes five minutes and is very easy. The on-premise portion on the other hand, when I first did it a year and a half ago, was a little bit more complex since it involved a lot of customization. However, now it's more streamlined.

There is no maintenance necessary. It's a managed service. There's no patching of any sort. The on-premises components may require a little bit of maintenance every now and then if they need a patch or upgrade. If there are any changes in the environment they would have to be reflected in the configurations. 

I handled the implementation myself. 

I know the price, however, I don't know how it compares with other SIEM solutions. I don't have that visibility. I overheard not too long ago that Sentinel is on the expensive side. However, there are some capabilities that are fairly new that Sentinel offers to lower the cost. 

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

We use it for security. It's at the forefront of managing the security within our organization. We use the platform as our main SIEM for enterprise security whereby we have several tools that feed into Microsoft Sentinel and then from there, we have the use cases. It's a major tool for security monitoring within the enterprise.

Microsoft Sentinel provides the capability to integrate different log sources. On top of having several data connectors in place, you can also do integration with a threat intelligence platform to enhance and enrich the data that's available. You can collect as many logs and build all the use cases. 

Microsoft Sentinel helps to prioritize threats across the enterprise. We do threat categorization based on a risk-based approach. We categorize incidents as critical, high, and medium. The platform gives us the capability of categorizing the threats based on our assets' criticality and the type of data on our systems. At the end of the day, it does help in managing the threats within the organization. There are different levels of threats depending on the data that we have.

We also use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We have integrated Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with Microsoft Sentinel. Most of the alerts that come on our Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are fed into Microsoft Sentinel. We manage those alerts through Microsoft Sentinel, but when we are doing our investigations, we always leverage Microsoft Defender for Endpoint because we are able to do the investigation from the original source. Integrating a Microsoft product with other Microsoft products is not as difficult as compared to integrating Microsoft products with other vendor applications. With the inbuilt data connectors that already exist in Microsoft Sentinel, it's much easier to do the integrations with the Azure environment and other Microsoft products. If there's no data connector, it's somehow tricky. If we have a data connector in place, it's better. We also need to do some customization of the data that we ingest because we need to have the right size of the data that we feed into Microsoft Sentinel because of the cost aspect. At the end of the day, we managed to do an integration of on-prem AD with Microsoft Sentinel via a platform that acts as a bridge between them

Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint work together natively. The alerts are fed into Microsoft Sentinel seamlessly, but when it comes to investigations, you need to leverage Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to isolate a device and to see some of the timelines or actions that were done with that machine. You can't do that with Microsoft Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to investigate threats from one place, but it doesn't let us respond from one place. For responding, we need to narrow down the source of the threat. If it has been flagged from a Cisco perimeter solution that we use, such as Cisco Meraki, we need to go back and check in that platform. If it's flagging an issue that's happening on an endpoint, we need to go back to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and do further investigation to respond.

Microsoft Sentinel helps to automate routine tasks. We have playbooks and once we establish a baseline or a routine task that needs to be done, we can just automate it through the playbook.

We have the Sentinel dashboard, but we still need other dashboards for other logs, such as from email. We can't see email logs from Sentinel. We still need a network security monitoring platform. It has helped us to secure 90% of our cloud environment.

With the integrations we have, its threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and to take proactive steps. We get visibility into what's happening on the AD on a real-time basis. If there's any issue going on with the AD, we are able to fix that within the minimum time possible. It also helps with the visibility of different resources across the cloud environment. However, it can't do all that by itself. We also need other tools. 

It has saved us time. It has helped in handling most of the issues within the cloud environments or any misconfigurations done on the cloud environment. We are able to handle any issues within the shortest time possible. In terms of threat detection, I can give it a nine out of ten. If we didn't have Microsoft Sentinel, it would have taken us three to four days to discover a security incident that is happening or any security misconfiguration in the cloud environment. Within a week, it saves me about three days.

It has saved us money from a security risk perspective, but from a technology perspective, it hasn't saved much. The main value that it's giving to the organization is from a security perspective.

It has saved our time to detect, but that also depends on the original platform. If the original platform, such as Microsoft Defender, fails to detect incidents, then Microsoft Sentinel will definitely not flag anything. The feed that Microsoft Sentinel gets comes from other platforms. With better fine-tuning across the other platforms and with good integrations, it can really help.

Playbooks are valuable. When it comes to automation, it helps in terms of managing the logs. It brings the SOAR capability or the SOAR perspective to the platform with the high usage of Microsoft products within our environment. We are utilizing most of the Azure resources. Our AD runs on Azure. We have on-prem and Azure AD, so we have the integrations. At the end of the day, when we are managing the security, we have the capability of initiating some options from Microsoft Sentinel and directly to AD. We also have automation with Cisco Meraki. We have configured playbooks where if there is a suspicious IP, it blocks the IP.

Microsoft Sentinel needs to be improved on the metrics part. I've had an issue in the recent past while trying to do my metrics from it. It gives me an initial report, but sometimes an incident is created on Microsoft Sentinel, but you realize that when a lot of information is being fed from Microsoft Defender to Microsoft Sentinel, instead of feeding the existing alert, Microsoft Sentinel creates a new alert. So, metrics-wise, it can do better. It can also do better in terms of managing the endpoint notifications.

We do have in-built or out-of-the-box metrics that are shown on the dashboard, but it doesn't give the kind of metrics that we need from our environment whereby we need to check the meantime to detect and meantime to resolve an incident. I have to do it manually. I have to pull all the logs or all the alerts that are fed into Sentinel over a certain period. We do this on a monthly basis, so I go into Microsoft Sentinel and pull all the alerts or incidents we closed over a period of thirty days. I then calculate the meantime to detect and the mean time to resolve. I have to check when all the tickets were created, when they were handled by the analysts, and when they were closed. I do a manual metrics calculation after pulling all the data. I believe Microsoft can do better on the metrics side of Sentinel. They can provide monthly reports. If I want to submit the reports to my senior management, it will be much easier for me to pull the data as a report. Currently, you can't pull any reports from Sentinel. It would be helpful if they can build a reporting tool within it and allow me to have my own customization. I should be able to customize the reports based on my needs. For example, I should be able to generate a report only for incidents with high and medium severity.

It should also provide information on trends within the platform. There should be reports on specific alerts or security incidents.

They should build more analytics rules to assess key security threats. I have had to build a lot of custom analytics rules. There should be more of them out of the box.

There should be more information about how to utilize the notebooks. They can have a better approach to enlightening the end-users about the straightforward use of notebooks. The data point analysis rules and automation are straightforward compared to the way you utilize the notebooks. They can do better in terms of sharing how we can utilize the notebooks. 

We are able to ingest data across all our tenants and on-prem solutions, but we have been chasing Microsoft for the longest time possible for ingesting some data from Microsoft Dynamics 365. The kind of logs that we need or the kind of security monitoring that we need to do on Microsoft Dynamics 365 versus what's available through data connector tools is different. The best advice that they have managed to give us is to monitor the database logs, but we can't go into monitoring database logs because that's a different platform. There are several things that we want to address across Microsoft Dynamics 365, but the kind of logs that we get from the data connector are not of any significance. It would be better if they could give us customization for that one. That's the worst application from Microsoft to add because we can't monitor any business processes in that application, and there's no capability to do even customization. We are so frustrated with that.

It's quite comprehensive in threat intelligence capabilities, but it takes some time to establish a baseline. They can also improve the UEBA module so that it can help us address and have an overview of the risk. It's not yet that complete. It can establish a baseline for a user, but it doesn't inform how I can leverage the capability to address risks.

We can also have more integrations within Microsoft Sentinel with TI feeds out of the box. Currently, we don't have something out of the box for other TI feeds. Microsoft has its own TI feed, but we aren't utilizing that.

Microsoft Sentinel should provide more capability to end-users for customization of the logs they feed into Microsoft Sentinel.

It has been two years.

We haven't had any issues with it so far. It's very stable. 

It's scalable. There are data connectors for different technologies and products.

I've not contacted their support for Microsoft Sentinel.

I've used QRadar.

We are ingesting on-prem and cloud logs. The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't that straightforward because of the integrations.

We had help from a Microsoft partner for visibility and integrations. We had about five engineers involved in its implementation.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require any maintenance from our side.

Microsoft Sentinel is costly, but it provides value in terms of managing security or managing the threats within our organization.

The return on investment is in terms of better security, visibility, and management. If you don't know what's going on in the cloud environment or the on-prem environment, you might need to pay a huge price in terms of compliance or ransomware to restore your data. We have seen value in investing in Microsoft Sentinel because we are building a better security capability within our environment.

The current licensing is based on the logs that are being ingested on the platform. Most of the SIEM solutions utilize that pricing model, but Microsoft should give us a customization option for controlling the kind of logs that we feed into Microsoft Sentinel. That will be much better. Otherwise, the pricing is a bit higher.

We evaluated other solutions. The reason why we chose Microsoft Sentinel was because of the cloud visibility. We needed a lot of visibility across the cloud environment, and choosing another product that's not Microsoft native wouldn't have been easy in terms of integrations and shipping logs from Microsoft Sentinel to on-prem.

A good thing about Microsoft Sentinel as compared to the other platform is that most organizations run on Azure, and the integration of Microsoft Sentinel is much easier with other products, but when it comes to other SIEM solutions, integrating them with Microsoft sometimes becomes an issue.

You need to customize the kind of logs that you feed to Microsoft Sentinel. If you just plug-in data connectors and don't do any customization and feed everything to Microsoft Sentinel, it will be very expensive in terms of cost. You only need the traffic that assists you in addressing security issues within your environment. You only need the information that gives you visibility to address security issues.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten.

Our customers primarily use the solution to monitor their infrastructure locally.  Some of our customers want to monitor logs to find some abnormal instances, so, they use Microsoft Sentinel to identify threats or identify what is happening in their infrastructure.

Microsoft Sentinel is easy to use compared to some third-party solutions, for example, if we want to get a log using a lot of the third-party solutions it is very difficult because we have to configure it. But in Microsoft Sentinel, if you want to get a log, you just click next, next, next, and see the log. It's straightforward to use the solution. Microsoft Sentinel is on the cloud, so we don't need to maintain a lot of the OS issues we have with other products. Sometimes SIEM has problems that require a lot of maintenance to resolve the OS issues and that takes a lot of time to deal with, but the Microsoft Sentinel benefit is you're on the Cloud. We don't have to spend time dealing with OS issues. We can use that time to focus on critical incidents.

The most valuable features in my experience are the UEBA, LDAP, the threat scheduler, and integration with third-party straight perform like the MISP.

The product can be improved by reducing the cost to use AI machine learning. In my experience in Taiwan, if you want to use Microsoft machine learning for Microsoft Sentinel, the cost is high. The high cost keeps customers from using the feature.

Currently, I think that the customized log can be improved because I check some documents, and Microsoft Sentinel can only customize some file logs. If some logs can be in a database or some user Syslog for all the events in Microsoft Sentinel to be supported. I can't choose to parse the log. I hope Microsoft Sentinel can support more and more different event types for customization. The solution ends up passing a lot of the logs.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for 13 months.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is easy to scale.

Technical support uses a ticket system. We just use the portal and I can open a ticket for them, and they will respond back to us. The technical support team is very good they solve a lot of the issues for us, or help us solve a lot of issues, but sometimes the issues can be more complicated and they cannot help us. If I submit a complicated ticket to technical support and they still don't know how to resolve it we are required to use premium support and that option comes with an additional fee. If you have less complicated issues free technical support can resolve the ticket but with more complex tickets you need to use the premium service.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy we just choose where to create, and then next, done, finished. Very easy. The deployment took less than five minutes and only required one person.

The implementation was completed in-house on my own. I just studied Microsoft documents and trained myself. If I still don't know something, I open a ticket to Microsoft to get some help.

The solution is expensive and there is a daily usage fee.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I am a third-party user of the solution, but if I were an outside user of Microsoft Sentinel, I really like it because they have a lot of the functions that others don't have. Things like the UEBA and intelligence from Microsoft. Microsoft has already studied a lot of threat intelligence, and they have the capability to help us detect what kind of content will match Microsoft intelligence. I like this and also has a lot of AI machine learning. This will help me to review or, learn easily. I hope this product will help me with a lot of things.

The solution states that it provides good visibility into threats by identifying vulnerabilities. I'm not clear on the vulnerability feature. I am not sure if most customers are familiar with the feature. I believe the feature is used to detect a lot of threats, but what kind of vulnerability? I am still not familiar with the feature.

I think because our enterprise has a lot of different Standard Operating Procedures it depends on the customer, for example, the solution helps detect ransomware, and that helps the organization prioritize dealing with the ransomware situation above other threats.

We have one customer that has implemented Microsoft Security E5. That means they also have Microsoft Defender 365. They use this to detect their infrastructure and their endpoints as well as if they have a SaaS platform they can monitor abnormal behavior.

I have integrated Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender 365, and they are very easy to integrate. They also have a correlate function and they have rules called Fusion. This Fusion function helps us investigate the correlation between the products.

Because my job is to help the customer integrate, I don't know how well the solutions work together to deliver detection and response for our customers. I am not involved once the solutions are deployed.

In Taiwan, we don't have customers that use Microsoft Defender for Cloud but I use it in my lab.

Some of our customers have additional solutions that are not Mircosoft. I have some customers, who have some data from the Microsoft device, from Windows and maybe events, and others that are not Microsoft products. The customers use their own on-premise, third-party products and buy their solutions. Hence, it is difficult to say if Microsoft Sentinel enables us to ingest data from the whole enterprise.

You can investigate the threats and respond from one place using Microsoft Sentinel. We should report correlation too. It's effortless to investigate responses in Microsoft Sentinel.

In Taiwan, we don't believe in automating routine tasks. There are a lot of things we still do manually and are not using the automated function of Microsoft Sentinel except to send mail.

With Microsoft Sentinel, we use one unified dashboard that is very easy.

We don't use the threat intelligence from Microsoft Sentinel because it is not public, so when a threat is detected that matches the Microsoft database threat intelligence, they only send us an alert, but they don't provide the content inside. Instead, we use open-source threat intelligence and integrated it into the solution.

Using Microsoft Sentinel has reduced the time spent per incident from three hours to one and a half to two hours.

The solution has not saved any money because it is still expensive. We have a large customer demand but all the vendors are as expensive as Microsoft Sentinel. I think they are very expensive. The solution has a daily usage charge.

Depending on the rule being used the solution can save us time in detecting incidents or threats. I can say we just use the default, sometimes it's very long and doesn't really take a lot of time. We get the result to tell me, "Oh. You have an incident happen." But I still don't know why Microsoft usually misses the threats. I still don't know why they design it like this, because I have had some instances in my past experience where the rule is if a threat is detected we must immediately alert first. Perhaps the detection module for Microsoft Sentinel is old. It starts to already alert us and that is a default rule. So, I still don't know why Microsoft Sentinel was created like this. I still don't understand. If you use a UEBA, to detect some threats in some abnormal behavior it's very fast, but if you use the scheduler to detect a lot, sometimes it takes a long time.

In my experience, everything is working and the solution doesn't have any bugs.

The solution is only released on the cloud on Azure. You can't deploy the solution on-premise.

Currently, I only deploy in a single environment. I don't have another environment because almost all our customers use a single environment. Perhaps in the future, they will add another cloud that will use Microsoft Sentinel. That is a very long time in the future. In my experience, the solution is used only in a single environment. We have two people in our organization that use the solution and four to five large customers.

Since Microsoft Sentinel is cloud-based it updates automatically and requires no maintenance from our end.

I think I'm more likely to use a single vendor over using a best-of-breed strategy because a single vendor, integrates together all of the things. I don't need to customize. Trend Micro doesn't understand Microsoft products, and Microsoft products, don't know Trend Micro products. If I choose to use a single solution that means they will handle all of those things. I don't need to use or take the time to customize some functions. I don't need to do that. I prefer to use a single vendor.

If a customer is already using a lot of Microsoft solutions I would recommend Microsoft Sentinel because it is very easy to integrate, but if a customer is using multiple different third-party security solutions I would not recommend Microsoft Sentinel because it will take more time to integrate it and check everything.