Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

We have possible use cases for the solution. We have ten or 12 different use cases under this solution.

The Log analytics are useful. You can review many details. 

The portal and the full integration and collaboration between the cloud workloads and multi-tenants have been useful. We can use it with Sharepoint and Exchange.

The solution helps us prioritize all of our threats. It's one of the most important and critical systems we have here. 

We have a lot of Microsoft solutions. For example, we also use Defender for endpoints and Microsoft Cloud. We mostly use Microsoft products, although we also use Crowdstrike. 

It was easy to integrate Defender for Endpoint. Each of these solutions works natively together. It's very crucial that they work together. 

Microsoft is very comprehensive. It helps protect us and offers very clear information. It's easy to assess everything. It's a good user experience. 

We make use of Microsoft Defender for Cloud's bi-directional sync capabilities. We have different customers under our umbrella and multiple subsidiaries. Not all have access to the same license. We don't have the same security exposure everywhere. We can pick and choose who needs access.

Sentinel does enable us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. This is crucial. That said, it can cost us a lot of money. We try to get feature visibility and enhance the collected logs to be able to identify only certain logs that would need to be uploaded. That said, it's very crucial we can ingest data from anywhere.  

We can investigate threats and respond holistically from one place, one dashboard. Having one dashboard is important as it saves the team from headaches. We can collect all the information we need in one view.

The comprehensiveness of Sentinel is good in that it helps us identify most of our gaps in security. In the last few years, we have been able to fill in most of the gaps.

Once we enabled the connectors and started getting incident reports to our dashboard we were able to realize the benefits of the solution. It took about one month to begin to get the value of this product.

Sentinel helps automate routine tasks and helps automate the findings via high-value alerts. We've been able to automate a lot of the cycle and leave the investigation to humans. Support is very crucial and we can take the right actions fast.

The product helps us prepare for potential threats before they hit and we can take proactive steps. We're very satisfied in terms of security operations.

Before implementing the solution, we didn't know we were wasting a lot of time. Once the solution was in place, we discovered a lot of gaps across the traditional way we were handling security. 

I can't say if we are saving money. However, we're investing in the right places. We're now utilizing services we actually need. From a business perspective, although it does have a cost, it's saving the business since it's protecting us from any security breach.

I'd like to see more integration with other technologies beyond the Microsoft OS. 

I would like to see more AI used in processes.

I've been using the solution for three or four years. 

The stability is not an issue. 

We do have plans to increase usage. The solution has the ability to scale. 

We have not opened a ticket for technical support yet. So far, we haven't had any issues. 

My understanding is Microsoft does not have good support and has done a lot of outsourcing. In general, they used to be brilliant as they were focused on customer satisfaction and engaged with experts, however, the quality is not as good.

We also use Crowdstrike as our EDR solution. However, before Sentinel, I did not use anything else in this category.

I took part in the initial deployment. The process was very straightforward. It took about one week to onboard all that we needed. We did it in three phases. First, we did a demo and looked for items that needed to be addressed. We then onboarded the device and put the analytics and logs in place. 

We had a team of three on hand that handled the deployment. They also handle support and maintenance. 

We initially had the assistance of Microsoft partners. However, we failed to get all of the information we needed. We found it more valuable to get assistance from the vendor directly. 

I can't speak to the exact cost.

We are a customer of Microsoft. 

During implementation, it's helpful to get the vendor engaged in the implementation. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It's good to go with a single-vendor strategy. I've recommended this product to others.

The user experience should be the number one priority. Microsoft is working on this every day. It's very important to us that the user experience is maintained and there's no conflict between the products or connectors. Having one dashboard makes it easier for admins and businesses to be in touch, engage, and share. For example, my manager can see my reports even if he's not knowledgeable in the technology.

I work as a security team leader and consultant in the Netherlands. Additionally, I am the main architect for my organization. Our current focus is on building our own Security Operations Center for media entities, and we offer this service to our customers as well. Our solution ensures zero bypasses and integrates the XDR suite of our clients. Therefore, any customer looking for the same solution can benefit from our expertise.

Microsoft Sentinel has the potential to assist us in prioritizing threats across our entire enterprise. However, its effectiveness relies heavily on the quality of our analytics roles. If we have appropriate alerts in place, we can avoid unnecessary noise. If we can accurately prioritize incidents and assign the appropriate level, it will significantly aid us. Additionally, automation can help analysts make informed decisions by consolidating incidents and alerts.

I have completed many customer integrations. Currently, I am working with one of the largest healthcare retailers and a very large insurance company. They have a variety of other products, such as effective AI, Infoblocks, and Akamai as a last resort. Our goal is to consolidate all the alerts from these products into Sentinel, which sometimes requires processing or editing. We refer to this as social editing, which essentially means fixing issues. Ultimately, our objective is to have a comprehensive overview of everything in a single dashboard.

The effectiveness of the integrated solutions that work together natively varies. At times, a data connector may work well, while at other times, it may not. I have noticed that Sentinel has significant potential for the development of data connectors and passes. This observation is due to one of my customers requiring a considerable amount of additional processing for data connectors, which prompted us to make a request to Microsoft. Currently, we are pleased to see that Microsoft is integrating this functionality. On the other hand, we also have plans to work with a local collector that involves parsing logs and collecting log data using custom parsing services.

The effectiveness of integrated security products in providing comprehensive threat protection is improving. However, there is a risk of overlap in the functionalities of Microsoft's various products, leading to duplicate alerts or unwanted charges. Nonetheless, compliance is improving. Additionally, the endpoint portal is starting to function more like an application portal for multiple products. Using only the Defender portal instead of Sentinel would benefit many customers at present, though additional sources may provide added value. There are also many developments in this area worth exploring.

Microsoft Sentinel has the capability to collect data from our entire ecosystem, but it comes with a cost. As the head of IT, I would have the ability to obtain any sensitive data that I need. If there is a substantial amount of data, I can handle it. However, we need to establish a use case for the data before proceeding, as it could become too expensive for us to handle. Therefore, we will not be ingesting all the data available.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to investigate and respond to threats holistically from a single platform. This capability is powerful because we can create our own queries, and the language used is user-friendly. However, we must ensure that the data in Sentinel is properly structured. This means ensuring that our timestamps are consistent and accurate and that the quality of our data is high. By doing so, querying becomes easy and effective.

If we have a background in Azure, then it's relatively easy to understand the SOAR capabilities since it's built on Azure foundations and logic apps. This makes it more powerful.

The cost of Microsoft Sentinel is reasonable when compared to other SIEM and SOAR solutions. While the cost of ingestion may be high, the platform offers numerous capabilities for automation, alerting, monitoring, and operations. Therefore, we are receiving good value for our investment, even though it may not be the cheapest option on the market. Microsoft Sentinel's ongoing development of new features justifies the price point. For example, I compared it to a customer who used Splunk last year, and Splunk was more expensive and had fewer features.

Sentinel assists in automating routine tasks and identifying high-value alerts. For instance, we can configure it to automatically detect risks on specific accounts and receive notifications through an automatic inbox. While we exercise caution in implementing automation, we can leverage it during hours when staffing is limited to ensure timely and appropriate actions.

Sentinel's threat intelligence helps us prepare for potential threats and take action before they can impact us. Obtaining threat intelligence feeds from Microsoft would also be beneficial. We may eventually need to acquire an Excel feed, either from Microsoft or another source, but we must ensure that these expenses provide tangible value. I believe that the machine learning used by Microsoft Infusionsoft provides valuable threat intelligence with reliable patterns.

I've noticed that some customers are using on-premises environments such as Oxite for this particular task. However, since we're on a cloud platform, we don't have to handle and operate the systems as much because they are cloud services. This allows us to focus on the platform, the content, and making it work. The integration with Microsoft works well, and we can use similar queries in Sentinel as we do in Defender for Endpoint, which saves us time.

If we compare the current situation to that of five years ago, we can see that every company was spending less on this type of product because the threat wasn't as significant. However, over time, we have witnessed a significant increase in cyberattacks. As a result, every budget has been increased to address this issue. Therefore, in my opinion, Sentinel is not merely saving money; rather, we are utilizing our resources more efficiently.

I believe one of the main advantages is Microsoft Sentinel's seamless integration with other Microsoft products. This means that if we need to work with customers who already use the entire defense suite, we can easily collaborate with them. Additionally, the KQL language created is very robust and has a manageable learning curve for those who already have some experience. Furthermore, we can use KQL in other Microsoft platforms, making it a versatile tool. The AI aspect is also noteworthy, as it utilizes existing resources in Azure. For instance, if we have previous experience building Azure functions or using wireless technology, we can incorporate these skills into our playbook development in Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel provides visibility into threats, and the incident alert display has improved. However, I don't believe it is efficient or pleasant to work with, especially for specialists who work with it all day. We are considering putting our incident alerts into ServiceNow first, which would improve instant handling, logging, and monitoring, and streamline the investigation process. This is a potential area for improvement, but currently, the system is workable and easy to use. I understand that improvements are in progress, and I expect the system to get even better with time.

When we look at external SOAR and orchestration platforms, we have a better overview of all the rules, their behavior, and the correlation between them. From a technical perspective, it works well, but from a functional overview, there's room for improvement. For example, we need a clear understanding of what playbooks we have in our SOAR capabilities. Currently, we have a long list, and we need to know what each playbook does. If we want to add some playbooks in Azure, we need to consider the playbooks that we have in Azure that are not related to any schedule. This can make the environment a bit messy. While building them ourselves, we can have a clear understanding of the why, what, and how, but it can be complicated to know which playbook does what at a given moment or what role it best fits.

Currently, the watchlist feature is being utilized, and although there have been improvements, it is still not fully optimized. When examining the watchlist, it appears that it is not adequately supported in Sentinel's repository feature. As a result, we are constantly having to find workarounds, which is functional but require more effort. It is possible for Microsoft to improve efficiency, but they have not done so yet. 

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for three years.

Last year, there were some issues with Azure Sentinel, which is a specific service within the Azure platform. These issues affected the performance of Sentinel and caused some concerns. While the situation has improved, there may be further challenges as the platform continues to grow. As a cloud service, there is a risk of outages, which can be difficult to address. Overall, there are currently no complaints about the stability of Azure Sentinel, but it is important to stay vigilant about potential issues that may arise.

Sentinel's scalability is impressive. Currently, we have not encountered any limitations. While there may be a limit on the number of rules with a large amount of data, we have not reached that point. The system performs well, aided by the basic and archive loss features. In the event that those features are insufficient, we still have additional options available. Overall, I believe that Sentinel is highly scalable.

We used to utilize ArcSight Interset, an outdated on-premises product that wasn't suitable for our move to the cloud or offering services to our customers. Since we mainly use Microsoft products, we switched to Sentinel enthusiastically. Sentinel is a perfect fit for our organization.

The initial setup was straightforward and adoption was fast. Currently, our approach within the organization is, to begin with a simple implementation and ensure it is functional before incorporating more complex integrations. We started with basic tasks such as editing data files and integrating on-premises data responses. Once we have established a solid foundation, we will build upon it to create a more advanced version.

If we take all areas into account, we would need a considerable number of people for deployment. I believe we would need around 15 to 20 individuals, including engineering consultants, ServiceNow personnel, and others.

I give Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten.

We use the entire range of security measures except for Defender for IP. This is similar to how we use Defender for servers. In Azure, these measures are used on the front-end point, server, and callbacks. As for our customer implementations, I am responsible for carrying them out. For our own laptops, we have a strategy where we use Carbon Black instead of Defender for Endpoint. However, we still use Defender AV, and for other cloud applications, we use Defender for Office 365. The reason we continue to use Carbon Black is due to its legacy status.

Sentinel is a cloud service platform that is particularly useful for those who require sizable, scalable, and high-performing solutions.

Sentinel always requires some maintenance, which includes examining the ingested data to determine if it is being used for a specific purpose. It is important to evaluate the amount of data being stored and ensure that we are paying the correct price. Additionally, any necessary updates should be made to patch up any queries. These actions will result in improved efficiency and effectiveness.

The choice of the best-of-breed solution depends on the company's specific needs, but given the shortage of skilled personnel in many organizations, managing multiple products can be challenging. If we opt for a best-of-breed solution, we may end up having to maintain expertise in several different areas. On the other hand, choosing a single vendor, such as Microsoft, can be advantageous in terms of discounts, support, and skill maintenance. Our experience suggests that when evaluating a solution, it's essential to know the requirements, risks, and desired outcomes beforehand, rather than trying to ingest all available data, which can be costly and inefficient.

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. 

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 organization is a service company, therefore, we are proposing Microsoft Sentinel as an MSSP solution to our clients. Additionally, we are offering other solutions with Microsoft Sentinel. We have integrated Microsoft Sentinel with MISP, an open source intelligence trading platform, to create a deluxe solution. Furthermore, we use the five-year tool in conjunction with Microsoft Sentinel.

We pitched the solution for BFSI, healthcare, and ONG sectors.

The solution can be deployed based on the client's requirements.

Microsoft Sentinel provides visibility into threats by creating alerts, which will generate an instance and notify us. We can also view files and prioritize alerts using Microsoft Sentinel. Additionally, there is a tool with Sentinel that allows us to check alerts, which will help us identify false positives and false negatives, which is very beneficial for analysts.

Microsoft Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise.

Microsoft Sentinel's ability to help us prioritize threats is a very important must-have feature for our organization.

Integrating Microsoft Sentinel with additional Microsoft solutions such as Microsoft Security Center is easy because we use a Microsoft agent. There is a default integration available with multiple connectors and we can use the agent to install data into Microsoft Sentinel.

The integrated solutions work natively together to deliver a coordinated detection and response across our environment. We use a playbook for the response process. We also integrated ServiceNow tools and Sentinel for ITSM. We are also designing the playbooks to meet our requirements.

Having the ability to integrate solutions with Microsoft Sentinel is an important feature.

Microsoft Sentinel provides comprehensive protection. 

Our organization has a strong partnership with Microsoft. Most of the services we receive are quite cost-effective. Microsoft provides market listings, allowing us to design our solution and place it on Microsoft's market listings, resulting in mutual benefits for both Microsoft and our organization.

We used Microsoft Defender for Cloud to get to the Azure security center for Sentinel. We wanted to work with a particular server but at the time the requirement was in order to use Defender we had to enable the solution across the subscription and not on one particular server.

Microsoft Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire system if we want.

Microsoft Sentinel enables us to investigate and respond to threats from one place. We can control everything from a single pane of glass.

Microsoft's built-in UEBA and threat intelligence capabilities play a major role in our security.

We can automate routine tasks, prioritize alerts using the playbook, and use the analytical rule's default settings when creating an alert. This helps to reduce false positives so that we only receive one alert for each issue.

Microsoft's XDR enabled us to avoid having to view multiple dashboards. We can integrate a variety of tools with Sentinel, allowing us to monitor all relevant information from a single screen.

The integration into one dashboard reduced our analytical work because it reduces the time required to review and respond to threats. 

The solution helped us prepare for potential threats proactively. Microsoft Sentinel helped our organization save money by preventing attacks. The solution helped reduce the threat detection time by up to 40 percent.

The data connectors that Microsoft Sentinel provides are easy to integrate when we work with a Microsoft agent.

The UI design for the investigation portion of Microsoft Sentinel is great.

The alerting of the queries works great and it is easy to develop a query around our requirements using Microsoft Sentinel.

The GUI functionality has room for improvement.

The playbook can sometimes be hefty and has room for improvement.

The troubleshooting has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support depends on if we have upgraded our support or not. The basic support has a wait time but the premium support is great.

Positive

We previously used IBM Security QRadar. The data connectors are more complicated and there are more configurations required with IBM Security QRadar compared to Microsoft Sentinel. The alerts are much better with Microsoft Sentinel.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The implementation is completed in-house with Microsoft documentation.

In comparison to other security solutions, Microsoft Sentinel offers a reasonable price for the features included.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The maintenance is completed by Microsoft.

I recommend Microsoft Sentinel to others.

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.

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.

I support Microsoft Sentinel as a Microsoft partner. We work on various scenarios, such as emails and data connectors. I support licenses by helping them enroll and advising them on the prerequisites they need to meet. I show them how to get started with Microsoft Sentinel. 

I'm the technical lead for Microsoft, so I've worked on several Microsoft security products, including Sentinel, Cloud App Security, Defender, Azure Information Protection, and Azure Key Vault. These are now my significant areas. It wasn't easy to integrate Sentinel with other products initially, but we had a smooth experience once the data connectors and everything were in place.

We are from the support team, so we operate in multiple environments depending on the use case. It works smoothly in every environment, including hybrid ones.

I've seen scenarios where the customer's security score was at 60, but we managed to increase it to 80 or 90 based on the recommendations from Sentinel. We use Sentinel to investigate the activity logs and address the issues. The security score increases once we fix those. 

The benefit Sentinel provides depends on the organization and how they have recruited engineering staff. If the engineers can maintain two or three products, then it's easy for them, but it hasn't reduced any difficulty from my perspective. 

Sentinel saved us time. When this product was introduced, many customers used other SIEM and SOAR technologies separately. Now that we have Sentinel in place, customers only need to learn how to use this product, so it's 50% to 60% more efficient. It's also more cost-effective because you aren't paying separately for those security components. Sentinel is all-inclusive. 

Sentinel integrates seamlessly with Azure platform services, making it more reliable and cost-effective. I can't say with certainty because it's outside my department, but my best guess is that Sentinel can reduce costs by about 30% to 40%. I would also estimate that it reduces our response time by roughly that amount. 

The bidirectional sync capabilities ingest the data and show us alerts that help us prioritize our policy settings and secure our environment. Once we ingest the IP address, we can monitor the network traffic. It ingests everything from the IP address to the applications we use at the cloud level. Having every event, alert, and output from Log Analytics integrated into one platform is essential. We can ingest everything using the syslogs and data connectors. For example, I'm using Windows Server 2016. It will send the data to the cloud, and Microsoft Sentinel pulls it from there. It removes the sysadmin logs and the other logs, so we can easily see the DDoS attacks and other threats.

It ingests the networking stuff and other things, too. It collects everything the company needs to secure the data from data engineers, Log Analytics engineers, information production engineers, etc. It ingests data from everywhere and stores it in one place. You can pull whatever data you need. 

A security product must be integrated with multiple other technologies like SIEM and SOAR to give you the best results and analyze user behavior. Sentinel uses connectors to integrate all Azure products and third-party security tools.

Sentinel provides excellent threat visibility, enabling us to dig deep. It directly connects to Azure Log Analytics, allowing us to do research and pull logs. It uses SOAR intelligence to detect and fix issues using AI and machine learning algorithms.

The ability of all these solutions to work together natively is essential. We have an Azure subscription, including Log Analytics. This feature automatically acts as one of the security baselines and detects recommendations because it also integrates with Defender. We can pull the sysadmin logs from Azure. It's all seamless and native. 

Everything shares a common database so that every product can be integrated depending on your enterprise licenses. Microsoft is effortless from a customer's perspective. You get a wide range of features with one license, including threat detection, information protection, infrastructure solutions, and endpoint protection. One or two enterprise licenses cover everything. 

Sentinel is an excellent product with multiple dashboards if you want to look at something specific. It also has a centralized dashboard for everything if you want to see the overview of what's essential. I use multiple dashboards because it's easier for us as support team members. 

Microsoft Defender has a built-in threat expert option that enables you to contact an expert. That feature isn't available in Sentinel because it's a huge product that integrates all the technologies. I would like Microsoft to add the threat expert option so we can contact them. There are a few other features, like threat assessment that the PG team is working on. I expect them to release this feature in the next quarter.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for two-and-a-half years

Sentinel is stable. 

I rate Microsoft technical nine out of 10. 

Positive

Setting up Microsoft Sentinel is straightforward because it's a cloud platform. You can install it with a few clicks. It isn't like the on-premises solutions we have used in the past, where you need to spend a couple of hours. You can deploy Sentinel with one person in around five minutes if you have all the resources, permissions, and rules.

Like all products, Sentinel requires some maintenance. There are planned and unplanned outages. Depending on when Microsoft releases the updates, it can be challenging, but they usually notify us ahead of time.

Microsoft offers the best value from a customer perspective.  With a small amount of money, customers can take advantage of an array of technologies because everything is connected from the Microsoft perspective. The return on investment is massive. You don't need to recruit multiple engineers. One engineer who is familiar with Microsoft products can manage the solution. 

I think Sentinel's pricing is reasonable. It's more reliable if it can integrate with other enterprise technologies, so you have to pay for that. We have to consider the size of the organization. We might shift to other security products for a smaller company. Given the reliability of Microsoft support, Sentinel is cost-effective.  

Sentinel is one of the best products compared to other SIEM solutions like CyberArk. Microsoft's market share is enormous, and they have surpassed AWS, so more companies are adopting Sentinel. A company can centralize everything with Sentinel, and that's great from a cost perspective. 

I rate Microsoft Sentinel nine out of 10. I see a few areas of improvement, but they are already working on implementing these features. If someone asked me whether I would recommend an a la carte approach using the best-in-breed solutions or an all-in-one integrated package from a single vendor, I would say that both approaches have advantages. However, I think it's good to hand everything over to the vendor. A vendor will take the sole responsibility and do the work for you. 

I also recommend becoming an expert in Microsoft Sentinel because it has a bright future. You can earn a decent salary once you have hands-on experience with this product. Sentinel is not well known, but I think it will have 60 to 70 percent of the market share.

Our first use case is related to centralized log aggregation and security management. We have a number of servers at the user level and data center level, and I cannot use multiple tools to correlate all the information. My overall infrastructure is on Azure. We have a hybrid approach for the security environment by using Sentinel. So, hybrid security is one of the use cases, and unified security management is another use case.

It has helped us in three ways. One is IT, one is security, and one is compliance. Before Sentinel, our IT was mature, but our security and compliance were not mature enough in terms of certain controls, client requirements, and global-level regulatory compliance. By implementing the SIEM along with Security Center, we have improved security to a mature level, and we are able to meet the compliance reporting and client requirements for security within the organization.

It has an in-depth defense strategy. It is not limited to giving an alert; it also does correlation. There are three things involved when it comes to a SIEM solution: threats, alerts, and incidents. Sentinel gives you granular and concise information in the UI format about where the log has been generated. It doesn't only not give the timestamp, etc. This information is useful for the L1 and L2 SOC managers.

It has good built-in threat intelligence tools. You can configure a policy set and connectors, and you don't need to have any extra tools to investigate a particular platform. We can directly use the built-in threat intelligence tools and investigate a particular threat and get the answers from that.

We are using Microsoft stack. We use SharePoint. We use OneDrive for cloud storage. We use Teams for our internal productivity and communication, and we use Outlook for emails. For us, it provides 100% visibility because our infrastructure is on Microsoft stack. That's the reason why I'm very comfortable with Sentinel and its security. However, that might not be the case if we were not in Microsoft's ecosystem.

We are using Microsoft Defender. The integration with Microsoft Defender takes a few seconds. In the connector, you just need to click a button, and it will automatically connect. However, for data ingestion, it will take some time to configure the backend log, workspaces, etc.

It is useful for comprehensive reporting. We need to prepare RFPs for our clients. We need to do reporting on particular threats and their resolution. So, it is useful for our RFPs and our internal security enhancements.

It is helpful for security posture management. It has good threat intelligence, and it provides deep analysis. The security engine of Microsoft Sentinel takes the raw data of the logs and correlates and analyses them based on the security rules that we have created. It uses threat-intelligence algorithms to map what's happening within a particular log. For example, if somebody is trying to log into an MS Office account, it will try to see what logs are available for this particular user and whether there is any anomaly or unwanted access. It gives you all that information, which is very important from the compliance perspective. It is mandatory to have such information if you have ISO 27001, HIPAA, or other compliances.

It enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. It is not only about detecting threats. It is also all about investigating and responding to threats. I can specify how the alerts should be sent for immediate response. Microsoft Sentinel provides a lot of automation capabilities around reporting.

With the help of incidents that we are observing and doing the analysis of the threats, we are able to better tune our infrastructure. When we come across an incident or a loophole, we can quickly go ahead and review that particular loophole and take action, such as closing the ports. A common issue is management ports being open to the public.

It saves time and reduces the response time to incidents. We have all the information on the dashboard. We don't need to go ahead and download the reports.

There are a lot of dashboards available out of the box, and we can also create custom dashboards based on our requirements. There is also one dashboard where we can see the summary of all incidents and alerts. Everything can be correlated with the main dashboard.

We can use playbooks and data analytics. We have one system called pre-policy definitions where our internal team can work on the usability of a particular product. We get a risk-based ranking. Based on this risk-based ranking, we will create policies and incorporate data analytics to get the threats and alerts. We are almost 100% comfortable with Sentinel in terms of the rules and threat detections.

It improves our time to detect and respond. On detecting a threat, it alerts us within seconds.

The AI and ML of Azure Sentinel are valuable. We can use machine learning models at the tenant level and within Office 365 and Microsoft stack. We don't need to depend upon any other connectors. It automatically provisions the native Microsoft products.

Playbooks are also valuable. When I compare it with the playbooks in other SIEM solutions, such as Splunk, AlienVault, or QRadar, the playbooks that Sentinel is providing are better.

The SOAR architecture is also valuable. We use productivity apps, such as Outlook and Teams. If a security breach is happening, we automatically get security alerts on Teams and Outlook. Automation is one of its benefits.

We are working with a number of products around the cybersecurity and IoT divisions. We have Privileged Identity Management and a lot of firewalls to protect the organizations, such as Sophos, Fortinet, and Palo Alto. Based on my experience over three years, if you have your products in the Microsoft or Azure environment or a hybrid environment around Microsoft, all these solutions work well together natively, but with non-Microsoft products, there are definitely integration issues. Exporting the logs is very difficult, and the API calls are not being generated frequently from the Microsoft end. There are some issues with cross-platform integration, and you need to have the expertise to resolve the issues. They are working on improving the integration with other vendors, but as compared to other platforms, such as Prisma Cloud Security, the integration is not up to the mark.

The second improvement area is log ingestion. Sometimes, we are observing large ingestion delays. We expect logs within 5 minutes, but it takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

They can work on their documentation. For Sentinel, not many user or SOP information documents are available on the internet. They should provide more information related to how to deploy your Sentinel and various available options. Currently, the information is not so accurate. They say something at one place, and then there is something else at other places.

It has been about two years.

It is stable. They are enhancing it and upgrading it as well.

It is scalable. It is being used across all departments. We took it for about 80 devices, but, within 24 hours, we mapped it to 240 devices.

Technical support is very straightforward. They will not help you out with your specific use cases or requirements, but they will give you a basic understanding of how a particular feature works in Sentinel.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution in this company. We went for this because as per our compliance requirements, we needed to have this installation in place. About 80% of our environment is on Microsoft, and we could just spin up Azure Sentinel.

It is straightforward. Usually, you can deploy within seconds, but in order to replicate an agent on your Sentinel, it will take about 12 to 24 hours.

We engaged Microsoft experts to deploy the agents across the devices on the cloud. It didn't take much time on the cloud, but for on-prem, it takes some time.

It has saved a lot of time. Implementing a SIEM solution from a third-party vendor, such as AlienVault OSSIM, can take about 45 days to 60 days of time, but we can roll out Sentinel within 15 days if everything is on Microsoft.

For implementation, we have about three people. One is from the endpoint security team. One is from the compliance team, and one is from the security operations team.

It is a cloud solution. So, no maintenance is required.

We have reached our compliance goals, and we have been able to meet our client's requirements. We are getting a lot of revenue with this compliance.

It has saved us money. It would be about $2,500 to $3,000 per month.

It varies on a case-by-case basis. It is about $2,000 per month. The cost is very low in comparison to other SIEMs if you are already a Microsoft customer. If you are using the complete Microsoft stack, the cost reduces by almost 42% to 50%.

Its cost depends on the number of logs and the type of subscription you have. You need to have an Azure subscription, and there are charges for log ingestion, and there are charges for the connectors.

I would strongly recommend it, but it also depends on the infrastructure. I would advise understanding your infrastructure and use cases, such as whether your use case is for compliance or for meeting certain client requirements. Based on that, you can go ahead and sign up for Sentinel.

If you have the native Microsoft stack, you can easily ingest data from your ecosystem. There is no need to think about all the other things or vendors. However, in a non-Microsoft environment where, for example, you have endpoint security from Trend Micro, email security for Mimecast, and IPS and IDS from Sophos, FortiGate, or any other solution, or cloud workloads on AWS, Microsoft Sentinel is not recommended. You can go for other solutions, such as Splunk or QRadar. If about 80% of your infrastructure is on Microsoft, you can definitely go with Microsoft Sentinel. It will also be better commercially.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 based on my use case.

I work for a security operation center. We use Microsoft Sentinel to monitor the tenants of our customers and provide automated investigations and feedback and alerting.

If something happens or if we get an alert, we also use it to investigate further. We do a deep analysis of the logs that we ingest from our customers. We also have many automation rules built into Microsoft Sentinel to reduce the noise and not-true positive alerts.

There is the ease of setup and ease of use. When we get new customers, we do not need to go onsite, build a system inside their on-premise network, and spend a lot of time setting up the systems. We can easily deploy a new Sentinel solution for a customer with automated templates, which benefits a lot in onboarding new customers. Because we have integrated it with many other security solutions from Microsoft, we can also perform many actions for which we otherwise would have needed VPN access or would have had to go to the customer site. So, the main benefit is that we can easily do anything from anywhere without having to spend much time setting up and onboarding.

We have combined it with other tools such as Microsoft 365 Defender Suite. With all tools combined and the customization that we have developed, we get pretty good insights into possible threats. It all depends on the logs you ingest. If you ingest the right logs, you can get very meaningful insights.

It helps us to prioritize threats across the enterprise. It does that in a very good way. It prioritizes the threats based on multiple factors. If multiple similar incidents happen or suspicious related activities happen at the same time, the incident gets a high priority because that's likely to be a real threat, but it also ingests the priorities that come from the other tools. You also have the ability to adapt priorities because each customer is different. Each business is different. We give our customers a standby for tickets that come in with priority two or higher. Microsoft Sentinel also gives us the chance to lower priority on some cases or upper the priority on some cases depending on the business use case of the customer.

We are a Microsoft security company, so we try to use as many Microsoft security tools as possible. We have Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 as well. They are integrated into Defender 365 currently. We use the compliance portal. We use Microsoft Purview. We use Microsoft Sentinel. We use Microsoft Defender for Key Vault. We try to use as many security solutions as possible.

We have integrated these products with each other, and we have succeeded in it as well. Each product is at least integrated with Microsoft Sentinel by either using the way provided by Microsoft or a custom way to ingest data. We have integrated Defender 365 and other tools as well. We try to ingest alerts only from one place, if possible. We have integrated everything into one portal, and we ingest the data only from that portal. The integration for Microsoft solutions mostly works natively, but some of our customers have third-party solutions that we can integrate as well.

It's very important that Microsoft solutions work natively. When they work natively, you can have more built-in functionality for them. They are much more maintainable, and it does not take as much time to set up versus when you have to make a custom integration to something.

Microsoft Sentinel enables us to ingest data from the entire ecosystem. We can make custom integrations. If you have Linux machines or on-premises networks, you can set up a log forwarder inside the network and ingest the data that way into Microsoft Sentinel. There are many possibilities to ingest data from all locations, which is necessary for an XDR/SIEM solution. This ingestion of data is one of the most important things for our security operations because if we cannot ingest any data, we are partially blind on that side.

Microsoft Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. You do have to learn the KQL language, but it's similar to many other languages that are created by Microsoft or adopted by Microsoft. It's not that hard to learn. If you know it well, you can easily perform analysis on a whole bunch of data, whereas without Microsoft Sentinel, you would have to perform the analysis at many different places. Microsoft Sentinel gives you the possibility to do it just in one place.

We do not use all the functionalities of Microsoft Sentinel. For example, hunting queries are something that we do not use often, but their threat intelligence is updated quite regularly. We have tried it in Purview, which is a separate threat intelligence license that you can buy from Microsoft, but Microsoft also provides basic rules that alert on multiple threat indicators they detected earlier. They are very useful at the beginning sometimes. You have to remove those rules yourself as soon as they get outdated. The alerting that we get out of the threat intelligence provided by Microsoft itself has been valuable many times for our use cases.

Microsoft Sentinel helps automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts. If we see many recurring alerts that are always suspicious but not really malicious, we can build our own automation rules that auto-close these alerts or automatically lower the priority on those alerts so that we are not getting too many notifications from alerts that are not worth investigating. It's really easy to do that. You can do it in many ways. To do the automation, there is a user-friendly interface. There are just drag-and-drop steps. It helps a lot, and it's easy to implement as well.

It has helped to eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and have one dashboard for the analysis part, but for the response actions, it hasn't eliminated that because we have to log on to the Microsoft Defender security portals to perform most of those actions. For the analysis part, the alerting part, and the automated investigation part, this is the solution.

Its threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps. For example, as soon as the Log4j vulnerability was known to the public, we immediately got alerts. We were able to take immediate action and remediate the vulnerability. We immediately knew how to prioritize our customers because we knew which customers already had active exploitation. Most of the time, such attempts were blocked, and if they got through, then the machine was luckily not really vulnerable, but it has been very helpful at that point to immediately assess the criticality for our customers. The attempts were not successful for many reasons. It also blocked them immediately.

It has saved us time. Especially because of the automated investigation part, it saved us a lot of time. We also have automated reporting, which also saves a lot of time each month. We provide our customers with a monthly report. If we had to do it manually and gather data from many different places, it would take a lot of time. Even if we had to fill it in manually in Microsoft Sentinel, it would take a lot of time, but because Microsoft Sentinel already ingests all of the data we use in our reports, we were able to write an integration with Microsoft Sentinel, which takes care of 75% of our reporting, and then we only have to do our analysis part. The data is already filled in, which saves a lot of time each month. The time savings went from one day per customer to one hour or two hours. For nearly fifteen customers, it was fifteen days, and now, it's 30 hours, which is more or less four days. It saves a lot of time each month that can now be spent on improving our service or performing deeper investigations on newly known threats and proactively act on them.

It hasn't reduced our time to detect because we have been using Microsoft Sentinel from the beginning. So, we always had the same response time because we only used Microsoft Sentinel for our alerting. It integrates well with Atlassian tools and ServiceNow tools, which gives us the ability to be alerted very fast on something, and then we can act immediately.

It's easy to use. It's a very good product. It can easily ingest data from anywhere. It has an easily understandable language to perform actions. You can use the entire Azure cloud to perform automated actions and automate investigations. The possibilities are more or less limitless because you can integrate Microsoft Sentinel with many resources inside the Azure cloud. If you integrate the security tooling with it, you can also make use of the data that Microsoft gathers from all Windows operating systems about malware, for instance, or about possible attacks. They ingest that data from so many sources, and you can make use of it. It helps a lot in discovering new vulnerabilities. We can almost immediately investigate them because Microsoft is always on top of things.

Threat intelligence could be better because we have had some cases where we got alerted online for many things all of a sudden. It was because some updates happened in the background, and we didn't agree with the use cases or how they were built. That part of threat intelligence could be a little better.

We have also had incidents where other tooling got an update but Microsoft Sentinel didn't update.

Microsoft Sentinel is a simple and straightforward solution. It could have a better API to be able to automate many things more extensively and get more extensive data and more expensive deployment possibilities. It can gain some points on the automation part and the integration part. The API is very limited, and I would like to see it extended a bit more.

We have recently turned on the bi-directional sync capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It works pretty well, but sometimes, it just syncs only the incidents and not the alerts behind them or the other way around. That was the only thing. That was a recent complaint we had. Other than that, it works well.

I've been using Microsoft Sentinel for nearly two years.

It's very stable. We have many different Microsoft Sentinel instances running. Apart from some cleanup and maintenance, they all are running without any issues.

It's very scalable. As long as you send the right logs, it can ingest them perfectly, but, of course, the more logs you ingest, the higher the price, so you have to be very careful and very concerned about the logs you are ingesting in Microsoft Sentinel. You have to make sure that the logs that you ingest provide value for your security and are not useless.

I have not contacted them regarding Microsoft Sentinel, but I have contacted them for other solutions. Sometimes, we can't figure something out ourselves or we have questions about the new features that are made public. If we have a question or need assistance in any way in providing support to our customers, we can count on support to help us. I have not had a bad experience with them. We are also a Microsoft partner, so we get quick replies and have direct contacts within Microsoft sometimes for some cases. If we need support, they always help us very well.

Overall, I would rate them a seven out of ten because sometimes, they take a long time or you get redirected many times to another colleague before the issue is resolved, but in the end, they always help us out, and everything is fixed.

Neutral

In my previous job, we worked with local or on-premise systems, but the security monitoring was not that strong at that time. This is my second job, and in this job, I've only worked with Microsoft Sentinel.

I worked on one of the deployment scripts we use for our customers, but I was not involved in its initial deployment. I deployed it once for a customer by using the Azure resource manager template that I built. It was rather complex because the documentation was not up to date or correct at that time. When working with Microsoft Sentinel, sometimes the documentation is not as up-to-date or complete as it should be in my opinion.

The number of people involved in its deployment depends on the size of the customer, but usually, one or two people from the team do the deployment. One person works on the deployment of Microsoft Sentinel, and the other one usually works on the deployment of other components, such as analytics, automation, etc.

It does require maintenance. In order to stay up to date and keep evolving on the threat landscape, you have to keep looking for new analytic rules, new investigation techniques, and new automations. You have to constantly improve your Sentinel in order to stay on point and detect and have complete detection scenarios. Sometimes, the rules that are provided by Microsoft or the settings or conditions that are provided by Microsoft get deprecated or get a new update. You have to follow that up as well in order to stay up to date with the things Microsoft changes or recommends.

If you want to use Microsoft Sentinel, you should start thinking about the logs that you want to ingest. You should identify the ones that are important and also think of the use cases and what you want to detect from those logs. If you make the right choices on these two things, the setup and the integration with other tools will be very easy because you know from where you want to ingest logs and you know how to create analytics rules, automation rules, and things like that to detect the things that are critical or important to the security of your business.

To a security colleague who says it’s better to go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor’s security suite, I would say that with a single vendor, we can integrate everything like a single product. We use Azure Active Directory, so we can easily secure authentication across multiple products and manage access permissions. On top of that, we have a single pane of glass where we can investigate and perform analysis in a very easy and user-friendly way, which saves a lot of time. We don't have to click through many different portals and know where to look each time. We don't have to learn the configuration, the setup, and the actions we can perform in each system because everything has the same interface. We only have to learn the things that Microsoft provides and not different products. The single pane of glass saves time and makes it much easier to investigate and respond and secure the environment.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten. I'm very happy with it, but no product is perfect. It can improve on some points, but overall, it's very good.