Likelihood to Recommend Solarwinds SEM is great for generating reports for investigation purposes. Once you set up the connectors you can walk away and the product runs without needing maintenance. It was however pretty difficult to create the reports and alerts when now starting out and it can be very intimidating for new users.
Read full review Splunk is excellent when all your data is in one location. Its ability to correlate all that data is intuitive (once the hurdle of learning the query language is overcome). It is also easy to standardize the presentation of information to the company. When data is siloed/standalone, other systems can be cheaper and faster to implement.
Read full review Pros It does a great job of notifying us when accounts have been locked out. We can then find out the device on the network where the login attempt occurred. Searching for incidents is now a lot faster with the implementation of the HTML 5 interface. Read full review This SIEM consolidates multiple data points and offers several features and benefits, creating custom dashboards and managing alert workflows. Splunk Cloud provides a simple way to have a central monitoring and security solution. Though it does not have a huge learning curve, you should spend some time learning the basics. Splunk Cloud enables me to create and schedule statistical reports on network use for Management. Read full review Cons All SolarWinds product suffer from slow response times in management portals. SolarWinds SEM is no exception. While it is much preferred over a "thick client" there is much room for improvement in speed. If you use the email alert features with SolarWinds make sure to prepare you staff and team for the large amount of emails they could receive. Make sure to reduce the number of alerts so your team does not ignore the alerts. Read full review The SPL programming language that the queries are built in is not very intuitive. There should be a better repository of pre-built queries for what I would think of as common Active Directory usage monitoring. I would like to see more free training/familiarization information made available. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM
Read full review Usability If you are familiar with SolarWinds then you can use this product it's as easy as that. If you have never used a SolarWinds product then it will take a minute to get how they do reports and make dashboards but that being said the tool is great and can make things very easy once you get a feel for how it works and get everything setup how you like it.
Read full review Overall, it is very usable. I would like if recent searches were saved for longer because I always have to refer to my notes when I'm looking for something specific and it's been a few weeks. But that's a small issue, and the actual search and browsing interface is easy to use and powerful.
Read full review Support Rating The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material.
Read full review Splunk Cloud support is sorely lacking unfortunately. The portal where you submit tickets is not very good and is lacking polish. Tickets are left for days without any updates and when chased it is only sometimes you get a reply back. I get the feeling the support team are very understaffed and have far too much going on. From what I know, Splunk is aware of this and seem to be trying to remedy it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Splunk was a pretty good product but the licensing structure needed a lot of work. They changed the structure three times that I am aware and I still had problems understanding LogRhythm had a lot of issues correlating users to IP addresses, the mappings were frequently wrong so this product could not be trusted in my environment as all our access logs are IP based and this needs to be matched to usernames from AD Fortianalzyer is a great product but it can only do logs from Fortigates so that was not helping for anything other than our firewalls.
Read full review Splunk Cloud blows
Sumo Logic out of the water. The experience is night and day. We went from several highly stressed IT security professionals who were unsure if the data they were getting was valuable, to very happy IT security professionals who can now be more proactive and get all the information they need.
Read full review Return on Investment For the price, it produced a decent value. It did a lot of the easy stuff well. I can't give any specific data given the objective of the product was to monitor very basic events in the environment. There are free options that can do a better job. Read full review End-end visibility across your departmental silos Strengthen the overall global monitoring posture Move from Reactive to Proactive Monitoring Highly secure environment at your finger-tips Takes you away from managing infrastructure/administration, allows saving time & money. Reduce the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Screenshots