Amazon CloudWatch vs. IBM Security QRadar SIEM

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

Incentivized

I would only recommend IBM Security QRadar SIEM in a few situations. For one, it's very easy to setup and use if all your log sources are generic from known vendors. It's also significantly cheaper than Splunk, which is nice if you're trying to save money or be more efficient. I would not recommend IBM Security QRadar SIEM for environments with a lot of custom logs and complicated detection requirements.

Incentivized

• It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
• It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
• If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Incentivized

• Enables identification and prioritization of vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure for corrective action.
• Facilitates security incident investigation and forensic analysis.
• Provides a real-time view of security events, enabling immediate incident response.
• Can integrate with external threat intelligence sources to enrich data and improve threat detection.
• Enables the generation of detailed and customized reports.

Incentivized

• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

Incentivized

• Need to spend more time configuring the system to properly interpret and normalize different type of data collected from multiple resources.
• While Rule creation QRadar uses that rules to detect security threats and generate alerts, but to creating and managing rules is bit complex & tedious work to complete.
• IBM Security QRadar SIEM is excellent in handling large & complex systems that requires in-depth knowledge and extensive training to configure and maintain the system which includes upgrading, optimization of performance & issue troubleshooting.

Incentivized

QRadar is an established and stable product, we have been using it for many years and want to continue to focus on it. Anyone who has used the product and knows it knows how reliable it is and how it facilitates continuous monitoring of threats from outside and inside. it is an exceptional product that is very useful for us.

Incentivized

It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.

Incentivized

As a grade I give 8 as QRadar is not easy to learn. It requires some time to master it. It also needs a team of people actively working on the product. Once you learn to use it the software works very well and it is easy to correlate and understand detected threats. It only takes time to learn how to use it well and configure it properly.

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Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

Incentivized

Customer support is Good of IBM, While Using IBM QRadar its deployment is to slow and suddenly stop working and crashed we have contacted IBM Support and Rised a Ticket within a few minute we get call back from customer support and Query Resolved by them Fast And Rapid Support of Ibm

Incentivized

The training was very useful and the people who taught us were very knowledgeable. Although the software may initially seem difficult to learn they made things much easier for us.

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The training was very useful and the people who taught us were very knowledgeable. Although the software may initially seem difficult to learn they made things much easier for us.

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Initial patience is required to learn how to use the product, and it takes a dedicated team to use it. One person is not enough, and it's not enough to just set it up and check it once in a while. It has to be used daily and kept under control to be used effectively

Incentivized

Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed

Incentivized

IBM Qradar takes the best from its competitors. Reliable and stable but sometimes very expensive, the SIEM from IBM offers a wide range of scenarios in which the customers can suite and size their own infrastructures. IBM Qradar doesn't really needs to stack up againt its competitors because it already sets an example in the SIEM world.

Incentivized

• Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
• Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
• Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.

Incentivized

• Offense investigation was really helped in tackling the incidents. It was accurate and brief
• The automation with IBM resilient (SOAR) was a milestone in elimination of user mistakes
• The X-Force threat intelligence supported us in getting the work done without any 3rd party enterprise OSINT database

Incentivized