BigPanda vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

If the organization has a proper CMDB asset record then BigPanda features can be utilized to their true potential as it has alert correlation capability. The alert can be redirected to the proper support team using the auto-share feature. This wouldn't be the case where asset records are not updated and the Operations have to manually assign the alerts to support groups.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Alert correlation feature helps in grouping similar alerts together
• Alert Enrichment to enhance the data after it arrives on the tool
• Integration with multiple tools
• The console is very user friendly and provides ease of administration

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Tool should have a feature to query the data
• The dashboard feature needs improvement
• It should have a dark mode

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

TrueSight didn't provide many customization options. The features provided were primitive as compared to BigPanda. TrueSight was being used just for alert visibility and assignment to a proper support group from a single console. Although Moogsoft had similar features as compared to BigPanda, the user administration and ease of use were a bit complicated. BigPanda provides a much simpler user interface.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• BIgPanda is very easy to implement and use
• Better than the previous tool, provides more functionality
• BIgPanda's alert enrichment feature very helpful

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized