Cisco IPS Sensor (Discontinued) vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

IPS sensors are more suited for companies that do not have visibility into their network with third-party analyzing tools. Scenarios would be to place IPS sensors at the perimeter firewalls mainly. IPS sensors are less appropriate for companies that have third-party analyzing tools that will mitigate vulnerabilities and malicious traffic and activities already.

Incentivized

Optimal for SolarWinds Security Event Manager needs for smaller companies - it is a very cool product but has some limitations around EPS (which gets chewed up quickly if you're doing it the right way & adding servers/storage/FW & other network devices)... Also pricing model is GREAT (not consumption-based, which is the greatest grift the SIEM industry has created).

Incentivized

• Identifies and blocks malicious traffic.
• Detects unwanted traffic and allows your company to be proactive, let alone reactive.
• Comprehensive Threat protection allows companies to adjust thresholds and policies at will.

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

• The web GUI is somewhat slow.
• Sometimes difficult to adjust policies.
• Fail open feature may not work properly all the time.

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

Cisco TAC has been great at helping with configurations and issues that may arise

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

IPS sensors provides the necessary network visibility my company needs to satisfy its security appetite. By doing so, we have been able to stay compliant and up to date with today's network security requirements and procedures. We are able to be proactive with vulnerabilities and reactive to malicious traffic and intrusions in our day to day operations.

Incentivized

Fortianalzyer can only do logs from FortiGate so usefulness is limited. Elasticsearch was a lot slower than Solarwinds and the filters were a lot harder to set up and use. The connectors for SEM were far more stable.

Incentivized

• Provided less need to purchase third party analyzing tools.
• Needed more dedicated staff to build/review/and maintain policies and such.
• Answers companies need for network security.

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