Cisco Stealthwatch is a network behavior analysis product based on technology acquired by Cisco with its Lancope acquisition in 2015.
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ExtraHop Performance Platform
Score 8.3 out of 10
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ExtraHop in Seattle, Washington offers an IT operations analytics platform via the ExtraHop Performance Platform, providing a dynamic, real-time view of all transactions in the IT environment, every team from NetOps to SecOps can spot and solve problems fast.
Few products operate off the Netflow or RAP/SPAN traffic versus the endpoint. Of those products, many operate from the aggregate traffic of uplinks/downlinks, whereas Secure Network Analytics focuses on viewing all traffic to give per-endpoint comprehensive data analytics. SNA is a great product for network visibility and detection, and to preserve that focus, other options such as remediation or quarantined are deferred to other products in the security ecosystem. SNA uses Machine Learning models to determine traffic behavioral compliance, which is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it mitigates zero day attacks changing traffic patterns, but conversely, it requires training to know acceptable traffic patterns. Unfortunately, many adopters of SNA do not spend the time giving it the user input and so the ML models never gets the correct weights and parameters to work from.
One very big use is the ability to resolve performance issues. One example used was with the performance of sql issues. ExtraHop [Performance Platform] gave us the packet tracing ability to see the database was being queried incorrectly. A programmer has written a query that would bring the database information local and one the queries instead of allowing the sql server itself to do the work and push out the information.
There are things that you can search for a particular type of traffic, but you cannot create an alert to alert on that type of traffic. An example of that is a particular encryption type. So like RC4 encryption is prohibited within DHS. I can search for traffic using it, but I can't create a rule alerting on that traffic type.
Some person like me who want to see Extrahop can integrate better with other network analysis tools like Wireshark or TCPdump. The desired functionality I've been looking for is to program a kind of specific criteria to trigger the probe starts to run Wireshark or TCPdump to save the trace of a specific problematic session. Sometimes I want to see the evidence in a packet trace layer rather than just have the warning or error only presented in the dashboard.
Cisco Secure Network Analytics is a fantastic tool, but does require some setup and upkeep which may turn off smaller IT Security teams. However, once all the flows are set up and the product is functioning with the proper rules, the insight into your network is fantastic. For us, the product has a significant ROI and will be a product we keep up on.
Strong and complete tool which gives comprehensive methods to discover cyber security incidents and prevent data leakage. In case of common use of Cisco StealthWatch and Cisco ISE, you will receive [the] ability [to] not just discover cyber security incidents but also dynamically respond to them. This makes StealthWatch one of most valuable products through[out] [the] whole Cisco Security product portfolio.
We haven't had too many issues with the uptime and availability of CSNA, but the application does have a lot of dependancies and we have seen issues after an upgrade that caused an outage for several hours.
Overall winner because it exceeds our expectations by answering all our requirements and at the same time empowers our operations thru other built-in capabilities it has. Visibility is a key to security operations and Cisco StealthWatch really gives us a magnifying glass to check all logs in the network for threat intelligence and threat hunting.
Implementation of the product can be tedious, especially fine tuning its rules to customize it to your environment. However, after that is done, CSNA is a very useful and flexible product that would enhance the security posture of any corporate network.
After integrating and developing a lot of security features in MF NNM, we were not able to meet the requirements from the customer. After the alternative research, we got to know about this Cisco Secure Network Analytics tool and after implementing the same, we finally were able to win CSAT. MF NNM had a support-related issue as well. It took more than a month to solve for couple of issues frequently. Whenever there is a problem or need their support, reaching out to them has always been a challenge.
We use ExtraHop specifically to monitor network traffic. It does many other things very well also, but it is the best network traffic analysis tool that we currently have in house. The fact that it is agentless also makes it more reliable and not dependent on agents running on devices throughout our enterprise.
It is a little pricey - in my organization, with budget cuts, I eventually had to replace it with an open source product (NTOP). While it works well for visibility, it simply isn't the same. If you can afford it, don't bother looking anywhere else - just get it.
Being able to detect, pivot out, and remmediate from one console was awesome.
