Solarwinds Security Event Manager (SEM) is the best solution for price/performance. The solution has an easily understandable architecture and also the solution can be installed easily. The solution is a very stable and fast solution for our company size.
I know the Qradar is not the right SIEM tool to compete with Solarwinds SEM but when we looked from a cost, audit & compliance perspective (which are major for many customers), we knew the log management and compliance with regulation would be achieved with SEM. But no machine …
QRadar is very well suited on environments where there are not multiple tenants or domains, we do have success on this kind of scenario. IBM Security QRadar SIEM is less appropriate for environments with multiple tenants, specially when each tenant represent a different End Costumer (such as for MSSP companies), those environments require a high amount of rules and building blocks replications, since each tenant will have its own "BB definitions", servers, rules exception, etc. Also, some information, such as EPS count or EPS dropped are generated by QRadar's own log sources, which takes place on default domain, therefore users associated with different domain can not have access to those logs, even when the information is related to other domain's environment. For example, even if Event Collector 1 is associated to Domain A, the log informing its dropped EPS is generated by System notification, log source that must be associated to Default domain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With the arrival of IBM Security QRadar SIEM at our company, we have a better vision of all the security needs that may arise, it is a very safe software to use that prevents threats from damaging our IT environment, it is impossible to change it for another software.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
