LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

LogRhythm is good for providing a comprehensive view of the environment. It gives a great outline of whatever is going on in our servers and systems regarding security malfunctions. The SIEM sends real-time notifications when there are some occurrences; like creating a new user and inappropriate login attempts. It also avails a good use case that meets our HIPAA compliance.

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

• LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform has an alarm system that generates tickets based on the event and the way it has been configured in the LogRhythm console. Let's say we have a ticket for a malicious email attachment. The ticket will some information like the source of the log, the source IP, destination IP etc. It can be drilled down to obtain specific information like the recipient, source location, file attachment name, SHA hash of the file, source and destination port, time, mac address of the machine that downloaded it etc. This helps the analysts to go to the root of the cause and take actions easily without manually parsing them.
• The second good thing about the LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform is that it is very easy to use with its well-structured interface. To use LogRhythm, an user barely require any technical skills. A little overview of IP, CIDR, hash, etc. is enough to get your hands on it. It requires no programming or coding skills, as everything is GUI based. It also provides a beautiful visualization dashboard. There is another beautiful feature that it provides for the classification of events, known as cases. Multiple users working on the same platform can create cases and add events to it. They also help to maintain future reference.
• The third good feature is the search tool which is very powerful. For example, sometimes it is hard to find the users who downloaded a malware from the guest wireless of the institution and not the private network. The search tool helps us in searching the user by automatically correlating the MAC address from the current network logs and the previous logs as the MAC address is the same. It is highly scalable for parsing a large number of logs from various sources.
• I particularly think this is one of the best software available for log parsing in an organization where non-technical users are working on incident response. This tool has a good amount of flexibility. However, it can only be configured with the LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform Console.
• In terms of usability, as already mentioned, it is a very easy tool to use, with a GUI based interface.

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

• LogRhythm absolutely needs to provide back end support for threat intelligence lists. Performing a linear search on massive lists of IPs on incoming web traffic can bring the SIEM to its knees.
• LogRhythm should drop its entire code base for implementing lists and simply turn them into hash tables to avoid the excessive cost associated with referencing lists in rules. I haven't seen the code, but the performance suggests O(n).
• The reporting feature is the worst of all SIEMs, luckily reports are not my primary service offering. LogRhythm should definitely revamp its reporting to be more intuitive.

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

LogRhythm is focused on SIEM. That is their core business. Cost of operations, feature set and ease of use. The Log Rhythm support team is outstanding. Overall reliability is good. Reporting module needs some improvement and LR is promising that there will be significant improvements in future releases.

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

LogRhythm does a rather decent job of making the functionality advanced (allowing for advanced keyword & field searching, use of "AND" as well as "OR" statements in the search bar) while keeping it accessible (by not requiring a specific syntax to do quick searches). This combined with a user interface that has headings and labels that are intuitive is very helpful.

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

While LogRhythm support is generally quick to respond, the initial response is usually from a first line support engineer with general knowledge of the product. Any advanced or complex issues have always required the assistance of a higher tier of support, directly or indirectly. For a few occasions we actually used our PS hours to work on the issue.

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

• Buy professional services.
• Buy and implement the system if possible.
• Remember that the end point log configuration may require other teams in your company to assist you in getting the desired logs from all resources.
• Attend the end user and daily operations training after a period of usage so you are not overwhelmed with information on concepts not yet seen.
• Don't be afraid to call for help during your first months of use.
• Don't close any ticket until you are sure the expected results are verified.
• Use the community forums to discuss issues with your peers.
• Watch the training videos offered by L R University.

Incentivized

LogRhythm was simpler to set up and configure as well as extract information from. It also was less intrusive in terms of how many appliances were needed to implement. We were up and running within 5 hours to start accepting log sources. We selected LogRhythm as well since support is based in the USA in Colorado.

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

• The ability to search through logs in a centralized location really helps us to provide RCA (Root Cause Analysis) to management for outages. This helps us to quickly identify the cause of outages and thus saves money due to reduced downtime.
• Being able to configure the alarms to provide real-time notification (and responses) to security events helps to prevent potential loss due to compromises (such as a fraudulent wire transfer).
• The initial investment in LogRhythm SIEM is somewhat expensive, however, the appliance is built to your specific needs so you won't have to constantly be upgrading the device as your company grows.

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