Microsoft Sentinel (formerly Azure Sentinel) is designed as a birds-eye view across the enterprise. It is presented as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.
Perfect for projects where Elasticsearch makes sense: if you decide to employ ES in a project, then you will almost inevitably use LogStash, and you should anyways. Such projects would include: 1. Data Science (reading, recording or measure web-based Analytics, Metrics) 2. Web Scraping (which was one of our earlier projects involving LogStash) 3. Syslog-ng Management: While I did point out that it can be a bit of an electric boo-ga-loo in finding an errant configuration item, it is still worth it to implement Syslog-ng management via LogStash: being able to fine-tune your log messages and then pipe them to other sources, depending on the data being read in, is incredibly powerful, and I would say is exemplar of what modern Computer Science looks like: Less Specialization in mathematics, and more specialization in storing and recording data (i.e. Less Engineering, and more Design).
I recommend Microsoft Sentinel for effective threat detection and response. It is a great SIEM and SOAR solution for businesses, and we have used it effectively, which is why I recommend it. Since it works across on-premises and multi-cloud environments, it is ideal for businesses of all sizes. Being AI-equipped and its ability to handle threat analytics make it irresistible.
Logstash design is definitely perfect for the use case of ELK. Logstash has "drivers" using which it can inject from virtually any source. This takes the headache from source to implement those "drivers" to store data to ES.
Logstash is fast, very fast. As per my observance, you don't need more than 1 or 2 servers for even big size projects.
Data in different shape, size, and formats? No worries, Logstash can handle it. It lets you write simple rules to programmatically take decisions real-time on data.
You can change your data on the fly! This is the CORE power of Logstash. The concept is similar to Kafka streams, the difference being the source and destination are application and ES respectively.
I appreciate that it keeps the data within our, what we call our, authorization boundary. The fact that the data remains within Microsoft's, I guess, walled garden if you will, is very helpful for certain compliance needs in particular.
The large library of ingestion: ability to ingest is basically as easy as I can basically get it to be most of the time. There's occasionally some vendors that it's a little bit more challenging for, but given the ease of integration for a lot of things, basically it's become one of my requirements when I am looking at other tools is how easily do they integrate with Sentinel.
I think it should include more third party integration with non microsoft products as well as with other cloud providers. These integrations should be native.
It should improve ML and AI capabilities.
I find its documentation a little bit difficult to understand at the start. So the words should be simple.
As I said earlier, for a production-grade OpenStack Telco cloud, Logstash brings high value in flexibility, compliance, and troubleshooting efficiency. However, this brings a higher infra & ops cost on resources, but that is not a problem in big datacenters because there is no resource crunch in terms of servers or CPU/RAM
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.
Logstash can be compared to other ETL frameworks or tools, but it is also complementary to several, for example, Kafka. I would not only suggest using Logstash when the rest of the ELK stack is available, but also for a self-hosted event collection pipeline for various searching systems such as Solr or Graylog, or even monitoring solutions built on top of Graphite or OpenTSDB.
Microsoft Sentinel excels in cloud-native scalability, Microsoft ecosystem integration, and AI-driven threat detection with UEBA and Fusion rules, offering faster deployment and lower costs (48% cheaper per Forrester) than Splunk, QRadar, Exabeam, SentinelOne, Securonix, and Wazuh. It lags in third-party integrations and syslog parsing. Organizations choose Microsoft Sentinel for its cost-effectiveness, automation, and Microsoft synergy, especially in Azure-heavy environments, though Splunk and Exabeam lead in flexibility and UEBA, respectively.
Positive: LogStash is OpenSource. While this should not be directly construed as Free, it's a great start towards Free. OpenSource means that while it's free to download, there are no regular patch schedules, no support from a company, no engineer you can get on the phone / email to solve a problem. You are your own Engineer. You are your own Phone Call. You are your own ticketing system.
Negative: Since Logstash's features are so extensive, you will often find yourself saying "I can just solve this problem better going further down / up the Stack!". This is not a BAD quality, necessarily and it really only depends on what Your Project's Aim is.
Positive: LogStash is a dream to configure and run. A few hours of work, and you are on your way to collecting and shipping logs to their required addresses!
As any cybersecurity product, this has to be more with risk to avoid loss in case of a ransomware that more than relate to a productivity increase. Maybe the impact could be that instead of having people that are checking 24/7 the dashboard, you could implement Sentinel and have less people checking that or people with less expertise. So the saving will be a minor but will be a saving in the cost of your team.
