Offering enhanced network security, performance, and connectivity, it is well as used in a business setting. Features including application control, web content filtering, firewall, IP address, application control, VPN, and good advanced threat protection. With enhanced features and advanced threat protection you get an awesome performance cost effective firewall device.
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).
Live traffic monitor: Firewall Analyzer lets us monitor traffic as it flows through the firewalls. It also breaks it down according to what type of traffic (e.g., web, mail, FTP, etc.) it is. It lists the tops hosts, the top users from traffic, and a lot of other useful statistics, all in a very visual format.
Security Monitoring: Another good visual graph Firewall Analyzer provides is the security one, which shows us if we're being attacked, from where, by what, how many, etc. It will also send us alerts when there's an alarm of any kind on the firewall.
Reporting: We can run all sorts of custom reports, and that helps us both with compliance and informing management as to what's going on. It would be difficult to describe all the various kinds of things we can include in these reports, but they are extensive.
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.
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.
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
It is fast to download the test software and implement. It takes some sometime to understand the ways you have to on board your firewalls into it. It is nice to buy and just activate the product that you have already installed. Maybe some wizards could be improved in order to accelerate these tasks.
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.
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.
ManageEngine was chosen over the use of AlgoSec as it slotted nicely with other Manage engine services we use for services such as active directory management. Other benefits include how lightweight and easy to install and set up it is. You can install it inside your network and start testing within 20 minutes.
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.
Firewall Analyzer has definitely freed up a lot of IT's time, by congregating logs and displaying them in a more useful, visual way.
The cost for licenses and proactive alerting, compared to the man-hours spent reactively through data, paid for itself in a few months.
There was no negative impact to users, and only some to IT staff who had to train on the software, which mostly consisted of videos and playing around with the software.
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.
