ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

We rely on the application to monitor the bandwidth to know user behavior. It makes the process of keeping your system and information safe super simple and streamlined. It supports multiple firewalls that include Check Point, Cisco, Cyberoam, Fortinet, Sense, Juniper, Huawei, Sophos, and WatchGuard. It helps us to gain insight into security threats and traffic.

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

• Allowed upper management to track VPN usage when employees were not on site and working.
• Gave me real time monitoring of internet usage
• alerted me to potential problems
• Allowed me to track web usage real time

• SolarWinds easily provides the much needed visibily into changes in an Active Directory (AD) environment. Email alerting can be configured to alert a team if an account is locked out, disabled by another users, or if users and/or computers accounts are created.
• SolarWinds allowed a searchable audit feature. Microsoft Windows can be configured to log many different parts of a system, but search those logs can be difficult. SEM allows you to search for specific users or events.

Incentivized

• UI can be improved, not very intuitive.
• Search features can be improved too, I needed to export an excel file to perform an advanced search.
• Automatic direct updates would be great.

• Compared to other SIEMs, there are features that are missing. Machine learning, automatic event correlation, ability to correlate multiple sources together.
• The UI is clunky, and the *New* event log analyzer page felt really disjointed from the rest of the product.
• In my experience, the dashboards were almost unusable. They persisted across login per device, and even then they sometimes would reset and go back to the ''Getting Started'' look.

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

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.

It is very good - but you get what you pay for. The intent is not for a Fortune 500 that needs more "heavy lifting" with SolarWinds Security Event Manager & for whom the price tag is not (much of) a consideration.

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

You’ll be able to discover new devices as well as manage via a single interface. For a network person that may be less experienced with tech setups, this is a handy feature to have. This can be a great option for protection, particularly if you already have other elements of the UniFi system installed.

Incentivized

The compare well against the others - the pricing models for all but Splunk (free version) are based on EPS/TB consumed... the problem they pose is guesstimating the price tag per month. SolarWinds Security Event Manager gets around that.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It saves a lot of time when we had issues trying to figure out where the user account lockout was coming from.
• With it being an affordable SIEM, we are able to have the ability to do the actions associated with a SIEM and the advantages of not “breaking the bank account”.

Incentivized