Microsoft Sentinel vs. ScienceLogic SL1 vs. Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)

It's certainly well-suited in environments that rely heavily on Microsoft products, and it's well-suited for environments where you have other business drivers to go to the E5 license. If I were to say where I would not and why, I only gave it a seven on the recommendation, that answer would probably vary if you already owned E5 or not. It's extremely expensive. And if there are other alternatives, if you don't have any other driving reason to go to E5, I would coach you not to go to Microsoft Sentinel. But if you're there, it's a fantastic property. It's certainly part of the cost argument for moving to E5, but it's only a part. It can't by itself justify the move to E5.

Incentivized

For Windows, the issue is in higher resource consumption related to WinRM monitoring, which provides better options then the SNMP monitoring, which on the other hand is less resource intensive. The problem is also with support for OS with other than English language.

Incentivized

Splunk ITSI is a great tool (and toolbox) for combining together numerous and varied monitoring regimes to bring more holistic analysis and reduce alert fatigue. By leveraging the Splunk ITSI service and KPI modeling regime, ecosystem telemetry can be turned into a more reliable, clearer, high-level perspective on the current state of your components and services.

• It's the scale. Having built-in detections and vulnerabilities and the ability to see into the traffic flows is absolutely key. Look at it from my perspective as network security. We want to see what's going on east, west, between all the kinds of subscriptions and the tenants. We don't have that. We don't have that with any other product. Microsoft Sentinel gives us that kind of visibility.

Incentivized

• Best overall coverage of montioring different technologies.
• Easy to use in any environment
• Customizable being able to generate your own reports, dashboards, DA's, RBA's, etc.
• Have very good out of the box integrations with other monitoring solutions such as ServiceNow
• Always improving and regularly releasing new versions and upgrades to the system/DA's.
• Interactive community

Incentivized

• Monitor hundreds of IT services by continuously tracking thousands of KPIs in a scalable way.
• Quickly identify problem areas by a combination of default visualizations and ability to create custom dashboards.
• Extremely configurable to effectively monitor nearly any KPI imaginable from Splunk.

Incentivized

• An area for improvement is how case management is surfaced within the Microsoft Sentinel experience, as clearer integration into Sentinel workflows would reduce context switching and improve incident handling.
• There is an opportunity to further expand agentic, autonomous investigation and response capabilities.

Incentivized

• Dashboards are quite old and are of Iron age. Need to have AP2 dashboards only instead of AP1 and consistent new design across all functionalities.
• Reporting is not improved since Y2020 and need to revamp completely. Need to integrate Dashboards and Reporting. PowerBI Like functionality to be given OOTB. Reports should be extracted in Excel, PDF, HTML and should be heavily automated.
• Create and Open APIs for basic and advanced monitoring data extraction.
• Topology based Event Correlation and Suppression should be improved drastically. Need to identify critical network interfaces based on Topology and monitor them. Basic customization of Dynamic App and/or Powerpack to exclude/include certain metrics/events to be permitted OOTB instead of customizations.
• Integration with ServiceNow to be improved and to be taken to next level. Automation Powerpack should be made available OOTB as part of base product and to be priced attractively.
• Take product to next level where we can monitor actual impacted IT or Business Service instead of metrics and events BSM and Topology map to be auto discovered and identify the network dependencies and alternate paths automatically instead of manual creation of BSM.

• ITSI really needs a robust splunk log ingestion infrastructure at its core
• ITSI requires a great engineering team to build out the automated discovery and topology
• Unless you use an API to build the topology, the view can quickly become static

Incentivized

it does the job reasonably well

Incentivized

It is simply because of all the best possible autonomy solutions it is providing and getting better day by day. Using AI and Devops along with handy automation, The monitoring and Management of devices becomes much easier and the way it is growing in all the aspects is one the best reasons too. Evolution of the SL1 platform in the autonomy monitoring and management is quite appreciable.

Incentivized

We have replaced our monitoring platform with Splunk & ITSI, and with the success, it's seen at our organization thus far we would be hard-pressed to pivot to another tool. Frankly, our business partners and application teams love Splunk & ITSI.

Because, as I said, it still lacks a lot of things, like many playbooks outside the Copilot integrations and the actual remediation. For example, for Microsoft Sentinel and SAP, I would want to see Copilot doing a lot of remediations in Microsoft Sentinel at SAPN, like executing the transaction code, maybe creating certain increases, or remediating stuff like that, which is all customized.

Incentivized

The core functions are there.
The complexity is due to the complexity of the space.
The score is based on comfort (I no longer notice the legacy UI) and the promise that I see in the 8.12 Unified UI (a vast improvement).
It is also based on the fact that with 8.12, you can now do everything in the new UI but you still have the legacy UI as a fallback (which should now be unnecessary for new installations)

Incentivized

Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) is a platform with extended functionality and provides various functionalities which can be utilized to improve the efficiency and accuracy in analyzing the data and detecting the attacks.

SL is always there and online when you need to get info from it. The only times when SL was not available in our own data center, was when network links from out side of the data center was down and those links were not in our controll. Having a central database and people accessing it all over the world, may put a bit of constarin on the performance of the dashboards when reports gets generated, but that is far and few n between.

Incentivized

SceinceLogic SL1 architecture helps the platform to give a top-notch performance in every respect, Data collection to reporting happens very smoothly. With the new user interface pages load much faster. Individual appliances carrying the individual task ensure things are working without lag. Integration with ticketing tool(SNOW) is well managed by the ScienceLogic, no issue or much delay has been observed while interacting with an external tool.

Incentivized

Microsoft support is one of the highest rated on the market. It has global and multilingual support. Calls can be made over the phone and the solution is virtually instantaneous with the help of Microsoft engineers. It's great!

Incentivized

So far, it's good as part of my overall experience, except for a couple of use cases. The support team is well knowledgeable, has technical sound, and is efficient. When support escalates to engineering, the issue gets stuck and takes months to resolve.

Incentivized

During POC, pre-planning, and implementation, we have had interactions with numerous folks at Splunk. Everyone from sales & engineering to markets analysts to specific IT component SMEs, and a small professional services engagement to get started. They have all been exceptionally helpful and go above and beyond the call of duty. They actively reach out to ensure success is being realized and find ways to help proactively, instead of having to simply open support cases with the vendor.

It was good, Do the online training first and understand it and you will get the most out of the in-person training that way. This also takes you to an advanced level which is very good and the training as been overhauled once again along with new product coming in such as Zebruim / Skylar, worth going through again if it a while back that you first did this.

Incentivized

There are a lot of educational materials and courses on the SL1 training site (Litmos university). However the recording quality is sometimes not very good - screen resolution is low. There is a lack of professional rather than user-oriented documents and there are mistakes in documentation and education is not well structured.

Incentivized

Implementation is smooth if we are to just support the out-of-the-box features available in ScienceLogic. For any custom requirement, having to go to SL1 Professional Services is the worst part of procuring this suite. And more often than not, SL1 Professional Services also ask to raise feature request. So, you subscribe to Professional Services to only hear back from them that "This feature is not supported and needs to have a separate feature request". At times frustrating.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Science logic SL1 is so user friendly and it's really easy to navigate between function. I would recommend Sciene logic SL1 to all of them who are looking for really useful monitoring tool and expecting easy way of managing it.

Incentivized

Splunk has raised itself as a platform not just as a tool unlike other products in the market. If I talk about Moogsoft it also has similar capabilities but Splunk ITSI has more visibility and its GUI is making a different impact on the users. ServiceNow and Splunk are equally capable products however Splunk seems to have more tech-savvy people tools than ServiceNow.

Incentivized

Our deployment model is vastly different from product expectations. Our global / internal monitoring foot print is 8 production stacks in dual data centers with 50% collection capacity allocated to each data center with minimal numbers of collection groups. General Collection is our default collection group. Special Collection is for monitoring our ASA and other hardware that cannot be polled by a large number of IP addresses, so this collection group is usually 2 collectors). Because most of our stacks are in different physical data centers, we cannot use the provided HA solution. We have to use the DR solution (DRBD + CNAMEs). We routinely test power in our data centers (yearly). Because we have to use DR, we have a hand-touch to flip nodes and change the DNS CNAME half of the times when there is an outage (by design). When the outage is planned, we do this ahead of the outage so that we don't care that the Secondary has dropped away from the Primary. Hopefully, we'll be able to find a way to meet our constraints and improve our resiliency and reduce our hand-touch in future releases. For now, this works for us and our complexity. (I hear that the HA option is sweet. I just can't consume that.)

Incentivized

Did not use professional services

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Once a powerpack is developed and configured for a device for one customer, it is easy to deploy the same powerpack on a second customer estate and configure specifically for that customer without having to reinvent the powerpack. This saves time and therefore money.
• Once the customer estate tuning is complete, the Operations team have come trust the alerts. This is especially true when transient or self-correcting alerts are automatically cleared without ops team involvement, but a record is still available for audit and debugging purposes. This saves time and therefore money.
• When setup correctly, it provides good visibility into applications, devices and whole customer estates. This saves time and therefore money when issues arise.

Incentivized

• Splunk ITSI has reduced the number of alerts exposed to our Network Operations Center by 100x while increasing the context around outages.
• Splunk ITSI has increased the accuracy of our incident detection by leveraging the Event Analytics system to weigh the behavior of the many characteristics of each component together instead of independently.
• Splunk ITSI has reduced our incident MTTR (mean time to restore) by detecting issues faster, presenting them more clearly, and surfacing the salient details about the underlying issue.