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.
$2.46
per GB ingested
Splunk Cloud Platform
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Splunk Cloud Platform is a data platform service thats help users search, analyze, visualize and act on data. The service can go live in as little as two days, and with an IT backend managed by Splunk experts.
Microsoft Sentinel gave us the opportunity to move to pay as you go model. This allows us to determine the value of a log source rather than paying a flat rate for data ingested or hosting a server ourself.
Prior to using Sentinel, we were using Splunk specifically Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk Cloud, so their on-prem and their cloud-based products. We switched originally for cost reasons, specifically cost control, but I have found that the ability to create reports, the …
As mentioned, the product was part of the purchase of several Microsoft Suites that we did earlier last year and with 200 licenses included, we can exclude those from the other SIEM and SOAR product, it just work well with the Microsoft's environment that we partially have Is …
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.
Splunk is excellent when all your data is in one location. Its ability to correlate all that data is intuitive (once the hurdle of learning the query language is overcome). It is also easy to standardize the presentation of information to the company. When data is siloed/standalone, other systems can be cheaper and faster to implement.
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.
This SIEM consolidates multiple data points and offers several features and benefits, creating custom dashboards and managing alert workflows.
Splunk Cloud provides a simple way to have a central monitoring and security solution. Though it does not have a huge learning curve, you should spend some time learning the basics.
Splunk Cloud enables me to create and schedule statistical reports on network use for Management.
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.
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.
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!
Splunk Cloud support is sorely lacking unfortunately. The portal where you submit tickets is not very good and is lacking polish. Tickets are left for days without any updates and when chased it is only sometimes you get a reply back. I get the feeling the support team are very understaffed and have far too much going on. From what I know, Splunk is aware of this and seem to be trying to remedy it.
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.
Search Processing Language really is a game changer for writing easy-to-understand and maintainable queries on your data base logs. Once understood, setting up and validating a query can be done in no time- which leaves us the option to focus on more monitoring and improved services. We have no other tools that utilizes data this efficiently
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.
