PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) provides digital operations management. Serving organizations of all sizes, PagerDuty aims to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time.
$25
per month per user
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds LEM is security information and event management (SIEM) software.
The best features of PagerDuty Operations Cloud are that it is a fairly good tool for alerting. Here is how the process works: suppose there is an XYZ server in my environment hosting a production or development application, and a primary on-call engineer has been assigned for that particular week. We have set up monitoring and observability for that node so that if the node is not reachable, an alert is triggered and sends a notification to our integrated Slack channels with PagerDuty Operations Cloud. If the engineer is available, they can acknowledge the alert. If they fail to acknowledge it, the system calls them on their provided number. If that is also not acknowledged, it sends a text message. If those actions are not acknowledged, it sends an alert to the secondary engineer and calls them as well. This multi-channel approach makes it very difficult to miss an important alert or update. PagerDuty Operations Cloud handles this process perfectly, and we do not miss any alerts because of this system.Regarding the stability of PagerDuty Operations Cloud, I cannot recall an incident where it was not available. I can say that it is 100 percent reliable for my needs.
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).
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.
From what I have observed, I say customization of notification and alert prioritization are the areas where PagerDuty can be improved. As in our collections team, we also deal with high priority accounts and lower priority system flags, PagerDuty definitely sends the alert, however this sometimes becomes messy. For ex, we had to spend extra time to create multiple escalations and test them in order to handle the priority accounts at first, then others, and that too without overwhelming our team with lower priority notifications.
I would highly recommend PagerDuty if it begins to offer something more intuitive, premium templates.... otherwise it's a great tool, I would say.
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
The UI is more complex than I would like. Part of the challenge is that most users use PagerDuty infrequently; I don't remember how I changed a policy last time. Another part of the challenge is that some users expect alerting to be a trivial feature, and are reluctant to invest any time in reading the documentation.
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.
PagerDuty is reliable and easy to set up. It gives an effective way to notify the team about critical incidents which results in a faster turnaround time on issues. users can customize their alerts rules based on their preferences. Overall it's effective and easy to use which adds great business value.
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.
OpsGenie was useful, mainly for teams already using Atlassian tools, and xMatters was good for handling team communication during incidents, but PagerDuty felt more complete for managing the full incident process in one place. We went with PagerDuty because it manages alerts, escalations, and on-call duties in a more organized and dependable way, which fits better with how our teams work daily.
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.
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.