Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

Palo Alto NTP is an appropriate suite of protection for any enterprise environment or anyone that truly needs some serious perimeter protection in a one-stop, all-in-one unit. There are no modules or add-ons or clunky interfaces to deal with it; everything works out of one management plane, licensing, implementation, monitoring. updating, etc. As a network admin, that is immensely valuable to me. Additionally, I get real-time reporting on all the stuff NTP is catching, and it is nothing to shirk at. The real value in NTP comes in only after you begin doing SSL-decryption, however, to truly inspect the traffic. Short of that, you are just seeing a bunch of encrypted data and the NTP suite of tools isn't going to avail you. NTP plus decryption, though, is invaluable!

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

• Anti virus
• Vulnerability protection
• Anti spyware

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Sometimes I struggle to find the deny or specific traffic log for file blocking profile under Unified logs.
• Reporting around Threat Prevention suite could be much better.
• Possibly a specific threat prevention search function that spans across of threat features.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

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.

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

It is comparable but not as robust as other stand alone IPS/IDS.

Incentivized

Splunk was a pretty good product but the licensing structure needed a lot of work. They changed the structure three times that I am aware and I still had problems understanding LogRhythm had a lot of issues correlating users to IP addresses, the mappings were frequently wrong so this product could not be trusted in my environment as all our access logs are IP based and this needs to be matched to usernames from AD Fortianalzyer is a great product but it can only do logs from Fortigates so that was not helping for anything other than our firewalls.

Incentivized

• We have various compliance standards we have to meet and the Palo Alto with its Networks Threat Protection suite has checked off pretty much all the boxes we needed and at a price point that couldn't be easily beat for comparable features, throughput, etc.
• IT/Network staff has saved a A LOT of time using this platform for protection (coming from an ASA)

Incentivized

• 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.
• There are free options that can do a better job.

Incentivized