Likelihood to Recommend Palo Alto Networks Wildfire is well suited for pretty much anywhere that you need the latest and greatest network security. It is extremely good at protecting you from the latest malware threats that might pose a potential problem for your network/endpoints. We've been very please since we installed it and I would say cost of the Palo Altos is the only drawback. If money were no object I'd go with a Palo Alto with Wildfire every time. But unfortunately in some smaller branches it just doesn't make financial sense.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros This is could base and easily manageable for our collocation. While working within the could can review in live time potential treats that it has reported from other devices. Worked very well with existing Palo Alto devices. Another huge plus is the simplicity of managing and ease of scalability. Its cost is competitive with similar/like products available. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons WildFire, like other sandboxes, has to stay up with malware sandbox evasion techniques, which necessitates larger file size limits. More file formats should be able to be submitted and scanned by WildFire, which needs improved initial administration and setup. It's quite pricey, and there's no warning choice for performance on the cloud. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It works very well and takes care of protecting us from threats new and well-known. It's been a game changer in terms of threat detection & prevention.
Read full review 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
Read full review Usability Easy to use and works well. For the most part it's set it and forget it, but there's also some flexibility for high security environments and those with extra privacy concerns.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating PAN support is very good. You can get the reasonable and timely support on any conditions. When the product is already integrated with the PAN firewalls, you can choose the severity levels based on the effect. The customer service/TAC is very helpful, they even have additional recommendations of advises for product usability. Local partners are also assisting the cases and give their expertise.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We wanted a single device to handle numerous jobs, such as antivirus, antimalware, vulnerability detection, url filtering, etc. Palo Alto provides this, while
TippingPoint IPS is a more dedicated product. Caveat: I used
TippingPoint over 5 years ago, so things may have changed.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment As we all know the product of Palo Alto is little bit expensive but its performance is far better than any of its competitors. So as I previously mentioned, Palo Alto should not sell WildFire Licence seperately. If the firewall is internet facing then only we should buy WildFire Licence. WildFire Licence is not necessary for internal firewall. If you are planning to buy a firewall for internal network where your traffic is not going towards internet so no need to buy WildFire Licence. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Screenshots