SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

The SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server does what it's supposed to do. It's a bare-bones Syslog Server. If your company is just trying to fulfill security requirements or doesn't need all the advanced features of a product such as Splunk, then Kiwi will work well and not break the bank. Using the tool is very straightforward as there aren't a lot of options outside of just viewing logs.

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

• Collection of SNMP traps a reliable and stable collection server for these is crucial to troubleshooting and time to ROS. Kiwi excels at this.
• Easy to install set up and train users on.
• The free version is a good free tool and handy to use for personal labs and other smalle use cases.
• SNMP traps to user readable format is great, sometimes syslog and smnp messages can be hard to interpret and read with out a knowledge of how to do this.

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

• Minimalistic; If you're looking for something with analysis features look elsewhere.
• Operating System support is Windows only.
• Some management features cannot be configured via web interface.

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

Kiwi Syslog has the best usability of any syslog server. While not being able to offer the most features, the ones it does have are intuitive and easy to work with. Everything that it has is where you think it should be. If you can't find it in the menus, it doesn't exist.

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

SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server is inexpensive and it works. It's easy to install and setup and is also very easy to learn how to administer. I recommend it to anyone needing log monitoring and reporting, especially if the price is a concern as it is with almost all businesses now.

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

The price for Kiwi was acceptable and it checked off all the boxes of a product that we needed. I also considered Graylog but Kiwi was much easier to configure.

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

• Centralized logging allows us to go to one place to see logs instead of each individual server.
• Very easy setup compared to other solutions
• No redundancy built-in

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