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).
Great for large enterprises 10k users or more and as part of defense in depth. Medium and small business you are better off looking for a cheaper UTM solution that does it all in one. It comes down to cost, are you willing to fund the cost of breaking out IPS functionality or moving towards a unified solution?
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.
Tipping point had a very nice GUI interface that sat on top of snort rules. It was easy to access, had nice customization of dashboards and output to syslog for SIEM solutions.
It was easy to configure rule sets, allow groups or singular allow/blocks or white-listing.
Security rule sets could be tweaked up or down and allow/drops signatures could be configured to help increase performance.
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.
Biggest qualms I had with TippingPoint was that it was just a tad on the expensive side for what you get. Nowadays everything has gone UTM in firewalls and they do it all including IPS as part of the basic functionality so really, TP is losing a massive market share.
Don't see a future in the roadmap with so many other vendors getting onto the "unified" wagon and adding IPS as part of their service and at a cheaper price.
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
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.
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.
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.