Blumira vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

Blumira is great for a small IT team in a small to medium sized environment. It gives you unlimited logging (no limit on the number of logs sent) and doesn't require advanced knowledge or expertise in SIEMs to get the system up and running.

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

• The user interface (for managing, reporting) is intuitive and is easy to use
• The setup / onboarding process was very easy
• Support has been wonderful (and personal)

Incentivized

• SolarWinds easily provides the much needed visibily into changes in an Active Directory (AD) environment. Email alerting can be configured to alert a team if an account is locked out, disabled by another users, or if users and/or computers accounts are created.
• SolarWinds allowed a searchable audit feature. Microsoft Windows can be configured to log many different parts of a system, but search those logs can be difficult. SEM allows you to search for specific users or events.

Incentivized

• We've had a few suggestions for improving some of the built-in "workflows" -- steps that we are instructed to take by Blumira for specific "findings"
• There are a few improvements about reporting I'd like to see

Incentivized

• Compared to other SIEMs, there are features that are missing. Machine learning, automatic event correlation, ability to correlate multiple sources together.
• The UI is clunky, and the *New* event log analyzer page felt really disjointed from the rest of the product.
• In my experience, the dashboards were almost unusable. They persisted across login per device, and even then they sometimes would reset and go back to the ''Getting Started'' look.

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

It is very good - but you get what you pay for. The intent is not for a Fortune 500 that needs more "heavy lifting" with SolarWinds Security Event Manager & for whom the price tag is not (much of) a consideration.

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

Blumira is "right-sized" for my small organization. It is not a strain on our resources (people, system, or monetary). It gives us exactly what we needed

Incentivized

The compare well against the others - the pricing models for all but Splunk (free version) are based on EPS/TB consumed... the problem they pose is guesstimating the price tag per month. SolarWinds Security Event Manager gets around that.

Incentivized

• Now when we have a security audit or need to completed a cybersecurity insurance application, we answer "Yes" to the "Do you have a SIEM?" question.
• It has provided awareness and visibility of events and situations on our system that we were completely blind to before.

Incentivized

• It saves a lot of time when we had issues trying to figure out where the user account lockout was coming from.
• With it being an affordable SIEM, we are able to have the ability to do the actions associated with a SIEM and the advantages of not “breaking the bank account”.

Incentivized