Microsoft Sentinel (formerly Azure Sentinel) is designed as a birds-eye view across the enterprise. It is presented as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.
$2.46
per GB ingested
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds LEM is security information and event management (SIEM) software.
We use it because when a user sees the suspicious activity on his account, Microsoft Sentinel gives alerts to the user's system and the admin system as well. When a user of one of our systems clicked a spam email, that email was trying to install a virus on our server, but Microsoft Sentinel gave an alert to the user and admin both, so that is why our team was able to fix that issue with Microsoft Sentinel very fast. However, it will not be the best option for you if your team is utilizing every feature but you are on a tight budget.
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.
It is a good tool for threat detection and analysis of the threats. We are using this tool for real time threat detection on our employee machines as well as some servers.
It provides various options for collecting data sources by leveraging multiple sources using data connectors. This helps us in gathering data from multiple sources such as our servers as well as our employee machines.
One good thing about this tool is automated incident response thereby increasing the security of servers.
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.
It takes some time to learn how to use and install it properly, and it does not connect effectively with external PaaS systems such as Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and so on.
Microsoft can simplify the display of the logs to make them easier to study, and the user interface occasionally delays, which can also be enhanced.
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.
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
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.
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.
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.
Microsoft Sentinel excels in cloud-native scalability, Microsoft ecosystem integration, and AI-driven threat detection with UEBA and Fusion rules, offering faster deployment and lower costs (48% cheaper per Forrester) than Splunk, QRadar, Exabeam, SentinelOne, Securonix, and Wazuh. It lags in third-party integrations and syslog parsing. Organizations choose Microsoft Sentinel for its cost-effectiveness, automation, and Microsoft synergy, especially in Azure-heavy environments, though Splunk and Exabeam lead in flexibility and UEBA, respectively.
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.
As any cybersecurity product, this has to be more with risk to avoid loss in case of a ransomware that more than relate to a productivity increase. Maybe the impact could be that instead of having people that are checking 24/7 the dashboard, you could implement Sentinel and have less people checking that or people with less expertise. So the saving will be a minor but will be a saving in the cost of your team.
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”.
