Palo Alto Networks WildFire vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

Depending on the environment being implemented in I'd recommend it for compliance purposes as well as managing it from a Network Engineer perspective. From my experience, firmware updates, patching and hardware integration have generally been smooth. Truth be told, cloud based firewall and networking compliance are becoming more and more mainstream and WildFire has a solid foundation.

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

• Quick definition downloads and updates. Version 7.1 can do one every 5 minutes. Zero day protection within 5 minutes is a huge plus.
• Quick manual or automatic examination of files. Palo Alto's wildfire site supports API uploads or manual uploads that provide more detailed information than a Virustotal, for example.

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

• The main pain is that we have to purchase the WildFire Licence separately. I think it should be by default available in Palo Alto Firewall.
• Sometimes it takes much time to analyse the file.
• It provides result after attack is happened.

• 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 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.

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 a great product that has definitely improved our security posture, however it does require quite a bit of training and time spent customizing for the environment. We had several difficulties in deployment but Palo Alto support was able to help us work through the problems that we were not able to figure out on our own.

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

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.

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

We tested Fortinet's products before settling on Palo Alto Networks WildFire. Most of our sites were already deployed with Palo Alto Firewalls, which made the decision easy, however we also based that on Palo Alto's superior ratings by other security firms. Fortinet also has a solid product portfolio but Palo Alto Networks WildFire turned out to be the best choice for our organization.

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

• Our ability to report third-party combat infiltration testing is enhanced by other customers' threat signatures.
• The additional high-end security equipment demonstrates strong attention to sensitive data we handle and address IT security vulnerabilities.
• Enhanced network visibility and unknown file analysis assist detect malware that lacks a current signature.

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