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.
McAfee is a good solution if you're in a medium/large company and if you're looking for a solution that can be customized and expanded. I also recommend if you have the most common log sources on your environment, since McAfee supports the major log sources (but lack a lot of small vendors). In my opinion, I wouldn't recommend McAfee for small companies, since it's not that easy to manage and maintain.
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.
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.
If there is a requirement to integrate into other vendor products i.e. (log sharing) then this was very cumbersome.
Integration of vulnerability scanning that is available in other vendor products would be a good addition.
When integrating all of Intel's products a third party consultancy is usually required, where other vendor products can be configured without this additional cost.
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
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.
Dealing with the McAfee support is a lottery. Sometimes you reach them and it's a really experienced engineer, but sometimes it's a person with no clue on the tool. We had few cases where our internal engineers knew more about the tool than the McAfee support. However, sometimes we get hold of some really good engineers that know the tool from inside out
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.
McAfee Enterprise Security Manager is a better option than other security software because it's both inexpensive and extremely effective. Norton and other security software boast a high price tag but don't always back it up when it comes to performance. With McAfee Enterprise Security Manager, I know I'm getting a quality product for a fair price.
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”.
