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.
The inspection of data packets before they enter the firewall is a really beneficial to our security team. It segments the data from the LAN and really adds a great layer of security on top of our firewall. The technical support is very responsive and knowledgeable in use case of the product
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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”.
