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Arista NDR pros and cons

Vendor: Arista
4.5 out of 5
198 followers
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Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Arista NDR's query language facilitates rapid and effective searches for network threats, making it possible to interrogate network records with ease.
The Security Knowledge Graph on Arista NDR meaningfully displays information, enhancing users' ability to quickly locate necessary data.
Encrypted traffic analysis by Arista NDR helps ensure compliance with government regulations by clearly tracking data transfers within the network, particularly through encryption methods.
Arista NDR provides robust monitoring of the network activities of insiders, contractors, partners, and suppliers, excelling in endpoint identification and correlation.
Through its threat-hunting services, Arista NDR proactively assists organizations by leveraging data insights not only from their network but also from others, enhancing preventive security measures.

CONS

Arista NDR's query language could be more user-friendly, especially for new users, and it should be more natural language-based.
There is a need for improvements in handling encrypted traffic and exploring alternative approaches since decrypting encrypted traffic is not feasible.
Arista NDR currently lacks the capability to import STIX/TAXII in an IOC format.
Integration with multiple tools is limited, requiring analysts to work separately, and needs improvement for seamless operation.
Entity resolution in Arista NDR is unreliable, with issues in correctly identifying device activities and merging devices into one entity profile incorrectly.
 

Arista NDR Pros review quotes

reviewer1719513 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 18, 2021
When I create a workbench query in Awake to do threat hunting, it's much easier to query. You get a dictionary popup immediately when you try to type a new query. It says, "You want to search for a device?" Then you type in "D-E," and it gives you a list of commands, like device, data set behavior, etc. That gives you the ability to build your own query.
KL
Feb 3, 2020
This solution’s encrypted traffic analysis helps us stay in compliance with government regulations. It is all about understanding data exfiltration, what is ingressing and egressing in our network. One common attack vector is exfiltrating data using encryption. My capabilities to see potential data exfiltration over encrypted traffic is second to none now.
reviewer1506834 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 10, 2021
The query language that they have is quite valuable, especially because the sensor itself is storing some network activity and we're able to query that. That has been useful in a pinch because we don't necessarily use it just for threat hunting, but we also use it for debugging network issues. We can use it to ask questions and get answers about our network. For example: Which users and devices are using the VPN for RDP access? We can write a query pretty quickly and get an answer for that.
Learn what your peers think about Arista NDR. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
JC
May 7, 2019
The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly.
EE
Jul 16, 2020
The security knowledge graph has been very helpful in the sense that whenever you try a new security solution, especially one that's in the detection and response market, you're always worried about getting a lot of false positives or getting too many alerts and not being able to pick out the good from the bad or things that are actual security incidents versus normal day to day operations. We've been pleasantly surprised that Awake does a really good job of only alerting about things that we actually want to look into and understand. They do a good job of understanding normal operations out-of-the-box.
reviewer1486446 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 14, 2021
The most valuable portion is that they offer a threat-hunting service. Using their platform, and all of the data that they're collecting, they actually help us be proactive by having really expert folks that have insight, not just into our accounts, but into other accounts as well. They can be proactive and say, 'Well, we saw this incident at some other customer. We ran that same kind of analysis for you and we didn't see that type of activity in your network.'
DS
Oct 5, 2021
The interface itself is clean and easy to use, yet customizable. I like that I can create my own dashboards fairly easily so that I can see what is important to me. Also, the query language is pretty easy to use. I haven't needed to use it a ton, but as I need to go in and do different queries based on their requests, it has been fairly simple to use.
reviewer1467852 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2021
It gives us something that is almost like an auditing tool for all of our network controls, to see how they are performing. This is related to compliance so that we can see how we are doing with what we have already implemented. There are things that we implemented, but we really didn't know if they were working or not. We have that visibility now.
reviewer1217625 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 28, 2019
Other solutions will say, "Hey, this device is doing something weird." But they don't aggregate that data point with other data points. With Awake you have what's called a "fact pattern." For example, if there's a smart toaster on the third floor that is beaconing out to an IP address in North Korea, sure that's bizarre. But if that toaster was made in North Korea it's not bizarre. Taking those two data points together, and automating something using machine-learning is something that no other solution is doing right now.
DS
Jul 23, 2020
We appreciate the value of the AML (structured query language). We receive security intel feeds for a specific type of malware or ransomware. AML queries looking for the activity is applied in almost real-time. Ultimately, this determines if the activity was not observed on the network.
 

Arista NDR Cons review quotes

reviewer1719513 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 18, 2021
The one thing that the Awake platform lacks is the ability to automate the ingestion of IOCs rather than having to import CSV files or JSON files manually.
KL
Feb 3, 2020
I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this.
reviewer1506834 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 10, 2021
One concern I do have with Awake is that, ideally, it should be able identify high-risk users and devices and entities. However, we don't have confidence in their entity resolution, and we've provided this feedback to Awake. My understanding is that this is where some of the AI/ML is, and it hasn't been reliable in correctly identifying which device an activity is associated with. We have also encountered issues where it has merged two devices into one entity profile when they shouldn't be merged. The entity resolution is the weakest point of Awake so far.
Learn what your peers think about Arista NDR. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
JC
May 7, 2019
There's room for improvement with some of the definitions, because I don't have time and I'm not a Tier 4 analyst. I believe that is something they're working towards.
EE
Jul 16, 2020
They've been focused on really developing their data science, their ability to detect, but over time, they need to be able to tie into other systems because other systems might detect something that they don't.
reviewer1486446 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 14, 2021
When I looked at the competitors, such as Darktrace, they all have prettier interfaces. If Awake could make it a little more user-friendly, that would go a long way.
DS
Oct 5, 2021
One thing I would like to see is a little bit more education or experience on AWS cloud for their managed services team. We've explained how we have the information set up, that the traffic coming in goes to the AWS load balancer and then gets sent on to our internal servers... but when I get notices they always tell me this traffic is coming from the IPs belonging to the load balancers, not the source IPs. So a little bit more education for their team about how AWS manages the traffic might help out.
reviewer1467852 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2021
While the appliance is very good, and I think they're working on it, it would probably help if they integrated the management team cases into the appliance so that everything we are working on with them would be accessible on our platform, on the dashboard, on the portal. Right now, Awake is just an additional team that uses the appliance that we use and then we communicate with them directly. Communication isn't through the portal.
reviewer1217625 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 28, 2019
I would like to see a bit more in terms of encrypted traffic. With the advent of programs that live off the land, a smart attacker is going to leverage encryption to execute their operation. So I would like to see improvements there, where possible. Currently, we're not going to be decrypting encrypted traffic. What other approaches could be used?
DS
Jul 23, 2020
Awake Security needs to move to a 24/7 support model in the MNDR space. Once they do that, it will make them even better.