IBM Security QRadar Reviews

I've got use cases where we monitor positive controls wherein something doesn't allow something to happen. It alarms when somebody changes the control.

The most valuable features of IBM Security QRadar are flexibility, IBM support, and scalability.

IBM Security QRadar’s GUI could be improved.

I have been using IBM Security QRadar for 12 years.

I rate IBM Security QRadar ten out of ten for stability.

Around five to ten users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate IBM Security QRadar ten out of ten for scalability.

The solution's initial setup is pretty difficult. I rate IBM Security QRadar a four or five out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

Based on the size and the number of use cases, the solution's deployment can take three or four days to a few months.

IBM Security QRadar is about 50% less expensive than Splunk. SIEM solutions charge by the amount of data, whether EPS or gigabytes. They directly incentivize you not to put things in it, which doesn't make sense since the goal is to put everything in it. They'd make it where you can't afford to do it.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate IBM Security QRadar's pricing a five out of ten.

Overall, I rate IBM Security QRadar a nine out of ten.

We utilize the product for our Security Operations Center operations. Additionally, we extend its use to our customers, employing it for tasks such as threat hunting, investigation, and triage analysis.

The tool's most valuable feature is log source management. It enables us to connect to various log sources, including content, authentications, or other customized integrations. These integrations can be tailored for use with other platforms that don’t already have built-in IBM add-ons.

Its scalability is also important. It is also compatible with ISO 27001, DSS API, and various certifications.

As part of our security infrastructure, this tool excels in detecting a wide range of attacks. Its responsiveness surpasses that of alternative solutions. Moreover, the user-friendly interface greatly benefits our analysts. The product is helpful in anomaly detection scenarios.

Additionally, we leverage out-of-the-box content and libraries within the IBM ecosystem. Its user behavior analysis helps us to ensure that our customers are protected. 

Correlation plays a pivotal role in our security strategy. It helps us to analyze logs from different sources. This process helps to correlate logs from endpoints. 

Certain updates—especially when using Azure—don't apply directly. Our engineering team must invest additional effort to implement these updates. However, the tool's cloud-based version poses no issues. However, upgrading the product can sometimes be challenging for on-premises instances.

Our current query language (KQL) serves its purpose, but there's room for improvement. Consider introducing a more human-friendly language to streamline analyst training. Analysts could then express queries in a manner akin to human language. This change would expedite processes, making it easier for new analysts to adapt.

I have been working with the product for five years. 

I rate the tool's scalability an eight to nine out of ten. 

Troubleshooting delays have been a recurring challenge. Occasionally, responses take two to three days, leading to escalations. While their website’s knowledge base is commendable, troubleshooting scenarios demand more time. My observation is that they may be understaffed.

Neutral

My company has customers using Splunk and Chronicle SIEM. When comparing Splunk and IBM Security QRadar, they indeed offer similar features, but their business models differ. Chronicle SIEM predominantly operates in the cloud. However, we cannot offer the cloud model if a customer prefers an on-premises solution.

Splunk and IBM Security QRadar both cater to diverse deployment preferences. Splunk boasts a slightly more robust correlation engine than IBM Security QRadar. Splunk tends to be marginally more expensive than IBM Security QRadar.

The number of log sources significantly impacts deployment complexity. The process becomes more complicated for environments with 50 log sources compared to those with fewer sources (e.g., 20 or 10).

Each log source requires a connection to IBM, a task that can take several days or hours, depending on its complexity.

On average, the entire deployment process spans six to eight weeks.

The tool's on-premise version is expensive. However, it is cheaper than Splunk. The hybrid model offers shared instances for customers, which is not expensive. Customers with a limited budget can opt for it. You can get premium support with licenses. However, if you need customized integration, you need to buy it. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

I think that the main weakness is the tool's architecture. The tool still provides a secured analytic application, although we have heard for many years that the solution is going to move to a container kind of architecture, which ArcSight, for example, made years ago. IBM Security QRadar's analysis part is sometimes a bit buggy. The interfaces sometimes could give users an inconsistent experience because different developers wrote several different GUIs at different times. Sometimes, the user experience is not so consistent. There were outdated areas of IBM Security QRadar, but you can still find some rudimentary parts that could sometimes be a weakness.

What my company misses at the moment revolves around the fact that the tool had a great feature around risk management, which the tool deprecated several years ago, and I think that it could be helpful in the present. The tool's user and entity behavior analytics application could be improved significantly because our recent experience shows that it is still kind of useless, but the customers and we also need it. More artificial intelligence and machine learning will be helpful in the tool.

I have been using IBM Security QRadar since 2012. My company is a customer, a partner, and a reseller of IBM.

The solution's technical support works, but sometimes, it can take quite a long time to get a solution from technical support. Generally, we are satisfied because we just understand how it works and that you shouldn't expect much from the technical support. It is not so bad, but sometimes it could be longer than you can expect. I rate the technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

My company has not worked with any other products before IBM Security QRadar. In our organization, we used different SIEM solutions, specifically ArcSight, FortiSIEM, and Rapid7. We repeatedly returned to IBM Security QRadar and didn't continue with any of its competitors.

I think the pricing is quite flexible. As a reseller, we had chances to win bids with IBM Security QRadar against Splunk, ArcSight, and even McAfee with better pricing around six or seven years ago. We won the deals with better pricing. Pricing could be flexible. It could depend on the number of assets used by the enterprise or on the number of events per second, allowing customers to choose what fits him or her the best.

My company is looking for different products in the market since we are upset with the recent news about the deal between IBM and Palo Alto. I think the deal doesn't touch the on-premises IBM Security QRadar, and both companies have only agreed to give Palo Alto the authorization for the cloud version, making it a reason why we continue to use the on-premises version.

I am generally satisfied with the product.

Considering that there is still room for improvement and that the vendor could improve it to be made faster than it is at the moment, it is still a good product.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I use IBM Security QRadar in my company as it provides features like SIEM, SOAR, and QNI.

The most valuable feature of IBM Security QRadar stems from the fact that it is a product that is like a complete suite.

The price of IBM Security QRadar is an area of concern where improvements are required. IBM is never known to provide products at a cheap price.

IBM Security QRadar's UI is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are needed.

In the future, I would like IBM Security QRadar to have a library of adapters or APIs.

The area around recovery time is an aspect of IBM's technical support where improvements are required.

I have been using IBM Security QRadar for more than a year. I use the solution's latest version. My company is in the process of being declared as a golden partner of IBM.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company currently deals with around four to five organizations comprising medium to large companies where IBM Security QRadar is used.

The solution's technical support is responsive. The only area where I don't agree with IBM Security QRadar's technical support stems from the lack of proper or defined recovery time, even though their response time is good.

I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have experience with Splunk. My company deals with Splunk since we had no choice owing to the fact that one or two customers wanted it.

In the past, I was using open-source products, including solutions like Elastic Security and Wazuh.

My company decided to switch from Wazuh to IBM Security QRadar.

The product's deployment phase can be described as an average one.

I rate the deployment process of IBM Security QRadar a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate the price a one, where one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is a cheap product. IBM Security QRadar is an expensive product. A customer gets discounts only when they ask for them from IBM.

The challenge is that if someone submits a request or proposal and finds that the prices of the products our company deals with are too high, we may not even be shortlisted for negotiations. If my company gets shortlisted for the next round, then we get questioned over the high prices.

My company takes care of the maintenance part of the solution for our clients who use IBM Security QRadar in their environments. Nine engineers and one manager take care of the maintenance process of IBM Security QRadar. My company has a lot of certified employees to take care of IBM Security QRadar's maintenance. My company can be considered a powerhouse when it comes to products from IBM.

I recommend the solution to those who plan to use it.

Splunk and IBM are leaders as per Gartner Magic Quadrant. I believe that IBM Security QRadar should be fairly priced for SMEs.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

I use IBM Security QRadar in my company for authentication of users and to block the access of a user to the internet. In my company, we have only used the basic version of the solution, and currently, we don't have a license for the product since we didn't renew it. The basic version of the solution fits my company's basic requirements.

IBM Security QRadar is not hard to implement and administrate. To serve new use cases or do the tuning and allow correlation rules, you may need training since it is necessary to know the solution. With IBM solutions, you need training to know how to use the different features of the solution. IBM needs to provide training to its users to teach them how to use the case manager and how to tune rules.

I have been using IBM Security QRadar since 2020, so I have experience with it for three years. I am a customer of IBM.

It is a scalable solution.

With IBM Security QRadar, my company faced issues with the support we received for the product. Basically, my company faced problems due to the delays or mistakes made by IBM's support team.

I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

For the product's implementation, my company took two months. To implement all log sources, my company took somewhere between three to five months.

IBM Security QRadar is a very expensive tool.

In the future, my company would want the cloud version of the solution and not its on-prem version.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.

The product is a threat detection and response solution. It is useful for consultants or security analysts. It is an incident management tool.

We had enabled federated search. It allows us to search data both on-premises and on the cloud. We can check the functional insights. We use keywords for threat investigation. We use the product mostly for AWS delivery models.

Most people handling QRadar in organizations are IT engineers. They do not have experience with the tool. They read from manual documentation. If there is an emergency to search for details about malware, we need a response team’s help. Sophos has a team called Managed Threat Response. The team conducts investigations in our network. This feature is not available in IBM Security QRadar. They only provide technical support. The product does not have a team for investigating malware.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The tool is stable. SIEM is important for every company. It is needed if any attack occurs.

We deployed the solution for an enterprise business. I rate the scalability of the tool an eight out of ten.

I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten.

The deployment takes almost half a day. If the environment is good, we can deploy the solution in 25 to 30 minutes. It will be helpful to have people who have knowledge of malware analysis and know specific languages that are relevant to the domain to deploy the tool.

In India, the solution is expensive. Only enterprise businesses can afford the tool. We need more than 3000 people in the organization to use it. We might have to pay for technical support separately.

We use Sophos now. Sophos provides us with a team called MTR. The team analyzes the vulnerabilities in our network. We need to pay separately for it. However, compared to us, they have better product knowledge. This kind of support is not available in QRadar. It will be great if IBM adds these features.

I am using the current version of the solution. We do not have a team to analyze malware. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is in the banking industry in two banks here in Egypt. We generally are monitoring the user behavior of the employees, For example, working after working hours, and signing into the machines after working hours.

The most valuable feature is the machine learning module.

I would like to see the interface improved along with the tuning and any adjustments when it comes to maintenance. It is not straightforward. I would also like to see some artificial intelligence and alternative solutions.

I have been using IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics for almost five years now.

I would give stability an eight on a scale of one to ten.

The scalability is not a problem and we have above three thousand in our organization.

The initial setup is extremely easy and straightforward.

The deployment took around two to three days and we did it ourselves in-house. We simply downloaded the application and went from there following the deployment process.

We are seeing a return on investment when it comes to profiling the employees.

The pricing is higher but cheaper than others and there are no additional costs.

We looked at ArcSight but the cost is more expensive than IBM. ArcSight did have the artificial intelligence model.

I would recommend tuning it to the maximum before going live. I would rate IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics a seven on a scale of one to ten.

The primary use case of this solution is to help customize the workflows and dashboards for our clients in a secure manner.

The solution has helped improve our organization by providing the comfort and visibility that we are, meeting compliance, and doing our due diligence in analyzing events from multiple sources and correlating threat activity. 

The most valuable features are the AI assistant, which is good at detecting known types of behavior. The solution can analyze different logged events, and network activity and create a correlation. The solution is easy to customize and tune compared to other products.

The solution can be improved by lowering the cost and bettering their technical support.

I have been using the solution for three and a half years.

The stability of this solution is rock solid, a ten out of ten.

The solution appears to be scalable. I have used the solution in organizations with users ranging from 2000 to 10,000.

The technical support eventually gets the job done.

Positive

Depending on what the client is looking for I have used and recommended ArcSight, Splunk, and Cisco.

The initial setup is in-between straightforward and complex. Any SIEM solution is complex, but compared to other products, it is the middle of the road. It's not as difficult or cumbersome, especially when you compare it to ArcSight being the most difficult where you require a whole team of people to really derive any value.

Most of our clients have seen a return on investment because compared to other solutions it does not require a busload of people to operate it and it is reasonably priced.

The solution is costly and the price differs depending on the vendor you use.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution is fairly easy to maintain and the learning curve is reasonable compared to other products to customize the workflow dashboards and get meaningful insight as far as what is happening within our organization. The solution is also fairly straightforward to integrate with different data log sources.

The solution requires three to five people to maintain including one analyst, an engineer, and an architect.

I suggest before using the solution you know what your process is, know what your logging sources are, and plan well because It's really a leadership challenge. The solution is better deployed than other models.

Our company includes 20 senior engineers and analysts who use the solution to detect viruses on Windows servers and critical assets.

We also track user activity such as connections during travel. 

We have many use cases and playbooks in our portfolio. 

Our company uses the solution as our main CM to detect malicious activity. There are many campaigns targeting Europe and other countries so it is important that we remain vigilant about suspicious activity inside our organization. 

The solution uses rules to identify suspicious activity that needs to be investigated. We conduct advanced forensic investigations based on the solution's output, including collecting logs from devices and correlating them for processing by a security analyst. 

Blocks of predefined conditions can be used to configure detection rules without having to write complicated script. 

Real-time detection is quite efficient and valuable. Other products such as Splunk focus only on running searches to detect a particular behavior.

The Vulnerability Manager module is useful and quite efficient. 

The dashboard and reports are not user-friendly or efficient so are of little help with threat hunting activity. We deal with large data sets so need to have great visibility for detection of malicious activity and indicators for cybersecurity. 

For example, the dashboards for Power BI and Splunk are very efficient and it is easy to observe suspicious activity. 

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable and easy to use if deployed well.

On occasion, you might get an error when running advanced analytics but reboots are not needed. 

The solution is scalable and it is easy to add appliances or expand your license. 

Engineers used technical support regularly between 2016 and 2019 and found them to be very helpful and responsive. If a situation was urgent, technical support intervened immediately. 

I rate technical support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I used the solution, switched to Splunk, then switched back to the solution. 

The ease of setup is based on the complexity of your environment and network architecture.

The initial setup is not complicated and should go smoothly if you set all predefined requirements prior to installing the solution.  

It took us two weeks to prepare all requirements and a few hours to deploy which included installing all resources. 

Documentation for the installation process is pretty straightforward. 

An in-house team that handles integrations was responsible for implementing the solution. Myself and other cybersecurity analysts participated with the team.

A team of three engineers handle ongoing maintenance for our large environment. 

The solution has a licensing model that is based on events per second so it scales to need and budget. 

At the time of deployment, we were premium partners with IBM so received advantageous pricing. 

The on-premises solution and its license are not impacted by the number of users so it is easy to add staff. 

In my experience, Splunk is efficient because it is customizable. You can create scripts to detect multiple behaviors based on scheduled jobs. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten because it is difficult to write script for advanced detection cases and the dashboard is insufficient. 

We analyze all our authentication traffic in QRadar UBA using the solution's AI module to detect and understand uncommon authentication patterns. There is also the rule logic, but we don't use that much. Instead, we mostly rely on AI to do that. In that respect, I wouldn't say we are using the product to the fullest extent because we only have the AI and what the CM is providing. We have a suite of security products, and QRadar UBA is only one source of information that we rely on.

QRadar UBA collects information on 16,000 employees in the company, including when they log in and out or when they launch applications. We have a team of 10 security analysts who go into the solution to check the alarms. IBM has set the solution up so that we only need to react to the alarms. The UBA will flag it if someone does something weird, and our security team will investigate the anomaly to see if that was valid or malicious. 

We are currently on QRoC — short for QRadar for Cloud — so it's the latest and greatest solution. It was originally on a private cloud, but we moved to the public cloud three years ago.

It's hard for me to pinpoint any one feature that's most valuable because it is all about consuming logs and analyzing them. We started using QRadar UBA because we needed something that could analyze Linux authentication information. Other products take care of the Windows platform.

Better algorithms or AI would always be appreciated, but this product does what it's supposed to do. And maybe there is something behind the scenes that could be improved, but I don't know. 

UBA is a plugin for QRadar SIEM. If we're talking about the SIEM solution as a whole, there is a lot I can talk about, but there isn't much to say about UBA as a standalone. I'm not in a position to criticize or comment on the underlying code.

I have been using QRadar UBA for six years.

I haven't had any problems. We have never needed to add more memory or CPU. 

IBM technical support is excellent. 10 out of 10. IBM is highly professional when it comes to security support. IBM's support for other types of solutions isn't quite as good, but the security domain is a different world. I've worked with IBM in other areas, and it's different. Security support is on a tier by itself inside IBM. 

Positive

We are also using a Microsoft solution called Azure Advanced Threat Protection. It provides similar UBA features but only for a Microsoft environment.  Most UBA products do exactly the same thing. I haven't tried many other solutions besides QRadar, Microsoft, and Splunk.

Splunk is brilliant. It does the same thing, but it's slightly more expensive, so we selected IBM. Microsoft's solution is a little cheaper, but it lacks Linux support currently. There are minor differences, but we went with IBM in this case because it has the best support.

IBM did the setup. I called them to ask for UBA, and it was available the next day. They handled all the deployment and maintenance. 

I have not calculated ROI for this product. QRadar UBA is a tiny part of the entire security portfolio. In the context of the SIEM as a whole, the cost is so low that it's hard to defend not doing it.

I have no idea what QRadar UBA costs as a standalone solution because it is bundled with the QRoC security operation center and several other modules that we pay for in a big lump sum. However, I don't think that part is too expensive. It's a plugin to the QRadar SIEM that feeds off the same data. We have X-Force Threat Exchange, so IBM is operating the SIEM for us. I say to them, "I want UBA," and there it is.

I rate QRadar UBA eight out of 10. It's a small product doing exactly what it's supposed to do as an integrated part of our SIEM. It looks good and works well. I don't give it a 10 because it is something we have to request. I would love it if UBA was included out of the box like Microsoft.

Regardless of which solution you use, I recommend user behavior analytics. It provides valuable information to the security team. It doesn't matter whether you use Splunk or Microsoft— you should use a UBA solution. 

We will probably stick with QRadar for the foreseeable future. It depends on the developments in the SIEM market. We will probably continue with IBM because changing SIEM is not something you do lightly. As long as we keep the IBM SIEM, we will continue to use QRadar UBA.