IBM Security QRadar Reviews

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 There were outdated areas of IBM Security QRadar, but you can still find some rudimentary parts that could sometimes be a weakness.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.

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.

We are using it from the compliance perspective. We need this solution to comply with HIPAA and PCI because our clients require HIPAA and PCI DSS compliance. We also use it for log management, primarily security logs, and to some extent, for operational activities, even though this tool is actually not meant for operational tasks. We do keep track of errors in our appliances like hardware, storage, and network switches through QRadar.

The main or core solution is on-premises. There is an extended arm, which is in the cloud as well for cloud integration.

Security incident and event management are actually the core functionalities of this solution. We receive security logs on this product and based on the received logs, we can create offense tickets that are forwarded to Netcool, which is another solution that we have. I don't have experience with that, but our integration is there so that any offense or security event is forwarded to Netcool, and a ticket is automatically generated in ServiceNow for that offense. This level of automation that we have for security-related events is done through this solution. There's no manual work involved, which obviously takes away a lot of load from the individuals who are managing the security side of it.

It is a pretty solid product for the type that it is representing i.e. SIEM. It can do automatic correlation based on the traffic that you are receiving to some extent. It has plethora of options available for third party application integration. For e.g CISCO Firepower, Palo Alto Dashboard for CISCO and Palo Alto Firewall respectively. Integration with Cloud based Log Sources is also supported via. parsers that support API Connect. This is helpful when pulling in Logs from AWS, Azure, GCP or other Cloud Based Solution like Carbon Black, Imperva etc.

A lot of information that we receive for the devices is IP-based, but it would help if we could have a default dashboard in which we can add more details about the assets for which we are receiving the information. For example, if it is a Windows or Linux device, we only get the IP for that particular device. We don't really get the name and other details of that particular device. For that, you have to drill down into your own asset management system. It would be good to have a place where we can probably add this information so that we don't have to look into other tools.

I have been using this solution for about six months.

It is very stable. As long as you have the proper connectivity availability, it is pretty stable.

Our deployment covers North America, South America and part of Europe. The product is easy to deploy and scale. Almost everyone in our organization is using this solution because most of our projects rely on this. Because of the compliance requirement, most of our projects have to be integrated with QRadar. Each business unit or each program that we have in another environment has independent access to the solutions. They might not be the end users, of course, but at least every admin team of every program unit has access to this tool so that they can see what's happening in their environment.

It also supports multi-tenancy. So, if you have multiple clients or multiple tenants in your environment, you can create logical containers for them. From a logical point of view, you can create separate disconnected containers for each client so that they can only see their data.

Their technical support is quite good. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Yes, we switched over from NNT to QRardar. This product is more detailed. Expensive but definitely more detailed! :)

It was pretty straightforward. These are hardware appliances. So, you need to rack and stack them. If the rack space, cabling, and other things are already done, which would typically be the responsibility of a data center team, it essentially takes three to five days. But this is only the core deployment. The fine tuning on top of it would take extra time based on the environment and how complex it is.

It was implemented by team that included me. We have an external team for its maintenance.

The IBM QRadar Licensing for the core Events(EPS) and Flows(FPS) is per second based. The licensing is perpetual and surely expensive but the output of the Product makes it worth your money. 

I would absolutely recommend this solution. I am pretty okay with it, and I don't have any issues with it. It has some competitors like Splunk and LogRhythm. Symantec has its own SIEM solution. ArcSight, LogRhythm, and Splunk are in the first quadrant for the Gartner research. They are leaders in their products, and they know what they're doing. It also comes down to what your company is into, how does it fit into a particular environment, and how compatible it is with a particular environment. I could have gone on the Splunk path and probably said the same thing for it as well. 

I would rate IBM QRadar a nine out of ten. It is a pretty solid product.

• The ability to correlate data across our global enterprise in near real time
• The ability to integrate a lot of third-party solutions
• The machine learning pieces with Watson, indicators of compromise, and utilizing that across the value stream

I look at the solution as the best-of-the-breed product. The fact that it can work with what everybody else is doing in the cyber landscape is really what gives it the edge.

The solution has improved the efficiency of our security team. These improvements prevent the need for more proactive security activities.

The improvements did not reduce our staff. It's funny, because IBM keeps on having this conversation about staff headcount. It probably sounds good to senior leadership, like to a CIO. The reality is that nobody's looking to decrease the number of staff who they are hiring.

We're looking at refocusing those resources and energy on being able to do additional, higher-value activities. It's more of the case that I don't need as many junior resources. I can focus on some of the things that are a little bit more important.

Our equipment collects billions of pieces of data. We're 100,000-plus EPS per second. The daily list of required investigations for the offenses is manageable.

We've had incidents in our environment. How long it takes QRadar to detect them is always a function of the rules being correlated, the people watching them, and pieces of that nature. I'd say it's in real time. The question is, when it comes to tuning, we want to know if it was tuned appropriately, so it's not lost in the pile of needles.

Room for improvement is more in relation to a lot of the features, the automation of incidents themselves, and being able to automate workflow responses.

Overall, I love the product. IBM usually puts good resources and talent behind things. What they fail to do is to bring all the security together and make sure everything inter-operates and creates one pane of glass.

Actually, I don’t want to say "one pane of glass" because we have seen other vendors do that. They fail miserably because they do not understand where people are coming from.

In terms of some of the right-click functionality that is within QRadar, it should work automatically for all the other IBM products. It shouldn't be something that customers develop. There are pieces in which they have to step back and get some of the foundational pieces.

There are pieces that I feel that IBM should do better. They own Guardium, they own AppScan, and they own some of these other pieces of the security infrastructure that need to relate to QRadar or to Watson. It's the foundational pieces that I feel they need some focus on.

Let's do some of the basics really well. I'm looking at it from owning 50 or 60 different security products across a global organization.

They keep on adding products based on a simple feature set that they can do real well, but they can't integrate them into the rest of the security economy. It doesn't make sense to keep on buying products like that. Whether it's IBM or others, there are companies in the endpoint space that are taking over because they're saying, "Hey, we're going to do everything across your gamut of security needs."

IBM needs to look at that and how they are going to integrate across all of the security products and have them work together.

We have been using this solution for four years.

The stability is good.

The scalability is great.

We don't really use technical support. We're part of some of the engineering and development behind it and we work with a lot of the backend engineers.

Once in a while, we may put something in PMR but most of the time, we are working with the engineers themselves to figure out a solution. They are not really tech support issues.

We have used other solutions, but that was years ago. We've had QRadar for four years. Before that, it was the Symantec solution. The landscape for SIEM has changed progressively over the years.

You're not even talking about the same set of requirements around those things. We just needed to upgrade. We needed the speed, the flexibility, and we needed the correlation building block pieces of it.

I was involved in the initial setup. We are an advanced user of QRadar. While the initial setup was not hard for us, it is a lot more complex where we are right now. It works with integrating some of other IBM products into QRadar, and there's work that needs to be done there to make it seamless.

We were able to be operational in a matter of weeks or months, which is not a long time.

When picking a vendor, the most important thing is partnership.

I honestly have nothing but good things to say about the IBM relationship that we have related to QRadar.

Partnership is going be important. Having the right skillset from an engineering standpoint is important to ensure that you don't set up things backwards. You have a high probability of doing it. This is one of those pieces where IBM doesn't “dummify” the solution for you.

On one side for my senior engineers, they don't want it “dummified” because they need to do it. On the other side of it, there are some aspects that don’t need to be this complex.

For the SMB market, those are some of the areas where I counsel people and say they need to get these types of solutions and do these types of processes. Selling something like QRadar to them becomes a little bit more of a burden because of that complexity. It's like a compliance check mark.

Log aggregation and event correlation did not occur in an enterprise fashion before this product. Troubleshooting more complex issues became much simpler with the addition of this product.

Search capabilities are sufficient for most tasks, although not as easy to use as some other products.

Search capability and indexing still lag behind competitors. We also need to see improved rule based access controls and rule/event tuning.

The search capabilities in QRadar are decent in their ability to be granular but the methodology of search prevents the rapid and easy modification of search parameters as an analyst works through the hunting process.

There are several examples of this. Let’s say you add two or three parameters to your search using various filter methods.

You can quickly change items like the scope of time for your search or the presentation of data, but you cannot quickly change the other parameters such as the IP address you are looking for. So you have a search of 10.0.1.1, the system processes that search, but then you realize you need to search for 10.1.1.2 instead.

You have to delete the old IP and recreate. At that point the search starts over from the beginning. In a system like Splunk if when using the filters the query string is written for you and can be easily modified/edited on the fly. While that may still result in a search restarting the manipulation of that search is faster and more efficient. This is just a single example.

I feel that some of the stability issues are attributed to our network. However, too many issues existed with the product and too many more appeared as they tried to fix different issues.

We never scaled the product before we decided to remove it from our network. From all appearances, scalability was not going to be an issue.

Technical support was OK at best due to the length of time before resolution.

I used ArcSight at a previous company. I would much rather have a correctly scoped and built QRadar to manage. However, as a consumer of ArcSight, it was a very good product.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Do your due diligence. I found other solutions, with more features at the same cost or less. You don’t have to leave the Gartner Magic Quadrant to beat their price.

I did not choose this product.

Evaluate the product based on a full set of requirements and your security analyst workflow. Do not base your decision on the company name or promises of new abilities years down the line.

We use the product to customize rules and detect malicious behavior. 

The tool's most valuable feature is real-time detection. 

The solution is not as flexible as Splunk. 

I have been working with the product since 2016. 

I haven't contacted technical support yet. 

I worked with Splunk before IBM Security QRadar.

The solution's pricing is based on the EPS model. 

I prefer Splunk since it gives a lot more freedom and flexibility. I rate the overall solution a six 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.

We're a customer, partner, or reseller. We use QRadar on our own internal SOC. We are also a reseller of QRadar for some of the projects. So, we sell QRadar to customers, and we're also a partner because we have different models. We roll the product out to a customer as part of our service where we own it, but the customer is paying. We also do a full deployment that a customer owns. So, we are actually fulfilling all three roles.

The most valuable thing about QRadar is that you have a single window into your network, SIEM, network flows, and risk management of your assets. If you use Splunk, for instance, then you still need a full packet capture solution, whereas the full packet capture solution is integrated within QRadar. Its application ecosystem makes it very powerful in terms of doing analysis.

In terms of the GUI, they need to improve the consistency. It has been written by different teams at different times. So, when you go around the interface, you'll find a lot of inconsistencies in terms of the way it works.

I'd like them to improve the offense. When QRadar detects something, it creates what it calls offenses. So, it has a rudimentary ticketing system inside of it. This is the same interface that was there when I started using it 12 years ago. It just has not been improved. They do allow integration with IBM Resilient, but IBM Resilient is grotesquely expensive. The most effective integration that IBM offers today is with IBM Resilient, which is an instant response platform. It is a very good platform, but it is very expensive. They really should do something with the offense handling because it is very difficult to scale, and it has limitations. The maximum number of offenses that it can carry is 16K. After 16K, you have to flush your offenses out. So, it is all or nothing. You lose all your offenses up until that point in time, and you don't have any history within the offense list of older events. If you're dealing with multiple customers, this becomes problematic. That's why you need to use another product to do the actual ticketing. If you wanted the ticket existence, you would normally interface with ServiceNow, SolarWinds, or some other product like that. 

Their support should also be improved. Their support is very slow, and it is very difficult to find knowledgeable people within IBM.

Its price and licensing should be improved. It is overly expensive and overly complex in terms of licensing. 

I have been using this solution for 12 years.

Their support is very slow. it is very difficult to find knowledgeable people within IBM. I'm an expert in the use of QRadar, and I know the technical insights of QRadar very well, but it is sometimes very painful to deal with IBM's support and actually get them to do something. Their support is very difficult to work with for some customers.

I work with Prelude, which is by a French company. It is a basic beginner's SIEM. If you never had a SIEM before and you wanted to experiment, this is where you would start, but it is probably that you would leave very quickly. I've also worked with ArcSight and Splunk.

My recommendation would depend upon your technical appetite or your technical capability. QRadar is essentially a Linux-based Red Hat appliance. Unfortunately, you still need some Linux knowledge to work with this effectively. Not everything is through the GUI. 

Comparing it with Splunk, in terms of licensing, IBM's model is simpler than Splunk's model. Splunk has two models. One is volume metrics, so you pay for the number of bytes that are transmitted daily. The other one is based upon the number of events per second, which they introduced relatively recently. Splunk can be more expensive than QRadar when you start to get into adding what they call indexes. So, basically, you create specific indexes to hold, for instance, logs related to Cisco. This is implicit within QRadar, and it is designed that way, but within Splunk, if you want to get that performance and you have large volumes of logs, you need to create indexes. This is where the cost of Splunk can escalate.

Installing QRadar is very simple. You insert a DVD, boot the system, and it runs the installation after asking you a few questions. It runs pretty much automatically, and then you're up and going. From an installation point of view, it is very easy.

The only thing that you have to get right before you do the installation is your architecture because it has event collectors, event processes, flow collectors, flow processes, and a number of other components. You need to understand where they should be placed. If you want more storage, then you need to place data nodes on the ends of the processes. All this is something that you need to have in mind when you design and deploy.

It is overly expensive and overly complex in terms of licensing. They have many different appliances, which makes it extremely difficult to choose the technology. It is very difficult to choose the technology or QRadar components that you should be deploying. 

They have improved some of it in the last few years. They have made it slightly easy with the fact that you can now buy virtual versions of all the appliances, which is good, but it is still very fragmented. For instance, on some of the smaller appliances, there is no upgrade path. So, if you exceed the capacity of the appliance, you have to buy a bigger appliance, which is not helpful because it is quite a major cost. If you want to add more disks to the system, they'll say that you can't. If they ship a disk with 2 terabytes that the older appliances have, and you say to them that you can commercially get 10 terabyte disks, they will say this is not possible, even though there is no technical reason why it cannot be done. So, they're not very flexible from that point of view. For IBM, it is good because you basically have to buy new appliances, but from a customer's point of view, it is a very expensive investment.

Make sure that you have the buy-in from different teams in the company because you will need help from the network teams. You will potentially need help from IT. 

You need to have a strategy of how you onboard logs into SIEM. Do you take a risk-based approach or do you onboard everything? You should take the time to understand the architecture and the implications of design choices. For instance, QRadar Components communicate with each other using SSH tunnels. The normal practice in security is that if I put a device in a DMZ, then communication between the device on the normal network, which is a higher security zone, and the DMZ, which is a lower security zone, will be initiated from the high-security zone. You would not expect the device in the DMZ to initiate communication back into the normal network. In the case of QRadar, if you put your processes in the DMZ, then it has to communicate with the console, which means that you have to allow the processor to communicate. This has consequences. If you have remote sites or you plan to use cloud-based processes, collectors, etc, and have an internal console, the same communication channels have to exist. So, it requires some careful planning. That's the main thing.

I would rate QRadar an eight out of 10 as compared to other products.