IBM Security QRadar Reviews

IBM Qradar is

• Ease of install . Its effectively redhat6.5 with an app on top.

• Automatic log source identification

• Inbuilt rules and reports are comprehensive so out of the box the system does things

• Recognises every log source we have added.
• IBM supply a virtual image which makes the standing up of a system a small piece of work.

IBM Qradar has great data reduction. We have several hundred million log records arrive on various of the platforms daily and have been able to tune them to alert on important things well. Very few false positives.

Like any SIEM product at a very base level the system is a pattern matcher. Looking for patterns in single log messages or looking for patterns in multiple logs messages combined with flow data. It has a primary focus of Security Event Management but you can look for anything in the information flowing through the system and can alert on it. So it can be used - and we do - as a general IT event management/monitoring system.

Room for improvement - IBM Qradar:

• Graphing on the system is a tad course. Analytics now requires really high quality graphing to assist in pinpointing anomalies.
• Need for multiple Java versions for deployment setup is a pain.
• There are areas you need to have Java 7 to be able to use.(Primary need for this is to access the Deployment area)
• We need to be able to handle multiple overlapping ip address areas. That is coming we know. But slowly.
• When you are building this in a virtualised environment you do have a bit of difficulty accessing the GUI.

3.5 years

I have used several versions of the Qradar system. Both the IBM version and the Juniper STRM OEM version.

IBM I rate as 7.5/10

STRM at 7/10

No real issues with deploy. What it is doing is exactly what we expected. It does have a few wrinkles but that is more about where we are collecting logs from.

No stability issues yet.

No scalability issues yet. We have sized the latest system to cope with up to 10000 eps and or only at about 4000 at the moment. Scaling is simply adding extra license as required at the moment. Easy.

Generally excellent.

Generally excellent.

• We were using SPLUNK. Licensing does not allow you to expose Splunk screens to customers (we are an ISP and IT service provider).
• Mcafee Nitro was too expensive
• Arcsight takes too long to install and tune

Simple:

• Boot VM off ISO image.
• Install license
• Point logs at it
• Done

Occasionally the documentation did not reflect what was happening so did need to access tech support a few times.

We implemented it ourselves. Initial seat of pants approach. Worked. I got my Redhat builder to spin up the two VM servers off the supplied image, licensed them, gave them the appropriate IP addresses, created the deployment (the Java 7 bit) and the system started receiving logs from the 1200 CISCO routers.

We are fulfilling a government contract. Install and move to BAU has been done and it came in under the estimated budget…..so All Good.

• Mcafee Nitro
• Juniper STRM
• AlienVault. Note. We would probably have used AlienVault but there was no representation in Asia Pacific at the time
• TrustWave

• First gather your requirements
• From that build a business case.
• Understand that no matter what technology you choose the technology area is 15% of the effort. Your processes are 85%. No process…then 5h1t in …5h1t out.
• Make sure you know your business reasons for the implementation

To be very frank, it's not that much help as of now. We are not getting that many insights from UVA, which we wanted, actually. As of now, we are exploring that UVA, and we have installed it. It's still quite new.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution is still new to us. Currently, it's a work in progress with this. I'm not in any particular condition to tell what exact improvements are required. I will let a few more months go by before analyzing the overall UBS solution QRadar to get to know and final understanding of this particular application.

There are a lot of things that require modification. That's my initial observation, however, I need more time and a few more months to get to know it and get a final understanding of the solution as a whole.

I want a reduction of false positives. I want crisp true positive incidents out of it. I want to see proper user behavior. Whatever algorithm is working in the background, that algorithm should produce accurate, true positive incidents and not false positives.

We are using QRadar as an appliance for the last four years, however, we recently, for the last six months, started using UBS.

I'm not sure about the stability just yet. We've observed a few issues and we raised a supporting ticket for it.

The scalability is very good. It's not a problem.

Technical support has been very supportive. We're largely satisfied with them.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward and simple. It's not very complex. 

We are using multiple features in QRadar. UVA is just one feature. We have overall 14 data nodes and we are almost 2,500 GB of data integrated with it and we are using multiple applications in QRadar. We have a nine-member team that manages the overall QRadar architecture, not only UBA.

We did a direct integration.

I'm an architect. Normally costs and licensing are handled by senior management.

For UBA, they haven't asked for any extra charges or anything. It's included in the licensing.

We're an IBM partner. We have platinum support with IBM.

We have segregated our data between on-prem and the cloud. All the on-prem data we have integrated with the QRadar. QRadar itself is an on-prem solution. We have QRadar hardware with us.

At this point, I would not recommend the solution to others. 

I'd rate the solution a six out of ten.

The price is very good. It's quite reasonable.

The solution's performance is excellent. The stability is excellent.

We've found the technical support to be very good.

The pricing is very good.

The product needs to improve its GUI. The dashboard which they facilitate needs to be modernized. They could make it a lot better and a lot easier to navigate.

I've been using the solution for approximately two years or so.

The stability of the product has been great. It's from 80% to 90% is stable. There are very few bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. If you do run into issues, technical support is quite helpful. 

The product works well for small or medium-sized enterprises.

The technical support has been great so far. If you run into any kind of issue, their support is available. They are very helpful and extremely responsive. We're quite satisfied with their level of service. I'd give them a rating of 90% to 95%.

The pricing of the solution is quite reasonable.

We're a customer and an end-user. We don't have a direct business relationship with IBM.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been extremely satisfied with the product so far.

I'd recommend the solution, however, depends upon a company's budget and requirements. For small and medium enterprises, QRadar is the best solution, due to its price and performance.

Depending on the organization's needs the solution can monitor different types of security through logs.

I have found the most important features to be the flexibility, tech framework, and disk manager. Additionally, the solution is easy to learn how to use it.

There could be better integration with the solution.

I have been using the solution for approximately three years.

Every solution has some bugs and other issues but for the most part, this solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. The amount of users is dependant on what your needs are. You can have many users having access to the solution. For example, out of a 5,000 person network, you could have five with access to it for security. 

The solution has great support. Whenever we had an issue they were able to give us support within 15 minutes.

The installation was easy but this can depend on what appliances you want to install it on. If it is VMware, then the installation is easy, it took me 30 minutes.

We did use a consultant to do the deployment and we only needed one technician.

The solution is priced fairly, there is a license for the solution, and we pay annually.

I would recommend the solution to others and we plan to continue using it in the future.

I rate IBM QRadar a nine out of ten.

We provide cloud services to the users, and we have our own cloud setup over here. The major use case is when clients require the SOC to be set up.

Setting up the SOC itself is a huge investment. A customer has to invest a lot to build up the whole SOC environment, so, rather than the customer investing in the SOC environment and building up the SOC, we provide it as a service. Customers don't need to do any up-front investment. They use our service. We manage their security tools and security environment as per the compliance guidelines that come from the Indian government. We follow all those practices, and we help them procure more for their network and infrastructure.

QRadar, Splunk, and ArcSight are SIEM solutions with built-in AI/ML features. They can do the complete investigation and alert the admin about what is happening. They can also do the root cause analysis. 

There are many other features that come with QRadar. It has a more granular log, so you can integrate with various non-IT as well as IT-based components. You can get unstructured data to the SIEM data, and you can identify more what is happening in the network or what is happening in the central head office. You can also identify what is happening between your remote offices. You can also use it to identify what the users in the field are doing on their devices and how things are moving.

From the integration point of view, it is very centric. It gives complete control centrally. If a user is not connected to the system, whenever he comes online, we can see the policy updates over the Internet, and we can ensure that the data that is supposed to be protected is protected.

When it comes to what could be better, it is always what others are trying to do and what is the roadmap. It can have more integration. It should have more flexible RESTful APIs for integration with applications. These are the things that are always in demand for any of the SIEM solutions, not only for QRadar. 

Integration is ever-evolving. Nowadays, different versions of mobile handsets are there and data is getting scattered. Users are using their personal handsets to keep the data of the organization. So, it should have a more flexible integration, irrespective of the flavor of the firmware and iOS or Android version. It should have an API that can seamlessly get integrated. It should also provide more flexible control and a more advanced or analytical view to see what exactly is happening across the globe or network. From wherever a user is connecting and accessing the enterprise data, it should give real-time visibility and predictive visibility about what exactly is happening. These things are already there, but there should be more advanced control in terms of managing the security.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is absolutely stable. It depends upon how the implementation has been done. We definitely have the skills to do this kind of implementation. We ensure that a customer's environment is absolutely protected.

It is very scalable, but it also depends upon how the implementation was done. We are providing services to one of the major brands in India. They have somewhere around 30,000 devices. We are currently managing more than 1 lakh QRadar users.

QRadar has a good technical team. They provide timely support whenever a ticket is raised.

Deployment of such solutions always takes time because these solutions are not simple. You should have the expertise and you should understand what is really needed for the business. We understand the real business need, and accordingly, we implement the policies.

We have been managing some of the security tools for the past 11 years. We have expert engineers who can help our customers with installation, configuration, planning, designing, and other things.

If you have an environment of 5,000 or 10,000 devices, three to five people should be enough to manage it.

Customers have to purchase a license based on the number of users, devices, and applications they want to protect. It allows you to take a license on a subscription basis for three years or five years.

I would recommend this solution. If you are looking for a SIEM solution, IBM QRadar is one that you should ideally look for.

I would rate IBM QRadar a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for a variety of tasks. We use it, for example, for authentication, network-related authentication, user-related tasks, and Windows UNIX servers. It's a lot. There's a ton of use cases. I really can't sync right now about every single use case, however, the main things are authentication and network-related systems and all flavors of UNIX Windows. 

It helped our organization in the sense that having it was better than nothing. However, I did not enjoy the product overall and I advised we switch to something else.

The user behavior analytics as part of our deployment was okay, even though it was clunky.

The solution can scale.

I really didn't like QRadar to be honest. I inherited it. I was part of the reason that we moved over to LogRhythm. The solution just isn't user friendly.

The solution is clunky. 

The interface could be much better.

The integration capabilities within the product are not that great.

I've been using the solution for about two years at this point. My team has been using it for two to three years, so we have a total of about five years of experience in all.

I wouldn't describe the solution as stable. 

It was really buggy. Like other app integrations, it wasn't straightforward. It was pretty clunky. We tried to integrate Qualys with it and it wasn't effective. To integrate anything took quite a bit of time and energy. It wasn't easy. When it did, it didn't work properly. It wasn't really pulling in the data correctly.

Scalability was hard as it was on-prem. We needed to add more modules, and had to add more of the servers to stack it. It wasn't that a simple task at all. I wouldn't say that it scales well, although technically, you can scale it.

When we were using the solution, we had ten to 15 users on it. They were anyone from Information Security Engineers to regular IT admins.

Technical support was awful. We often didn't even have any assistance available to us. On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate them at a three. We were very unsatisfied with the level of support we received. They just simply weren't helpful when it came down to it.

The organization didn't previously use a different solution before choosing QRadar.

We actually switched to LogRhythm as I didn't like how the solution was working for the organization.

I didn't handle the initial setup. It was handled before I arrived at the organization.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we're using.

I wouldn't recommend the solution. I'd probably tell others to shy away and look at other products like possibly Splunk, however, it's a pricey option. LogRhythm is pretty good. We're having some issues with it. That said, for the most part, it's okay. 

Exabeam also seems like it might be a good option. I haven't worked with it personally, however, I've had some experience with a POC.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a three out of ten. We didn't have a good experience with it. If it offered, for example, easier behavior analytics, easier integrations, better interface, supported model integration, and a good user interface to perform analysis I might rate it higher. Basically, it just needs to be much more user-friendly.

This is a security monitoring product and the primary use case is to detect strange behavior by users. For example, if we have a user that has not used the service for a long time and then all of a sudden, somebody logs in one night. This is not normal and the system will detect it. This is just one example of many use cases.

Integration is very easy and the reporting is good.

This is a good product, although it does require some fine-tuning.

The dashboard is pathetic and it takes a long time to perform a search.

The graphics need to be improved.

Providing good support is something that they need to work on.

It would be helpful if IBM published more use cases.

We have been using QRadar UBA since 2016.

The issue that I have with technical support is related to their large pool of resources. If you are lucky then you get good support, but sometimes you get pathetic support. Suppose you open a ticket, there are times where it will be very good, but the quality is intermittent.

I have experience working with Splunk and I find that the searching capabilities are better with it. Also, the processing time in Splunk is better. With QRadar UBA, when you have three, four, or five rules together, it takes more time to respond.

The complexity and length of time required for the initial setup depend on the requirements. There are some out-of-the-box features that can be implemented right away, but some equipment is not supported directly, so you need to write a DSM (device support module).

Implementing a DSM takes some time, although it will depend on the log source. If the log source is fully compatible then it will be very quick. However, if it is not compatible then you will need to do some scripting and other work.

The price of this product is high.

QRadar is not perfect. It's a good security monitoring product that can provide threat intelligence, but it cannot do it alone. You need to integrate with many other things, such as IBM Orchestrator. Also, you need to have X-Force. After these kinds of things are integrated, it works a little bit better.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The primary use case for us is the plug and play implementation and it is pretty easy to set it up, and scale up the SIEM. It has a kind of a functionality to it. 

It is really helpful to us from the compliance point of view. Whenever we had an external lawyer come in, he used to ask us for the data retention and log retention. So, QRadar could put out reports that could audit for us within the log collections. It was very helpful for us to meet compliance requirements.

In addition, it is a helpful solution for forensic analysis. It will easily perform Google type searches and get the logs searched easily. This is really helpful for us, and gives us a quicker investigation.

The most valuable feature is that it is a one stop solution for many things. It is a manager for vulnerability, functionality, packet filtering, packet analysis and log analysis.

They have introduced a lot of different suite of products and functionalities and that sometimes leads to confusion among the customers. There are a lot of options to provided and then I need to decide, what is my requirement, and what is my desire. I may be tempted to have a particular feature, but I have to decide whether it is relevant or not.

The stability is very good. There is not a single point lacking in terms of stability. And, I have never faced technical issues.

The scalability is good, especially with the introduction of data nodes. As of now, it is not a problem.

The tech support is not that good. They often rely on their learned knowledge base, instead of getting their hands dirty upon the actual case issues. They just think of the traditional approach of "OK, try this, or that." Obviously, we already know which steps to follow, we need for them to come up with some out-of-the-box solutions. This delays the process of finding a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, this happens a lot.

I previously used Splunk. And, we considered Sumo Logic, which has a similar kind of functionality. But, they are still in a very premature stage in terms of the product development.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was not complex or difficult. It is not complicated.

The cost of this product is expensive.

If you are a medium to large size enterprise, you can surely consider IBM as one of the major contenders for your selection. If you are a small enterprise, QRadar may be too much for you, it may be too complex.

When deciding on a solution, we always consider:

• Cost-benefit
• Shelf-life of the solution
• Security of the solution