LogRhythm SIEM Reviews

The ability to threat-hunt and, being a small staff of five people, we can actually not put a lot of time in administration, the care and feeding of it, and get useful analytics out of it.

We have two facilities, roughly 500 logs per second. Microsoft shop, Cisco stack on the networking side. We run two FortiGate firewalls, and a slew of different security products that we have not integrated into LogRhythm.

We haven't seen the improvements yet. We bought it as a compliance tool, and it's still sitting there. It's part of the reason why came to the LogRhythm User Conference, to figure out what our next steps are. When we had to tackle PCI compliance, one of them was log aggregation, and so that was why we brought it in.

It's met all of our compliance issues, really easy to do. As I said, there's not a lot of admin overhead, so it doesn't cost an FTE for us, which is nice. I think the added benefit is when we start using it for actually doing some analytics and in increasing our security posture, we're just not there yet.

I can't think of any features they should add because we haven't used everything they've already released. They have Office 365 logs integration. They've got this new phishing engine that we haven't used. They've got dashboards we haven't used, so we're basically right at the very bottom, we need to start building with what they're already doing.

In terms of improvement, their community boards, where to go find things, as a customer. As they're growing and they're moving stuff around, and it would be nice if we knew exactly where to find what. They're constantly reinventing how they do things and where they put stuff, that's the one challenge I've run into. I've always found the answer when I got to the right person: "Yeah. That's over here now," but I know other customers have shared that same issue.

Being a small shop, we're in an XM, everything in one appliance, which is really easy for administration, but I think it can get more complex as you get bigger. They've scaled to really large Fortune 500 companies, so that's nothing that we're worried about.

Great, you have almost the service-desk model, where you're going to get a live person. They're going to answer the call. They're going to make sure you get routed to the proper team. They're really good at followup, when "Everybody's busy now," they're really good at scheduling times, when both the technical agent is available and our staff is available, which I really appreciate. You don't have those, "I tried to get a hold of you," going back and forth. Not a lot of vendors understand that. LogRhythm does a good job with that.

It's straightforward, to the point that we brought it. We did a week of engagement with our security value-added reseller, and we were basically shoulder surfing. Everything looked like it made sense and why they were doing it, and it's not that complicated.

Where it can get more complicated, like I said, is if you're a big organization, you didn't have it all on one platform. Those components would have to be put together, and there can be a little bit more to the infrastructure.

The SIEM's a very technical tool, but LogRhythm - that's one of the beauties of it - once you figure out how it's installed, the care and fitting of it, the updating of the SIEM to new versions, and even the monitor agents, it's really pretty straightforward. Good documentation.

ArcSight and Splunk, and that was it.

We went with LogRhythm because of cost, administration, and ease of use when you're in the tool. Those are the top three. The fact that it was the lowest cost one, easiest to use, and easiest to administer. It was a no-brainer for us. It wasn't even really a conversation, other than the fact that we have to shop at the three different vendors.

Right now our focus is on user behavior, and that's part of why we joined the cloud Beta, they are our biggest risk. We don't know what they're going to do when and why, and so we've rolled out some security awareness training, we've rolled out some phishing exercises, and really trying to figure out how we can stop them being their biggest risks. Learning about what we learned today at the conference, with LogRhythm doing their phishing intelligence engine, it's going to be nice to see how we can implement that into the SIEM as well.

Security solution, number one is FTE; being a small shop and how much FTE does it take to run that? If that's a challenge for somebody, so they have co-piloting that you can do. We were able to absorb that in with two different FTEs splitting the duties, and they probably spend 45% of the time doing that. Might be different for a bigger shop, but that's our focus.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• reputation
• have they delivered on what they say they can do
• are there customers out there that we can talk to, that can validate what they're saying is actually true?

Regarding a solution being a unified end-to-end platform, it's not necessarily so important. Going forward, as we mature, more maybe, but we're really just tacking on the stuff that we go after. It's addressing certain needs, it's a little bit siloed right now, so it's not a huge need for us.

I gave it a nine out of 10 because I hesitate to rate anything a 10, that's perfect. But I think they do a great job, and I think it's more on us to really engage them more. They're always happy to talk to us about where we want to go with it, and it's just us dedicating the time to them.

Talk to people in the industry, make sure it can fit those needs you're buying it for. Proof of concept is huge. Do a proof of concept, especially in a SIEM. You don't want to just buy one and then implement it, and then try to figure out is it going to actually work for me?

The web interface, especially since the move to the open source storage system in v7, allows almost instant access to detailed log data from across the platform.

I work in the IT Security channel, reselling LogRhythm and associated consultancy services. The improvements from implementation of LogRhythm are to my clients' organizations.

The reporting engine is poor in comparison to other areas. It should be moved to the web interface to improve its functionality and usability.

I've been using it for over four years, since v3.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability. We haven't experienced instability.

The scalability before v7 was sometimes difficult due to the hardware performance required. Since v7 was released, the clustering and scalability options have improved significantly.

The UK-based technical support is good, and the engineering and lab teams based in the US are great.

I have experience with Splunk and ArcSight. LogRhythm's correlation capabilities (part of the AIE component) is much better than Splunk's, and the solution as a whole is generally cheaper and easier to implement than ArcSight.

The initial setup is straightforward. Follow the initial setup guide and the solution works within hours. Easy to use configuration tools are included.

I work for a reseller and consultancy firm in the IT security channel. I would recommend using a vendor or reseller to assist in the deployment, as although the basic build and set up is easy, on-boarding log sources and setting up the system to report and alarm on events requires experience and expertise.

As part of your plan for SIEM, identify what you expect the SIEM to be able to do for you / your organization. SIEM is not a silver bullet. SIEM will take a considerable amount of use by a security analyst or similar to get the best out of it. SIEM managed services offered by resellers or system integrators may be good value and should be seriously considered to ensure the best outcomes from the SIEM.

The Web UI is perhaps the most valuable feature in the solution.

LogRhythm allows our IT/IS teams to quickly identify issues across the enterprise. Searches can be performed using any known value, IP address, hostname, username, event. The results are then used to "open a case". The case is assigned to an analyst, who can add additional info during the research and remediation efforts.

Report-building is in Crystal Reports and has a limitation. A non-editable template must be created, then the report is created against the template. OFI is this. The template needs a preview option, as well as an edit option.

8 months

None that were not easily overcome.

None

No, we right sized the deployment and also deployed as a high-availability environment.

I have been very pleased with customer service. I have only had to contact my CS a couple of times, and he has done a great job of followup to insure my company's needs were met in a timely fashion.

Great support team. Average call pickup time has been less than 1/2 hour. I have had a couple of "scheduled" appointments get delayed when the agent's previous call ran over.

We previously used Juniper STRM, rebranded QRadar. We faced 1. Log processing could not keep up with collection, so events were being dropped. 2. Support was poor. 3. When a ($45 at Bestbuy) disk drive went out, we were sent an entirely new system. 4. When faced with upgrading to support our log collection demands, the estimated cost was several times greater than the LR deployment.

Depending on the size and complexity of the deployment, i recommend paying for the Professional Services team to assist. All work was done in a remote session.

I also recommend not attending the training sessions until a few weeks of bake-in have occurred. Too many topics were covered to fully absorb all the information that was disseminated.

Our internal security team performed the majority of the installation, again working with the PS group at LogRhythm.

We immediately saw benefit on our first investigation.

Depending on the size, number of logs, I recommend deploying VM (or physical) collectors, and have the logs forwarded to the appliance. We are collecting logs from 2500+ systems, and did not want to impact the appliance with collection, but rather, analyzing logs. This solution has worked very well so far.

We reviewed several solutions including Alien Vault (not large enough for our needs), Splunk (would need a full time programmer to write queries), QRADAR (since we already had a previous version. We did a month long POC on Correlog, attempted to POC EIQ Networks.

We are very pleased with the LR solution and are looking forward to the upcoming update.

Our customers are financial institutions, basically banks, and others in the financial sector. They have a lot of web-facing applications and technologies for which they need to have a complete trail of logs and audits. Whether they log in through their mobile devices and do mobile banking or internet banking, or do some queries, or are working on their systems, we need to have security logs for future audits and compliances. One use case is on the data protection side, because we are a data protection tech company, which determines if we need to activate security. The second is for audit trails, compliance, and if there are any issues. We need to have logs of all events and these logs are stored in the central bank. These logs have to be maintained for 10 years.

The user interface is good.

We are still implementing and have not yet completed the LogRhythm implementation for one particular customer. We haven't faced any issues right now. Once we've completed and we are doing the log analysis and the correlation and audits, at that point in time, if we find challenges, I can update you. Right now, it's okay.

Let us see once we finish the website we are working on. Then we'll understand better more of what we need. We'll probably need an improved user experience in terms of reporting and analytics. If the reports are very easy to configure and generate what we require, that will be the best thing. At the end of the day, it is just logging, correlating and reporting.

I have been using LogRhythm NextGen SIEM for the last four years. We are using the latest version.

The stability is there, it is good.

As of November we have four customers in the field of info, security, officers, managers, and risk and compliance. Generally, these are all risk and compliance teams at the financial institutions or in the government. The implementation is done by the IT security team but the reports and everything are part of the risk and compliance team.

It is scalable.

One person is more than enough to operate it. We have a specialist, one engineer who does it.

The support is quite good. We haven't had any challenges. Initially, there was something that they requested, so we logged a call and they were able to respond immediately. We had no challenges. They are quite responsive.

The initial setup is not so easy because it is quite a process. Nevertheless, from my experience in implementing SIEM, Splunk is the easiest, and LogRhythm comes next.

LogRhythm is okay, we never had any challenges.

The installation is per site. Because these are all government customers, public sector government customers, we generally take anywhere between four to six weeks for installation. We have five people doing it.

When they buy the license, whether on-prem or cloud licenses, I don't think that's all they pay. We do charge them for implementation and installation, but that's about it. Subscription is year on year.

We have tried many other products. But if you want to look for a mature product in the SIEM market - Gartner Quadrant, LogRhythm and Splunk are all leaders and are well placed products. The rest are yet to come up.

When I say LogRhythm is a mature product, I mean it covers all 360 degrees for SIEM requirements which is not there in the other products. Only a few products have this kind of totality of integration, especially in the reporting. It has very good machine learning and AI techniques. It is very good.

I of course would recommend LogRhythm NextGen SIEM to others.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give LogRhythm NextGen SIEM definitely a nine.

We have a lot of distributed offices and no visibility into any of them. The use case for this product is to collect and integrate logs from all the machines at all the different sites and get better insight into the security areas that we need to tighten up.

I am hoping that we will be able to response to threats and gain visibility into our environment that we don't currently have.

The AI Engine.

I would like to see our vulnerabilities counter. We will be using Tenable to fill that void right now.

It seems like it will scale easily with the way our environment is set up.

We have not used LogRhythm's tech support yet.

We were using an MSP and were dissatisfied with its performance. What we started to do was figure out what we could bring in-house and what we needed from a security standpoint, and this SIEM kept coming up as something we should look at.

The initial setup is complex.

We are using a LogRhythm partner, at least for the first three years, to help with the monitoring and the deployment of it. We are not a big enough environment where we have people that we can dedicate to it right now.

We require one person for deployment and maintenance.

I would recommend LogRhythm. I am really impressed with it, though we haven't start using it yet.

We are just in the middle of deployment of the full-spectrum analytics capabilities. We haven't finished the configuration of the product yet.

We do plan to use the built-in playbooks.

We have approximately 931 log sources at this point.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The reputation of the vendor. 
2. The quality of the product. 
3. The integration into the environment that we have right now.

The thing that I find most valuable is that every interface is consistent. Whether you're looking at a dashboard, a drill-down, an alarm, a search, the interface is exactly the same. As you move through the experience of looking at some type of event, some type of incident, following up on a search, everything is consistent throughout the whole user experience.

One of the evidences we have that LogRhythm is being very successful for us is in this year's penetration test. I caught the pen-testers five times in the course of their duties. That was just great ammunition to show that this works.

The biggest thing that I think needs improvement is reporting in the Web Console. Most of our reporting is done in the thick client console. The only people that have access to that, really, are the people that work for me, the administrators of the system. So the end-users, the people whose logs we consume, we give them views to their logs but they aren't able to run reports. By moving reporting to the Web Console, that would enable all of the regular, non-administrative users to run reports as well.

We've been using it for several years.

We just went through an upgrade just to increase our capacity, so we could bring in more log sources, and it's been a wonderful product for us.

It scales great, which is one of the reasons why we went to it.

Almost all the time things are handled in a proper way. We've had very good experience with technical support. On one or two occasions, a couple years ago, they were going through some growing pains because of their expansion. Our CRM, our Customer Manager, stepped in and helped us get through those hurdles.

It's actually our second SIEM tool. Our first one was not scalable. We didn't really get to pick it, it was chosen for us. We got to a certain point and we just couldn't grow it anymore. 

So we did a full RFP, a bake-off so to speak, and looked at everything that was really competitive on the market. Ended up with LogRhythm. Did our initial deployment, which lasted us for about two years. Because we did our basic measurements on a tapped-out SIEM - we didn't realize how much growth we would have once we uncapped the bottlenecks - we ran into some growth issues. We just doubled our capacity three months ago with no problems at all.

I always recommend training for everything, but that really is use, not setup. Setup is very easy. I do recommend people take advantage of the LogRhythm Professional Services. They make it very helpful, it's easy to get up and running in a day or two. Use Professional Services is my recommendation.

In terms of the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, there isn't any single important criterion. I have a spreadsheet that I use that expresses value.

• Price is one component of value 
• Usability
• Manageability
• How many resources do I have to apply to it? 
• Can I run it with one FTE? Do I need two FTEs? 
• Also, its efficiency. Does it meet all of the use-cases that we're buying it for?

The first thing you do is sit down and think about, "what are going to be my first steps?" This is the kind of thing you have to phase, really, to be successful. "What are my goals out of my first year?" Plan that out, and then plan where I'm going to go from there. Then sit down with somebody that's experienced like the LogRhythm Professional Services, or your SE, or other people you know that have used LogRhythm for a while, and review that plan and make sure that you've got some specific strategic benchmarks in place so that you can guide yourself through that growth.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. I am very happy.

The benefits we see are manifold, compliance. We have to store logs. We're under SOX control, we're under now New York Department of Financial Services, cyber regulations, we are under EU GDPR, loads of regulations are coming out. To be able to store these logs and be able to access them if we need to, from an archive point of view, is very valuable.

The most valuable feature of LogRhythm for me is the ability to correlate logs throughout many different log sources. Every different log has a different time stamp, it has a different user, things are in different places. But with LogRhythm you can take all of your logs from all the different sources and make them relevant to each other. 

So if you're looking for a user that is doing something malicious or if you're looking for a computer that is maybe making some calls out to systems that you've never made before, you can correlate based on a user attribute or a computer attribute to say, "Go find me everything that that user is doing." Because of the correlation, you can then have alarms and reporting off of multiple log sources.

I'm not really sure I can pinpoint any particular area that I see LogRhythm needing improvement in. 

I think they probably need to, because a lot of companies are having this cloud-first strategy, where anything that's new has to go into the cloud for some reason. So I think with CloudAI coming out, that's really good. But maybe having more of LogRhythm in the cloud. Educating people about how we get LogRhythm more into the Cloud.

Part of the care and feeding of LogRhythm is staying on top of what's coming out in LogRhythm. I know that their community site has been improved and that they're wanting people to be more involved with the community. But I think making people aware of parts of LogRhythm that are new is very important. 

On the whole it's a stable product. Occasionally we do have issues with upgrades, but Professional Services and the support staff have been very helpful with fixing any of the challenges that we've had.

For us, because we're a small company with not that many locations - we only have seven datacenters in seven offices - we haven't had any problems with scale. 

We did purchase a company a few years ago and adding their log sources into LogRhythm did not pose a challenge. We always know that with the system that we purchased, there's a certain limitation of messages per second that we have to watch out for, and we've never gone over that. So for us there have been no issues with scale.

Whenever we've had Professional Services on site to work through new alarms, to implement a new feature that we haven't used before, they're always very professional, they're always very responsive. They follow up on items that they said they would, which is always good. We're paying them to do a service, and that's always nice, that they perform their service.

We have had challenges in the past with EU-based support - most of this is run out of Dublin and London - and those challenges were overcome by LogRhythm bringing their support back in-house. They were using a second-level team to perform the support. But once they fixed that, we get great support from LogRhythm. 

When you open a ticket they acknowledge that a ticket has been put in, and then somebody will get back to us. We also have 24/7 support, so sometimes our ticket can move from the EU to the US, and we have people in the US that are able to take over the tickets. They seem to be very good at managing that. 

We did not have a SIEM solution in place at all. I was told to go out and look for one, so I did, and LogRhythm definitely came out on top for what we needed it for.

The main challenge with setting up LogRhythm is you cannot just put LogRhythm in and let it run. You have to put some care and feeding into it. You really have to work on it.

LogRhythm gives you a lot of standard rules, but some of those, a lot of them, do need tweaking, and there are reasons for it. They can create a global rule that would work for maybe 20% of their customers, but everyone needs to go in and actually make changes. You have to have a staff on prem to be able to know your organization, know what your organizations looking for, and to be able to make those tweaks.

So the challenge with setting up LogRhythm is you don't just flip it on, you work at it, you make sure that you're invested in it. You have to have a team. It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge team of people that are working on LogRhythm 24/7. I'm sure for some financial institutions, or some institutions, that has to happen. But you need to align resources internally to be able to know the product. 

It's almost best if you have a first-line support for LogRhythm internally, because you can't always rely on somebody else to fix your problems. You really have to know your system. So taking the LogRhythm training - when we've had other people come on to our staff - I've done a lot of training, but we have had Professional Services come back and do more internal training. 

In terms of criteria for choosing a vendor, when you go through an RFP process there are always weighted criteria. We went through that whole process and started out with eight vendors, got it down to two and then selected LogRhythm. For me it's relationship, I want to feel that the product that we're buying is going to be supported, and that we have almost a team behind us that is there. When we did purchase LogRhythm we felt that. We bought a lot of Professional Services time to help us implement. 

It's not like the sales guy says, "Okay bye," and never talks to you again, and just takes in the money for the license renewal every year. They have customer boards, the sales engineers will talk to you and will bring things to the table. They'll come and do a health check. I don't feel like we just bought a product with LogRhythm, I felt that we bought a team.

You have to allocate resources, and that's why I've recommended LogRhythm to a few friends and colleagues. To get the best out of LogRhythm you really have to put the time in.

The important thing in LogRhythm is the correlation in the AIE rules. It correlates all the logs to give meaningful events.

It helps us to improve our procedures management by decentralizing log management. We collect all the logs from our security devices, Windows server devices, and all the network devices into one single platform, then we can see all the events that led to the securities.

Our key challenge is how we can convince our top management that we are in a very secure state/environment.

The Web Dashboard UI: Maybe it can improve more to indicate some of what Splunk is doing, because I also compare with other SIEM products. Maybe LogRhythm can have some sort of dashboard similar to what Splunk is giving to their customers.

The product is good, but maybe they can further improve what they are doing in the roadmap, such as cloud AI and some of the web dashboard enhancements.

Since 2015.

At first, it is quite straightforward, but in terms of the the meaningful events, the AIE rules, during the implementation stage, we had difficulties getting the correct AIE rules, but further on it is improving.

For overall performance, it is very good. In terms of the correlation to the alarms rules, the AIE rules, I think in those terms of the reporting, maybe it can be further improved upon. The customization of the reporting could give more information that we need.

We have been using quite a lot of technical support. Every time we have any issues, we will create a ticket to LogRhythm support. Example, when we have an error in our deployment monitor's usage, they will have us fine tuning or do some maintenance to improve the logs, the logs that we receive.

During the proposal, we are looking at three to four different vendors, such as LogRhythm, Splunk, and IBM QRadar, so in term of alarms and AI intelligence, we see that LogRhythm is giving more accurate and meaningful events compared to the others.

My advice, when they first implement the solution, they should make sure that they know what data source or log sources that they want to give to LogRhythm to do the correlations, because they cannot just simply dump all the log sources to LogRhythm. It will impact performance, so they will need to carefully choose the log sources first. Then, after that, they can move away to the correlation, the engine rules, and so on.

It is important for us to have a unified internal platform.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

The most critical thing for us is in term of the correlations, because without the correct correlation, or alarms, then there will be no meaningful events. So what our priority is to give many people events that we can trigger our teams to do the mitigation and remediation action.