Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

In our Security Operations Center, we rely on Microsoft Sentinel for continuous security monitoring. We collect logs from various customer environments and define security use cases with correlation rules to analyze activities. These rules leverage predefined criteria to identify potential malicious behavior. Microsoft Sentinel serves as our central platform for security monitoring, investigation, and remediation of security threats detected through alerts.

The biggest challenge in security monitoring is managing the vast amount of logs generated daily from various devices like web servers and firewalls. Microsoft Sentinel tackles this by collecting all logs in a central location and allowing us to define rules. Using its query language, we can search across these logs for specific conditions, like malicious activity. If a suspicious event is identified, Sentinel generates an immediate security alert, enabling our team to investigate and take appropriate action to stop potential attacks.

Microsoft Sentinel helps us identify security threats through built-in machine learning. It analyzes network traffic patterns and can detect anomalies, like unusually high data transfers outside typical hours. These anomalies trigger alerts, allowing for early intervention.

Microsoft Sentinel shines in its ability to bridge hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It seamlessly integrates with on-premises infrastructure through Azure Arc, and even private clouds can be connected via Azure Gateway and a VPN to the Azure Log Analytics workspace. This unified approach ensures all our security data, regardless of origin, is ingested and analyzed for potential threats.

Microsoft recently launched Content Hub, a marketplace for pre-configured security solutions within Azure Sentinel. Unlike our previous experience setting up data connectors a few years ago, Content Hub offers a one-stop shop for integrating security tools. When we choose a data connector, we also get pre-built correlation rules, playbooks, and workbooks – all packaged together for faster and more effective security monitoring. The content hub streamlines onboarding pre-built SIEM content, especially during the initial SOC setup. When starting fresh with a new environment and unsure of specific use cases, we can search for relevant data sources in the hub. Once integrated, the content hub provides pre-configured rules alongside those connectors. Simply enabling these rules offers substantial coverage for our MITRE ATT&CK mapping, a framework that assesses our ability to detect various attack techniques. By leveraging these out-of-the-box tools, we gain significant initial security coverage with minimal effort.

The content hub helps us centralize all of the out-of-the-box content available from Sentinel.

Sentinel acts as a central hub, bringing together information from various sources both internal, first-party, and external, third-party into a single, unified view. This allows us to analyze logs stored in different tables, regardless of their naming conventions. By defining correlation routes, Sentinel can examine specific activities across these disparate sources. For example, we could create a route that checks firewall logs for suspicious activity and then correlates it with specific user actions in Windows device logs, providing a more comprehensive picture of potential security incidents.

Sentinel improves our visibility into user and network behavior through a feature called User Entity Behavior Analytics. This leverages Microsoft's machine learning to analyze user and device activity. If we're investigating multiple security incidents involving a user or device, UEBA provides a broader view. We can directly access the user's history of incidents and visualize their connections to other alerts and impacted devices in a graph format. This allows for efficient investigation of complex incidents impacting multiple users and devices.

Microsoft Sentinel streamlines security incident investigation. The incident page clearly displays involved entities and details of triggered alerts, including logs. This allows SOC analysts to quickly assess the situation and potentially predict the nature of the activity, even before diving into event logs. Sentinel's powerful query language further simplifies investigation by enabling easy data visualization, formatting, and custom functions, all within various timeframes. This significantly accelerates the overall investigation process.

Sentinel has streamlined our event investigation process. By allowing us to predefine keyword queries for specific alerts, it eliminates the need to manually craft queries each time. Similar to how SOCs use pre-defined playbooks for various incidents, Sentinel lets us define queries that return relevant data quickly. This cuts down on investigation time by allowing us to focus on the specific alert and the data it generates.

Microsoft Sentinel stands out among SIEM tools for its user-friendliness and powerful built-in query language. This language, included at no additional cost, allows for easy data collection, sorting, formatting, and visualization, making it accessible even to non-experts. Additionally, its seamless integration with other Azure products eliminates the need for custom parsing logic, saving time and resources.

Microsoft Sentinel's search efficiency can be improved, especially for queries spanning large datasets or long timeframes like 90 days compared to competitors like Splunk. While Sentinel might take several minutes to return results for such investigations, Splunk queries are significantly faster.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for two years.

Since the entire Azure Sentinel analytics workspace resides within the Azure environment, we've never experienced lag or downtime. This is because Microsoft handles all data storage, hosting, and infrastructure maintenance. As a result, we're relieved of those burdens and haven't encountered any Sentinel downtime.

Microsoft Sentinel's cloud-based deployment on Azure allows it to scale automatically. This likely involves built-in load-balancing mechanisms that distribute processing across different Azure resources when needed. This ensures Sentinel can handle increased workloads without manual intervention.

While I wasn't involved in deploying Microsoft Sentinel myself, I did help configure and set it up on our end. The initial setup process wasn't particularly simple, but it wasn't overly complex either.

While the user interface in Azure simplifies the deployment process of Microsoft Sentinel, some architectural knowledge is still necessary. The initial configuration might involve just a few selections, deciding on the deployment architecture, data replication workspace locations, etc. requires experience. This prior experience, however, should make integration with existing systems smoother. Three people on average are required for the initial deployment.

Our Microsoft Sentinel implementation approach depended on available time. For complex deployments, we handled it directly. In time-sensitive situations, we collaborated with teams managing the devices, providing them with implementation steps and troubleshooting support as needed.

While I wasn't involved with the specifics of Microsoft Sentinel's pricing, my understanding is it scales based on data ingestion. This means we only pay for the amount of data we bring in, which is fair. However, if a device generates excessive data like hundreds of GBs daily, investigating the cause becomes crucial to avoid unnecessary costs. In most cases though, the pay-as-you-go model shouldn't be an issue.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel eight out of ten. I've tried Splunk, QRadar, and Azure Sentinel. While Splunk requires knowledge of SPL for deeper exploration and QRadar's query language isn't powerful, Azure Sentinel strikes a great balance. It offers a user-friendly interface for basic investigations without needing a query language but also allows for custom queries and visualizations for advanced users. This makes it the most versatile of the three.

Splunk requires users to learn SPL for full functionality, making it less accessible for basic investigations. Conversely, Microsoft Sentinel's intuitive UI allows even those without KQL knowledge to conduct basic security analysis through its built-in features and informative interface.

Because our service is hosted on Microsoft's cloud, they completely manage all maintenance tasks, freeing us from infrastructure management responsibilities.

We're a cybersecurity company using Sentinel to provide SIEM services to our customers. 

Sentinel improved how we investigate incidents. We can create watchlists and update them to align with the latest threat intelligence. The information Microsoft provides enables us to understand thoroughly and improve as we go along. It allows us to provide monthly reports to our clients on their security posture. 

It helps us automate some tasks but not others. There are some things we missed because there aren't any rules. We're still working on integrating it. We know it can detect high-severity incidents if we utilize it correctly. We've been able to automate incident responses to some high-level threats we've encountered.

Microsoft's threat intelligence helped us prepare for attacks by developing rules before they hit. We know what behavior to expect because we have visibility into the threat and the actors. 

Sentinel's reporting features save us time. In the past, we created reports in Microsoft Word by dropping in screenshots. With Sentinel, we can create readymade reports from the dashboard. Our monthly report previously took about 16 to 24 hours to complete. We cut that in half. 

We have our own ticketing system for our soft team, and Sentinel's playbooks helped us automate many processes. 

Sentinel provides excellent visibility. Microsoft updates a lot of its security solutions via Sentinel. The content hub and connectors are available to integrate everything. Microsoft also created separate analytics groups, so we log behaviors and use a template. We often need to modify the template based on a customer's log behavior and our correlation and analysis. 

We can learn some new techniques for using KQL correctly by studying the latest templates that Microsoft releases and creating some KBs for our analysts. The MITRE ATT&CK framework is now integrated into Sentinel, so we can statistically identify which part of our microservices are vulnerable. We can assess the severity of threats and prioritize them accordingly. We also need to prioritize based on our SLAs. 

My company also provides managed service for Defender for Endpoint, previously called ATP. We also work with Defender for Cloud and Defender for Identity.

All the Microsoft solutions are integrated with Sentinel, including 365 apps, Azure AD, and various cloud-based security solutions. It includes all the connectors you need to ingest logs from multiple Microsoft products, giving us near-total visibility. Some customers use on-prem security appliances, so we have to correlate logs. 

Sentinel comes with Azure Lighthouse. We can link the subscription to our customer's tenant and ask them to create a global admin account. We can report on the activities using each account and how secure the credentials are. The integration is seamless when we have that level of access. 

We offer ingestion for all Microsoft products and always recommend our clients get everything so we can get full threat visibility and effectiveness. Having all the products integrated into Sentinel helps us see the big picture. In addition to the analytics rules and everything, we're utilizing dashboards and workbooks. Some workbooks are templates that Microsoft provides, but we also develop our own. 

We can compile all this data, put it in a workbook, and create rules. The other part is communicating with the customer because the user is still reviewing logs. Is it an admin? Is it doing daily counts of logins, etc? 

Three of our customers use Defender for Cloud. If a company needs it, we can support it. We have Microsoft-certified engineers who can provide expert frontline support.

Initially, we were only ingesting incidents from Defender for Endpoint, but now we can ingest more data throughout the system. Previously, we could not see some things. We could do it, but we had to search through the portal to find what we needed. Using a connector, we can see everything our employees do on the endpoint, such as device info, location, logins, etc. It's especially useful when employees work remotely or outside their normal area. 

Sentinel lets us investigate threats and comprehensively respond from one console. We can have multiple tabs on one application. The capabilities are robust and marketable. All of these solutions are combined. 

We've seen delays in getting the logs from third-party solutions and sometimes Microsoft products as well. It would be helpful if Microsoft created a list of the delays. That would make things more transparent for customers. 

In some instances, the customer reports that they suspect malware on a computer, and one of their IT guys noticed it. There is a five to ten minute delay before we can see it and respond. As a security company, we don't want the customer to be the first one to identify the threat. However, we must deal with delays from the various products we're integrating. For example, Apex One has a 15-minute delay.

Sometimes it's an issue with the third-party product, but sometimes it isn't. If it isn't, we need to open a ticket with Microsoft. We would benefit from transparency around delays and communication about what Microsoft is doing to resolve the issue. 

Another issue is transparency around usage and associated costs. There are charges if you use playbooks and queries. If you query 100,000 times a day, your costs will go up. The usage only displays in gigabytes per day. A breakdown would help us make reports for our management. 

We have used Sentinel since 2020, so it has been about three years.

We also have experienced some performance problems in the UK. I'm not sure how that works, but something might be going on in the back-end. We transferred to a different region a while ago and lost some of our workspaces. We were shocked.

If Microsoft needs to failover to another region, the customer should be informed because it affects many things. Some of the products we ingest just suddenly stopped, and we have to redo the integration with Cisco Umbrella, AWS S3, and SendGrid. Azure was pulling those logs, and the connections were suddenly cut when this happened. 

I rate Microsoft's support a five out of ten. We had problems using Azure and getting the logs from event services for one of our customers. The date and time the log generated on our customer's device were wrong. It showed the event's location but not the time that the event was generated. 

We contacted Microsoft, who told us to expect a reply the following day, but they didn't respond until four days later. Then, they sent us to another department to speak with someone more knowledgeable about our issue. 

We described the problem, and they asked us for evidence. They wanted our support team to recreate it. Microsoft's support team can create a lab environment and recreate the scenario for themselves. We had to stop the call because we were too busy.

Neutral

We previously used an in-house SIEM solution. 

Deploying Sentinel was complex initially, but it has gotten easier. We documented how we did everything, so it's easy for someone to replicate the steps. If we have accepted the CSP invite, we can deploy it in two days, including configuring ingestion, creating rules, and Azure onboarding. We also must build dashboards and templates. Sometimes there are delays, and it might take three to five weeks.

Sentinel is costly compared to other solutions, but it's fair. SIEM solutions like CrowdStrike charge based on daily log volume. They generally process a set number of logs for free before they start charging. Microsoft's pricing is clearer. It's free under five gigabytes. Some of these logs we ingest have a cost, so they don't hide it. I believe the tenant pays the price, and Microsoft helps create awareness of the cost.

With other solutions, you don't know what you're being charged until you get the bill. You might find that you're using playbooks or queries too much. Microsoft gives you visibility into your expenses. 

We evaluated a few other solutions, including CrowdStrike, Splunk, and LogRhythm. We decided to go with Sentinel because we have Microsoft-certified staff, and many companies in the UK are adopting Defender and other Microsoft security solutions. Sentinel offers seamless integration with Microsoft security products, and we've also seen how flexible it can be.

We can leverage KQL queries. If you're trying to send logs to another SIEM, you'll probably need an API and a lot of other components to make it work. Sentinel makes our jobs easier by providing all of the connectors and out-of-the-box integration. 

I rate Microsoft Sentinel a nine out of ten. I think the industry is shifting toward a single-vendor strategy instead of best-of-breed. If you have a lot of tools from various vendors, it makes things more complicated. You need to hire employees who specialize in each device. It's better if your team understands a solution's features and capabilities. 

If you're considering a SIEM solution, you should compare each product's mean detection and response time. I'm unsure if that information will be publicly available for every solution, so you may need to test them. You should also think about other components besides cost. Sentinel might be more expensive than other solutions, but it's more comprehensive because it incorporates all the different security elements and keeps evolving.

Microsoft is constantly updating all of its solutions. We mainly utilize Microsoft infrastructure, but some solutions are based on Unix or Linux. At the same time, threats on that side aren't as critical as those from Microsoft. They own the operating system, so they're positioned to understand the vulnerabilities and how to fix them. 

I'm currently using this solution for monitoring our SOC. I also implement Sentinel for clients.

We use Defender for Cloud, Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Identity. They were easy to integrate. It's necessary to understand the background of the data source to integrate the devices into Sentinel. If it is cloud-based, we can utilize the GeoLogic app or Azure function to integrate the log sources or use the slot method.

These solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our enterprise. We have different EDR solutions in our environment, and we have integrated them with Sentinel. We directly monitor all of the other security devices from Sentinel.

I haven't seen many issues with integrating different products. We can set a robust error detection mechanism. If there are some issues while integrating the logs, we can do automated alerting and easily troubleshoot any issues.

There are no issues with integrating multiple-location firewalls. We have Sentinel deployed in the US and other geolocations.

There are between 15 to 20 people using this solution in my team.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

We mainly use this solution for monitoring purposes. We previously used on-premises data sources, but we wanted to integrate lots of log sources that weren't directly supported by other solutions. Sentinel provides the capability to integrate unsupported log sources. We have integrated lots of unsupported security devices with Sentinel as well.

Sentinel helps automate routine tasks and helps automate the finding of high-value alerts. Microsoft provides some very useful out-of-box automation playbooks that we can utilize in our day-to-day operations. This increases the efficiency of security analysts and our response time. We are using those solutions in our environment to do automation, increase productivity, and enhance the efficiency of our security analysts. Sentinel reduces our overall investigation time compared to other solutions.

Sentinel has helped eliminate the need to look at multiple dashboards. We can use the workbook for that. Correlating everything into a single workbook isn't available right now, but it's achievable in the future.

The solution's threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and helps us take proactive steps. We have integrated one open-source solution for IOC monitoring, and Microsoft even provides the IOC data. To be proactive, we also rely on other solutions like Defender for Endpoint for detecting those threats before they actually happen.

We added IOCs into Sentinel from a monitoring perspective. If we can detect ransomware, we can prioritize that and work on mitigation.

Microsoft Sentinel saves us time. It has provided us with a very rich automation solution. We can see most of the details directly on the Sentinel site. We don't need to log in and check for different things, so it saves a lot of time for associates. It saves us about 30 to 40 minutes on average per incident.

The solution decreases our time to detect and respond. We can increase detection using dashboards. The automation and playbooks help us respond to threats if the user is compromised. We can directly reset the user's password or disable the user from the Sentinel portal by using the playbooks. We're saving about 15 to 20 minutes on our response times.

Sentinel is a Microsoft product, so they provide very robust use cases and analytic groups, which are very beneficial for the security team. I also like the ability to integrate data sources into the software for on-premise and cloud-based solutions. We can very easily integrate the devices with Sentinel. There are multiple ways that we can utilize the product. I also like how the solution processes data.

The solution helps prioritize threats across our enterprise. We can set the severity for the low and medium-priority severity incidents. Sentinel has machine learning and fusion rules, which help us effectively prioritize. Prioritization is very important for us in this security landscape because attacks are getting stronger.

Sentinel provides a lot of out-of-box analytic rules with Sentinel. It's very good at detecting threats compared to the different SIEM solutions in the market now.

Sentinel enables us to easily ingest data from our entire ecosystem. Attacks can happen from any of the devices. Even the IoT is vulnerable now. We can integrate different solutions for it. For instance, there is Microsoft Defender for IoT, which we can integrate into Sentinel. That provides a single pane of glass for security. In any SOC, we need to have multiple solutions. Sentinel is a great solution for managing and monitoring those products.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. We can integrate other solutions like ServiceNow with Sentinel, and we can set the bidirectional sync.

Sentinel's security protection is comprehensive. In the area of UEBA, I use the entity behavior settings of Sentinel. It provides some enhancement in security monitoring, but it still needs some improvement regarding user and entity behavior.

There is room for improvement in entity behavior and the integration site. It's a new solution, so it can include different security products in the data connector section. I've also experienced some performance issues with the runbook. It takes a lot of time to load.

In the automation section, there are some limitations.

I have used this solution for two and a half years.

It is pretty stable. I haven't had any issues in the two and a half years that I've worked with Sentinel.

The price goes up whenever we integrate more log sources, but there aren't any issues with scalability. We can increase it very easily.

Technical support is good. They're very quick to respond when we raise a case.

I would rate technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Splunk is also the leader in this market. I prefer Sentinel because it's a Microsoft product that provides a lot of free and built-in use cases.

We switched to Sentinel because it's a cloud-native solution. On-premises solutions involve managing IT databases and doing some upgrade activities, but we don't need to manage any of that in Sentinel. We can focus directly on security monitoring and detection and response.

The setup was straightforward. I worked on multiple projects before the deployment of Sentinel.

The amount of time it takes to deploy the solution depends on the client's network area, the firewall, and log sources. We have deployed the solution for user bases of 4,000 to 5,000. Deployment was completed within one month by integrating all the required processes.

We had a team of three people for deployment. I took care of the integration of the log sources, and the other two people took care of the customization.

Sentinel doesn't require much maintenance.

We evaluated Splunk and a few other solutions.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

My advice is that colleagues who have worked on different solutions, whether on-premises or cloud, should use the Ninja training. Microsoft provides this training directly. It is publicly available and provides a better understanding of how to utilize the solution more effectively.

I think it's ideal to go with different vendors across our environment rather than a single vendor for security purposes.

My role thus far has been to integrate security log sources into the platform. This includes developing or troubleshooting some of the data connectors for different sources, such as web application firewall interfaces.

Sentinel is a SOAR platform. It represents the next generation beyond traditional SIM and SIEM platforms. Its powerful SOAR functionality orchestrates and automates responses to security events, eliminating the need for manual intervention. Instead of relying on human analysts to monitor events and react, Microsoft Sentinel leverages pre-defined automation rules. These rules correlate relevant events, generating a holistic understanding of the situation. Based on this analysis, automated responses are triggered, expediting the resolution process and eliminating any delays associated with manual identification and decision-making.

Sentinel provides us with a unified set of tools for detecting, investigating, and responding to incidents. This centralized approach offers both advantages and challenges. On the one hand, it grants us the flexibility to tailor Sentinel's capabilities to various situations. However, this flexibility demands a deep understanding of the environments and activities we're dealing with to effectively utilize Sentinel's features. While this presents a challenge, it also highlights the potential benefits of this unified approach. The unified view is important to me because I get all the information together in a single pane of glass instead of having to switch between multiple applications. The ability to consolidate all of that information into a single application or dashboard and to centrally evaluate its intelligence is a significant advantage.

Sentinel's ability to secure our cloud environment is of the utmost importance.

Sentinel Cloud Protection offers a collection of customizable content that caters to our specific requirements, demonstrating the solution's flexibility. The versatility of this content allows us to address a wide range of needs. However, in most instances, we need to adapt the material to suit our unique circumstances. While Sentinel Cloud Protection provides a comprehensive set of resources, including pre-written responses, it often requires tailoring to fit specific situations. This customization process is not a drawback but rather an essential aspect of effectively utilizing the tool. It's crucial to understand the nuances of each situation to apply the content appropriately. While I wouldn't consider this a negative aspect, I've encountered individuals who believe they can purchase a solution, implement it without modification, and achieve optimal results. However, such unrealistic expectations often lead to disappointment.

The Sentinel Content Hub is essentially the central repository where we acquire the content to build upon. Therefore, it serves as the starting point for our efforts. Some of the hunt rules have been quite beneficial in terms of what they provide from the Content Hub, allowing for a plug-and-play approach. This means we can immediately benefit from what's available without having to do any additional work. We can then build upon this foundation and extend the capabilities beyond what's provided by the Content Hub. The Content Hub itself is a valuable asset that gives us a head start in achieving our objectives.

Content Hub helps us centralize out-of-the-box SIM content. This has made our workload more manageable.

The ability to correlate and centralize all of that information together, rather than having to manage it across multiple platforms and potentially miss things between different platforms, makes it more likely that we will not miss anything. The workload and the missed threats that we need to respond to have been reduced because of that unified approach. The mean time to detect has been reduced, and the mean time to respond has been reduced.

Sentinel correlates signals from first- and third-party sources into a single, high-confidence incident. The third-party integrations provided through Microsoft offer all the tools we need to integrate those sources. In other cases, we have to build the integrations from the ground up. Currently, we are struggling to integrate some of the sources that don't have existing connectors. However, the platform is flexible enough to allow us to build these integrations. It is just a matter of finding the time to address this issue.

Our security team's overall efficiency has improved. The build phase is still ongoing. We have not yet fully transitioned to an operational model. We are still in the build implementation stage because we need to integrate some third-party sources into the existing platform and ensure that they are included in the scope of the analytics rules. However, this has significantly reduced the amount of time spent working between different platforms.

The automation capabilities are perhaps the platform's most significant advantage. The force multiplier capability is exceptional. Traditional SIM or SIEM-like platforms were effective in gathering and presenting security information to security personnel. However, security personnel were still responsible for evaluating the information and determining whether a response was necessary. One of the benefits of Sentinel's automation capabilities is the ability to automatically trigger an action or response activity, which is a significant advantage.

The automation capabilities have helped reduce our mean time to respond. Automated events can prevent a problem from escalating beyond a single incident to multiple occurrences before we have to respond to it. In this way, automation effectively catches problems right away.

Sentinel has helped to improve our visibility into user and network behavior. This is extremely important because it allows us to have a better understanding of how users and networks are behaving.

Sentinel has helped reduce our team's time.

Sentinel has streamlined our event investigation process by eliminating the need to manually track down specific event activities. The rules are now automatically identifying and processing these activities, significantly reducing the time required for investigation. Tasks that previously took half an hour can now be completed in under five minutes.

The analytic rule is the most valuable feature. It allows us to assess the various use cases we've developed and then automate those processes accordingly. I consider it a force multiplier. It empowers a small team to achieve a significant impact, whereas previously, I would have relied on multiple individuals. By utilizing it, we can accomplish more with fewer resources.

While I appreciate the UI itself and the vast amount of information available on the platform, I'm finding the overall user experience to be frustrating due to frequent disconnections and the requirement to repeatedly re-authenticate. Microsoft needs to address these usability issues to enhance the user experience.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for seven months.

The stability is exceptionally reliable. I tend to be quite vocal when things don't function as expected. The web interface requires using a browser for interaction, and I often find myself multitasking between Sentinel-related tasks and other activities, such as responding to emails. When I return to the Sentinel interface, I'm prompted to re-enter my credentials, which causes me to lose my previous work. If I'm using KQL to query data, I frequently have to restart my work from scratch. This can be frustrating, but I've learned to copy my work periodically to avoid losing it. I haven't encountered this issue with previous platforms, even those that use web interfaces.

Sentinel boasts exceptional scalability. While it's crucial to monitor data ingestion costs, Microsoft has effectively crafted a platform capable of expanding to accommodate far greater volumes than initially anticipated.

The technical support has room for improvement.

Neutral

The initial deployment was straightforward. Our strategy was to consolidate onto a common platform. We have a significant portion of our security information being handled through SysLog events. As a result, it was almost as straightforward as simply rerouting data from the old platform to the new one. This served as a preliminary test of the new platform to ensure it was functioning as intended and could effectively redirect and handle the increased volume.

The deployment likely involved six people, but not all at the same time. There were six people involved in the deployment overall, but we probably had four people working on it at any given time. From a headcount perspective, I believe four people is the appropriate number.

We employed a third-party company for the implementation because we sought expertise in Sentinel and the Azure platform, and we aimed to augment our existing staff.

We have achieved a positive return on our investment. In my previous jobs of comparable size, I would have needed approximately three people to manage the event activity and to handle and respond to it. Here, we can accomplish this with two people. As a result, we have saved at least one headcount with our current staffing levels. Additionally, as we expand the platform, we will not need to increase the headcount to manage the growth.

Microsoft Sentinel can be costly, particularly for data management. While Microsoft provides various free offerings to attract users, these benefits can quickly become overwhelmed by escalating data management expenses if proper precautions are not taken.

I don't think it's Microsoft engaging in underhanded tactics. I believe the issue lies with customers not paying close enough attention to what they're enabling. Initially, they're excited and eager to incorporate everything, but before they realize it, they've incurred unexpected costs.

Azure Monitor Log Analytics and Sentinel have different subscription plans and pricing tiers. This segmentation was implemented to accommodate the distinct business relationships within our organization. Sentinel costs are managed separately from Azure costs.

The decision to adopt Microsoft Sentinel was made before I joined the organization. I understand that they evaluated all the major solutions available, including Splunk and QRadar. However, due to the selection of a cloud-based solution, they opted for Microsoft Sentinel as it aligned with their overall strategy.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel eight out of ten.

We've got a user base globally of about 5,000 people.

Microsoft Sentinel does require maintenance, which includes monitoring the incoming data and ensuring that everything is functioning as expected. While automation simplifies many tasks, it doesn't eliminate the need for oversight. We still need to verify that everything is working correctly. Part of the maintenance cycle involves ensuring that the automation agents are operational and performing their intended tasks and that events are being collected and evaluated properly.

Users need to have a clear understanding of their goals before selecting a solution. I have encountered too many people who believe that simply choosing a solution will resolve all of their problems. It is crucial to understand the desired outcome and the specific requirements of the use case to determine whether or not Sentinel is the appropriate fit.

We utilize Microsoft Sentinel primarily to monitor our data storage software. Through the implementation of distinct connectors, we can accommodate multiple use cases for Sentinel. This solution also enables us to thwart failover attempts and prevent brute-force attacks. Moreover, we leverage the EDR tools to establish groups. For instance, if an unauthorized individual attempts to access a critical server from outside the designated group, we can promptly identify them by analyzing the event ID.

Using the Microsoft Sentinel Investigation tab, we can observe all activities related to access and unauthorized attempts taking place in our environment.

Sentinel assists us in prioritizing threats across our entire enterprise. When we receive high-priority alerts, we engage with the client to investigate whether they are conducting any testing first. If not, we identify the unknown activity and collaborate with them to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

We also utilize Office 365. We have seamlessly integrated Office 365 with Sentinel, which is made easy through the provided connectors, especially when our API keys are associated with a cloud machine. All that is needed are the workspace ID, subscription ID, and API key.

The effectiveness of the protection offered by the integrated solutions is substantial. We are capable of preventing spam, tracking the complete trajectory of data transmitted by the end user, including its source, especially when originating from unauthorized URLs. Additionally, we can identify instances of unauthorized mail redirection. Furthermore, we can utilize SPF authentication to safeguard our domain against spoofing.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to gather data from our entire ecosystem. We also have the capability to exclude non-suspicious or non-malicious data, such as daily reminders, from the daily logs in order to prevent system slowdown.

Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond promptly from a central location. We can gather all the necessary information for an investigation with a single click, which will provide us with a comprehensive overview of the actions taken by the suspicious user by reviewing the Event ID.

The built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence capabilities of Sentinel are commendable. The UEBA can furnish a summary of all entities and discern unfamiliar ones that are not commonly associated with our system, subsequently tagging them for our review.

It aids in the automation of routine tasks and the identification of high-value alerts. For instance, if we need to compile a list of our administrative or high-profile users, we can establish rules based on high and medium security criteria, or any other specifications we might have. The entries will then correspond to the information aligned with our requirements. Furthermore, we have generated a watchlist of blacklisted users, which assists us in conveniently tracking activities originating from them. 

It provides the ability to create personalized dashboards that offer all the necessary information in a single location. It is important to mention that this feature comes with an extra cost, as is the case with all aspects of Sentinel.

Sentinel's threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit. By utilizing the event summary, we can proactively prepare for unauthorized entries and directly block IPs at the firewall level.

As a partner of Microsoft, they pay us for any POCs we create.

Sentinel has contributed to a reduction in our time for detecting and responding to incidents. As Sentinel operates in the cloud, it offers user-friendly accessibility, enabling us to swiftly access crucial information for responding to potential threats.

The automation rules that enable us to create playbooks for each individual are valuable.

The Identity Behavior tab furnishes us with the entire history linked to each IP or domain that has either accessed or attempted to access our system. By utilizing the data supplied by Sentinel, we can ascertain whether there are any attempts to breach our system. Numerous pre-defined queries are at our disposal, and we also have the option to craft custom queries as needed.

We are invoiced according to the amount of data generated within each log. For example, if I neglect to specify the time period in a search, Sentinel will retrieve all the logs, leading to charges for both pertinent and irrelevant data. This could potentially cause a substantial increase in costs. We incur lower charges for data under 100 GB, but anything surpassing that threshold becomes more expensive.

When setting up EDR for multiple endpoints, we need to create distinct rules for each one to monitor the devices effectively. 

I am currently using Microsoft Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel is stable. It is extremely rare that the solution is down.

Microsoft Sentinel is highly scalable. We can create any random custom playbooks. We can create any custom rules over there As per our requirements. We can enable and disable policies also as per our requirements. We can combine both policies accordingly.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Compared to IBM Security QRadar and Securonix, Microsoft Sentinel is more user-friendly. QRadar is quicker to respond but it has stability issues.

We are charged based on the amount of data used, which can become expensive.

I rate Microsoft Sentinel nine out of ten.

Maintenance is overseen by Microsoft. They announce periods of system downtime for maintenance. If we have anything critical that we require while the system is down, we can request it from Microsoft, and they promptly provide it to us.

Microsoft Sentinel offers us query update suggestions every three months. If we find a suggestion we like, we can simply click on it to automatically update our policy.

I believe it is better to choose a single-vendor security suite over a best-of-breed strategy.

Every day, I log into Microsoft Sentinel to check the logs. I start by checking the incidents and analyzing them. If I need to create an automatic rule, I do so. If the logic needs to be changed, I make the necessary adjustments. I am responsible for managing Microsoft Sentinel for our organization.

For our organization, Microsoft Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across most of our environment because we have not yet fully integrated the solution into all aspects of our operations. Currently, we are working on integrating mutual source AWS into Sentinel, which will provide us with more visibility. Apart from that, there is already a lot of visibility in case of any failures or anyone attempting large deployments across other companies or similar activities. Additionally, if someone attempts to use login information from a different location, it becomes apparent, as it is impossible to travel that quickly. Sentinel covers almost everything.

We are using Microsoft Office 365 for email security in our environment. Our infrastructure engineers have integrated Microsoft Office 365 with Sentinel. When we view the old connectors in the application, it mentions Microsoft Office 365. Currently, it also indicates this in terms of firmware.

Microsoft Sentinel can enable us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. However, since we are currently receiving services from an external source, we are not integrating the tool right now. That's why we are looking for another tool that we can integrate with Microsoft Sentinel. Once we do that, I believe we will be able to see everything, including any malware-related issues, as well as other security and licensing concerns.

The ingestion of data into our security operations is of utmost importance. If we are not monitoring whether people are sending large documents to other companies, how will we realize it? We don't have any other tool for that. Of course, we have email security and EDR, which cover some aspects, but some of them are not effective or are too basic. Unlike them, Microsoft Sentinel is comprehensive. It records everything: every click, download, login, and search. Therefore, it is a necessary tool for our operations.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond quickly from a unified dashboard. A couple of months ago, there was a concern with the AWS environment, and our director asked us to identify any relevant code-related alerts originating from the environment. Since we didn't have the rules at that time, I looked into the recommended analytics section, which turned out to be quite straightforward. When we write Python or work with any logs, cells, or Java-related elements, Microsoft Sentinel provides us with insights and a logical approach to integrating our environment. During my investigation, I discovered some configurations related to the Python code, and it appears to be functioning well now.

Microsoft Sentinel's built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence capabilities work well and are further enhanced with the addition of a firewall for added protection.

Before our organization implemented Microsoft Sentinel, we only had an email security DLP solution and some other tools. While we could see the logs on our computer, they were often presented in a confusing manner, appearing like gibberish to us. However, with the introduction of Sentinel, we can now interpret and make sense of that information.

When I joined the organization, they were already in the process of implementing Microsoft Sentinel. However, I am familiar with other integrations with Sentinel, such as AWS, and the integration is not difficult. We simply create the necessary resources, and everything is well-documented, which is a huge plus. We can access all the information online, both in the AWS part and in Microsoft Sentinel. So, I believe it's not rocket science.

It helps automate routine tasks and aids in identifying high-value alerts. We have automated the tool to receive critical or high alerts and send us messages accordingly. This automation is currently active. Whenever a high alert is generated, it comes through direct messages. Even during non-working hours, I receive these alerts on my phone immediately. If it's an important alert, I can respond promptly. We had an incident where I had to work on weekends due to such an alert. However, if I'm not using the tool or haven't activated it, I generally don't turn on the computer after work hours. So, this feature has been beneficial for us. Some months ago, there was a Microsoft bug that created false positive alerts for every clean link, including company links. We made modifications to the alerts, and now we no longer receive those unnecessary alerts.

It helps eliminate the need to look at multiple dashboards by providing us with just one XDR dashboard. We no longer have to go to other places. However, there are instances when we receive alerts about failing servers, and we can't check them using Sentinel; instead, we have to use Azure Active Directory. It's not Sentinel's fault, and checking through Azure Active Directory is not difficult, but we still have to go somewhere else.

Sentinel's threat intelligence assists us in preparing for potential threats before they strike, allowing us to take necessary precautions. My weekly routine includes dedicating at least two hours to the accounting part. I am constantly searching for any threats in our environment that may have gone unnoticed. So far, I haven't found anything, but I'm always vigilant because we can never be entirely certain that there are no threats.

We have been enabled to save a significant amount of time. The log files consist of hundreds of pages, and to review them, we need to possess networking knowledge to identify the specific case. Without knowing what we are searching for, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sentinel migrates the logs and presents the visual information in a user-friendly manner, which has proven to be a time-saving solution for us.

Sentinel saves money by reducing the number of people required to monitor the alerts. For example, if there are normally 50 alerts per week, fine-tuning reduces them to just one.

Microsoft Sentinel helps decrease our time to detect and time to resolve. Sentinel provides a brief introduction to the events occurring in the environment when someone is causing instability in the AWS environment. Sentinel precisely identifies the issue and offers a link for accessing more information about the situation.

The dashboard that allows me to view all the incidents is the most valuable feature. Threat hunting is also valuable. Sentinel has a Microsoft framework, so we can experiment with numerous queries. There are almost 500 queries available that we can utilize based on our environment.

I believe one of the challenges I encountered was the absence of live training sessions, even with the option to pay for them. Microsoft insists that all information is available in the documentation, which I must admit is quite comprehensive and helpful. However, for someone without a coding background, learning solely from the documents can be challenging at times. It would be much easier to learn if there were practical exercises and instructional videos available. This aspect bothered me significantly. While I did come across a course, my preference was to access it through Sentinel since they are already providing us with their services. Having the team trained up would undoubtedly streamline my job and save a considerable amount of time.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for one year.

We have not had any scalability issues with Microsoft Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel is scalable. We can add as many services as we want, and Microsoft automatically increases the capacity by adding memory and storage.

I have used technical support many times. Sometimes, I have a really hard time understanding them. I am not sure if they are calling from India, but there was background noise at times. However, they are really helpful, even though they seem a bit indifferent. They frequently inquire whether we have addressed the issue and if it has been resolved—quite a lot, actually.

In a company, we are often very busy. They expect us to address the issues immediately, but sometimes it can take months. So, I inform them that I will follow up. They can be a little pushy, which is understandable from their perspective, but for us, it can be challenging because we have many other tasks to handle. Sentinel is just one of my priorities, and there are a lot of other things I need to take care of. That's why sometimes we need time, but to their credit, they are always responsive. Whenever we ask them a question, they promptly provide a response.

Positive

I had previously used Kibana, which is quite different from Microsoft Sentinel. When I used Microsoft Sentinel for the first time, I realized that this was the ideal solution. Microsoft Sentinel is user-friendly, unlike Kibana, which I found difficult to install and not very user-friendly. Microsoft Sentinel, on the other hand, is incredibly user-friendly, making it easy for everyone to understand and learn how to use it. It is a straightforward solution to comprehend.

I give Microsoft Sentinel a nine out of ten.

We are currently evaluating Microsoft Defender and CrowdStrike in our environment to determine which one is a better fit. As for Defender, I cannot claim to have a complete understanding of it since it's in a testing environment. I can monitor people's devices, but I have not yet received any alerts generated by the devices. It has only been around ten days.

I am responsible for creating documentation for all of our implementations, while other teams handle the infrastructure portion.

Maintenance is minimal for Microsoft Sentinel. There is a check button in the house. Sometimes I go there because we occasionally find that some things are not working properly. So we have to go there and address the issue, but it is not a common occurrence. Maybe it happens, like, three times a year which is not bad.

When Exchange email is outside the domain, we have found sometimes that there are phishing emails. With the help of Microsoft Defender only, without Sentinel, we would not be able to track them. A couple of times data was compromised. With Sentinel, what we have done is integrate Microsoft Endpoint for Defender, M365 Defender, and our Exchange Online for all the email communications in and out.

With the investigation and threat-hunting services in Sentinel, we have been able to track and map our complete traffic: Where it started from, where it was intercepted, and where the files were downloaded and exchanged. We have been able to see how a phishing email was entering our domain. Accordingly, we understood that we needed to develop or modify some rules in Exchange and now, we do not have any phishing emails.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place to all of the attack techniques, such as MITRE ATT&CK, manual, DDoS, and brute force attacks. They are quickly identified by Sentinel. That is of high importance because we don't use any other product with Microsoft. Our SOC team continuously analyzes and monitors Sentinel, the activities and events that are happening. That team needs to be equipped with all of the real-time data we are getting from our ecosystem.

We have also integrated our SIEM with multiple firewalls and proxies. The traffic in and out, coming from the firewalls and proxies, is intercepted by Sentinel. We are now getting granular visibility into our traffic. We can see the hits we are getting from various regions, such as the hits that recently came from Russia. We have multiple such attacks on our firewall front end and we have been able to develop more granular rules on our firewalls.

And for DLP we have the help of protection from Microsoft Information Protection labels that we have defined for our data. Whenever this labeled data is shared, the data is limited to the recipients who were specified in the email. Similarly, our OneDrive data has been secured with the MIP Labels. All of this tracking is happening on Sentinel, which is giving us a broader view of where our data is traveling within and outside our organization as well.

People tend to go with Microsoft because it provides you with 360-degree protection, protecting your files, network, infra, and cloud environment. Each of its products is linked and interacts with the others. Microsoft Defender for Cloud will interact with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, for example. And both of them can interact with Sentinel. Sentinel is the central SIEM in Microsoft and has the ability to take all the instructions from all of these Microsoft products and it gives you a central dashboard view in Azure. That helps manage infrastructure and identify threats. It's a single pane of glass. That's why Microsoft is gaining compared to other products.

Eliminating our multiple dashboards was a little tough in the beginning, but the Microsoft support team's expertise helped us create our own dashboard. Previously, when we started integrating all the products, it was very hard for us to give a broader review to management. It was only something the technical guys could do because they know what all those events mean. But when it came to a dashboard and presenting the data to the stakeholders, it was very tough. With the help of Microsoft's expert engineers, we were able to create dashboards into Sentinel, as well as with the help of Azure dashboards and Microsoft Power BI, and we were able to present the data.

We got Sentinel to send the data to Microsoft Power BI and that helped us create some very useful and easy dashboards so that our stakeholders and senior-level management, who are non-technical guys, could understand much better how we are utilizing this product. They can see how much we are making use of it to investigate, hunt, and track the incidents and events, and the unnecessary accessing of applications in the environment. As a result, we started to put granular controls in place and restrict unnecessary websites.

The watchlist is one of the features that we have found to be very helpful. We had some manual data in our Excels that we used to upload to Sentinel. It gives us more insightful information out of that Excel information, including user identities, IP addresses, hostnames, and more. We relate that data with the existing data in Sentinel and we understand more.

Another important feature is the user behavior analytics, UEBA. We can see how our users are behaving and if there is malicious behavior such as an atypical travel alert or a user is somewhere where he is not regularly found. Or, for example, if a user does not generally log in at night but we suddenly find him active at night, the user behavior analytics feature is very useful. It contains information from Azure Identity as well as Office 365.

With the E5 license, we have Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Information Protection, Defender for Cloud, and Defender for Office 365. All of these products are integrated with Sentinel because it has those connectors. With both Microsoft and non-Microsoft products it can be integrated easily. We also have ASA on-premises firewalls and we have created a connector and have been sending those syslogs to Sentinel to analyze the traffic. That is the reason we are able to reverse-investigate and hunt threats going on in our network, end to end.

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. In addition to integrating our Cisco ASA Firewall logs, we get our Palo Alto proxy logs and some on-premises data coming from our hardware devices. We also get our Azure Firewall logs, and the logs from the Microsoft 360 bunch of products, like MIP and Defender for Cloud, Defender for Cloud Apps, et cetera.

When I think about the kinds of attack techniques that you are not able to understand at eye level, the AI/ML logic being used by Sentinel helps an administrator understand them in layman's language. It tells you that something has been identified as a malicious event or activity being performed by a user. All of those details are mentioned in an understandable manner. That is very important and is one way Sentinel is playing a wider role in our environment.

We use Microsoft Defender for Cloud and from that we get our regulatory compliance, recommendations, CSPM recommendations, cost recommendations, cost-optimizing strategies, and techniques for things like purchasing reserve instances. It helps us reduce the number of unused VMs or turn off VMs if they're not in production, as well as DevOp VMs in the early hours. We also use it for applying multi-factor authentications for users and reducing the number of owner or administrator roles that are assigned to subscriptions.

And the bi-directional sync capabilities of Defender for Cloud with other Microsoft products is near real-time, taking a couple of seconds. Within a minute, the information is updated, always, for all of the products that are integrated. Some products have a latency of around 4 to 12 hours of latency to update.

The following would be a challenge for any product in the market, but we have some in-house apps in our environment. We were thinking of getting the activities of those apps into Sentinel so that it could apply user behavior analytics to them. But our apps were built with different parameters and the APIs for them are not present in Sentinel. We are working with Microsoft to build those custom APIs that we require. That is currently in progress. 

We are happy with the product, but when it comes to integrating more things, it is a never-ending task. Wherever we have a new application, we wish that Sentinel could also monitor and investigate it. But that's not possible for everything.

I have used Microsoft Sentinel for around two years now.

It is scalable, with the help of the log retention facility in Sentinel in the Log Analytics workspace. We can limit the data that is being retained in it and that limits the cost.

We have it deployed across multiple sites.

In the beginning, it was not so good, but when we switched from standard support to premium support, the support improved.

I have been using QRadar and Splunk, but they both only gave me a centralized SIEM solution, a SOAR, and a VAPT solution. But I wanted to reduce the efforts required when jumping into different portals at different points in time. The way things stood, I had to hire different engineers to maintain those different portals and products. With the help of Sentinel, I could integrate all of my applications with Sentinel, as the APIs were ready and the support for them from Microsoft was good. That's why we thought of moving to Sentinel.

It was pretty hard to convince the stakeholders to invest so much in protecting the ecosystem through investigating and hunting, which is mainly what Sentinel is for. The integration part comes later. But convincing the stakeholders about the cost we would be incurring was a big challenge.

Slowly but surely, we started integrating many of our products into Sentinel and it started showing us things on the dashboard. And with the help of the Logic Apps, we were able to do multiple other things, like automatically creating tickets out of the incidents that are detected by Sentinel, and assigning them to the SOC team. It reduced the SOC team's workload because they used to manually investigate activities and events. Sentinel killed those manual tasks and started giving "ready-made" incidents to work on and mitigate. It has helped my SOC team because that team was facing a lot of issues with workload.

Then we also got visibility into different products, like Microsoft Defender, and Defender for Cloud Apps, whereas we used to have to jump into different portals to see and analyze the logs. Now, we don't have to go to any other product. All the integration is happening with Sentinel, and with the help of the AI/ML in Sentinel, investigating and threat-hunting have become easier.

It took around six months for us to realize these benefits because we were slowly integrating things, one by one, into it. We were a little late in identifying the awesome capabilities it has.

Most of our products are integrated but a few of our products are facing challenges getting connected. We are dealing with it with Microsoft and they are creating a few connectors for us.

We had to pay extra compared to what we would pay for other products in the market. But you have to lose something to gain something. Sentinel reduced the efforts we are putting into monitoring different products on different portals, and reduced the different kinds of expertise we needed for that process. Now, there are two to three people handling Sentinel.

The pricing was a big concern and it was very hard to explain to our stakeholders why they should bear the licensing cost and the Log Analytics cost. And the maintenance and use costs were on the higher side compared to other products. But the features and capabilities were going to ease things for my operations and SOC teams. Finally, the stakeholders had clarity.

Microsoft is costlier. Some organizations may not be able to afford the cost of Sentinel orchestration and the Log Analytics workspace. The transaction hosting cost is also a little bit on the high side, compared to AWS and GCP. But because it gives a 360-degree combination of security products that are linked with each other, Microsoft is getting more market share compared to Splunk, vScaler, or CrowdStrike.

But if I want to protect my files, to see where my files have been sent, or if the file I'm receiving is free of malware, or even if one of my users has tried to open it, Windows Defender would track it first. The ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) scans my emails and the attachments first. It determines if the attachment is safe and, if it is not safe, it will block it. I don't have to create any granular or manual settings. That connectivity across different products has a brighter future. That's the reason, even though we have a small budget, that we are shifting to Microsoft.

There are competitive applications in the market, like vScaler, Splunk, QRadar, and CrowdStrike. These are also good in terms of their features and capabilities. But these products only work as a SIEM or VAPT solution. They won't scan everything that we need to protect.

But if you are only considering SOAR, I prefer CrowdStrike because of cost and the features it provides. The AI/ML is also more developed compared to Sentinel.

But why Sentinel? Because it not only covers Microsoft products, but it also has API connectors to connect with any non-Microsoft products. It has inbound APIs for connectivity to QRadar, vScaler, or Splunk, so we can bring their data into Sentinel to be analyzed. Splunk is doing its job anyway, but Sentinel can filter the information and use it to investigate things. 

Those have great visibility and great potential over Sentinel. But for products that are out of the ecosystem, those competitive solutions might face issues in connecting or integrating with them.

We have created a logic app that creates tickets in our service desk. Whenever a ticket is raised, it is automatically assigned to one of the members of our SOC team. They investigate, or reverse-investigate, and track the incident.

Every solution requires continuous maintenance. We cannot rely on AI/ML for everything. Whenever there is a custom requirement or we want to do something differently, we do sit with the team to create the required analytic rules, et cetera. It doesn't involve more than three to four people.

In terms of the comprehensiveness of Sentinel when it comes to security, it plays a wide role in analysis, including geographical analysis, of our multiple sites. It is our centralized eye where we can have a complete analysis and view of our ecosystem.

Go with a single vendor security suite if you have the choice between that and a best-of-breed strategy. It is better to have a single vendor for security in such a complex environment of multiple vendors, a vendor who would understand all the requirements and give you a central contact. And the SLA for response should be on the low side in that situation, as Microsoft, with its premium support, gives an SLA of an immediate callback, within two to three minutes of creating a ticket.

We use Microsoft Sentinel to monitor many different environments for cybersecurity incidents, and we use it as our main alerting tool to let us know when this activity happens. It also interfaces with all of our other Defender products, such as Defender for Office 365, Defender for Endpoint, et cetera.

Almost all of our solutions are based in Azure. We use Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, Defender for cloud, Sentinel, and Azure Active Directory Identity Protection.

I use the latest version of Sentinel.

Sentinel is mostly used within our security operations center and our security team. We have about 50 endpoint users.

The backbone of our organization is built on Microsoft Sentinel, its abilities, and the abilities of our Defender stack. Ideally, we'd have more data, but a lot of data and functionality are in one place. The Lighthouse feature is outside Sentinel, but it allows us to have multiple environments integrated into one and to access lots of different Sentinel environments through that. It's very easy to manage a security workload with Sentinel. 

I would like to see better integration with CICD. It should be easier to use GitHub, Jenkins, or whatever our code management stack looks like. Whether or not you use Azure DevOps, being able to manage the code you have is fairly important.

Since using Sentinel, we've experienced a faster response time and easier development features. There aren't as many hurdles to moving a configuration.

I'm not sure how long it took to realize the benefits because it was deployed before my time here. It took me about three months to get familiar with what Sentinel has to offer and how we could leverage it, so it will be about three months before you start getting proper value from it.

There are still elements of Sentinel that I haven't used to their fullest potential, like the Jupyter Notebooks and internet hunting queries.

The solution is good at automating routine tasks and alleviating the burden for analysts.

Automation has moderately affected our security operations, although there is scope for it to significantly affect SecOps. There is definitely the capability for Sentinel to do pretty much all of your first-line response, which would be a significant improvement. It's a moderate effect because we only use automation in a few areas.

There are a few different dashboards for each of the Microsoft tools. We have a dashboard for Defender, one for Sentinel, and one for Active Directory Identity Protection. It consolidated alerts in some aspects, but a lot of information is still scattered.

It's fairly good for being reactive and responding to threats and looking for indicators of compromise. Overall, it helped us prepare for potential threats before they hit.

Sentinel saves us time. The automation feature especially saves us time because we can automate a lot of menial tasks. If other businesses could do that, it would eliminate a lot of their first-line response.

Sentinel saves us about 20 hours per week, which is the equivalent of a part-time staff member.

It saved us money. It's a very cost-efficient SIEM to use and still provides a good level of coverage despite that. 

Sentinel saved us about 50% of the cost of Splunk. It decreased our time to detect and respond by about 10-15%.

The automation rules and playbooks are the most useful that I've seen. A number of other places segregate the automation and playbook as separate tools, whereas Microsoft is a SIEM and SOAR tool in one.

It provides us with very high visibility. It allows us to see a lot holistically across our environment in Azure. It integrates very well with other products like Defender.

It helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. There are many things we can do to deal with prioritizing threats, such as having automation rules that automatically raise the priority of certain incidents. We're also able to make changes to the rule sets themselves and say, "I believe this to be a higher priority than is listed in the tool."

Prioritization is probably the most important thing to us because as an organization, we have a number of threats coming in at any moment, and each of them has its own valid investigation path. We need to know which ones are business critical and which ones need to be investigated and either ruled out or remediated as soon as possible. Prioritizing what to work on first is the biggest thing for us.

If you have the right licenses and access to all the products, it's fairly easy to integrate these products into Sentinel. Sometimes they don't pull as much information as possible, and I've noticed that there is a cross-functional issue where these tools will flag and alert themselves.

We can have it configured to create an alert in Microsoft Sentinel, but sometimes it doesn't create a bridge between them. When we finish our investigation and close the ticket on Sentinel, it sometimes doesn't go back to the tool and update that. That's the only issue that I have found with the integration. Everything else is straightforward and works well.

The solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection responses across our environment. It's probably one of the better-engineered suites. In other places, I've experienced an endpoint detection and response system that's completely different: proprietary coupled with a proprietary and different SIEM tool or maybe a different sort of tool. They are individual tools, and it can sometimes feel like they're engineered differently, but at the same time, they integrate better than anything else on the market as a suite of tools.

These solutions provide pretty comprehensive threat protection. A lot of them are technology agnostic, so you can have endpoints on Linux and Mac OS. It's pretty comprehensive. There's always a little oversight in any security program where you have to balance the cost of monitoring everything with the risk of having some stuff unmonitored, but that's probably an issue outside of this tool.

It enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. It's difficult to ingest non-native data. It's not as easy as in Splunk because Splunk is probably the leading SIEM tool. If you have a native tool that's out of the Microsoft security stack, you can bring it into Sentinel and have an alert on it.

This ingestion of data is vital for our security operations. It's the driver behind everything we do. We can do threat hunting, but if we don't have logs or data to run queries, then we're pretty much blind. I've worked in places where compliance and regulatory adherence are paramount and having logs, log retention, and evidence of these capabilities is extremely important. One of the more vital things that our organization needs to operate well, is good data.

A lot of the alerts come in from other tools, so sometimes we have to actually use that tool to get the proper information. For example, if we get an alert through Defender for Office 365, to actually see an offending email or attachment or something like that, we have to go into the Defender console and dig that out, which is inconvenient. As an aggregator, it's not bad compared to the other solutions on the market. In an ideal scenario, having more information pulled through in the alerts would be an improvement.

A lot of Sentinel's data is pretty comprehensive. The overarching theme with Sentinel is that it's trying to be a lot of things in one. For a UEBA tool, people will usually have separate tools in their SIEM to do this, or they'll have to build their own complete framework from scratch. Already having it in Sentinel is pretty good, but I think it's just a maturity thing. Over the next few years, as these features get more fleshed out, they will get better and more usable. At the moment, it's a bit difficult to justify dropping a Microsoft-trained UEBA algorithm in an environment where it doesn't have too much information. It's good for information purposes and alerting, but we can't do a lot of automation or remediation on it straight away.

Although the integrations are good, it can sometimes be information overload. A number of the technologies run proprietary Microsoft algorithms, like machine learning algorithms and detection algorithms, as well as having out-of-the-box SIEM content developed by Microsoft. As an engineer that focuses on threat detection, it can sometimes be hard to see where all of the detections are coming from. Although the integrations are good, it can sometimes be information overload.

Documentation is the main thing that could be improved. In terms of product usage, the documentation is pretty good, but I'd like a lot more documentation on Kusto Query Language. They could replicate what Splunk has in terms of their query language documentation. Every operator and sub-operator has its own page. It really explains a lot about how to use the operators, what they're good for, and what they're not good for in terms of optimizing CPU usage.

In Splunk, I would like to see some more advanced visualization. There are only some basic ones in Sentinel.

I've been using Microsoft Sentinel for about one year, but more heavily over the past five months.

It's pretty stable. We don't have any performance or capacity issues with it.

It's scalable when using solutions like Lighthouse.

I haven't needed to use technical support yet, but the documentation in the community is very good.

I previously used Splunk. The move to Sentinel was definitely cost-based. A lot of people are moving away from Splunk to a more cost-effective SIEM like Sentinel. We also chose Sentinel because of the ease of maintenance. Splunk's enterprise security has some good queries out of the box, but if I were a small organization, I would use Sentinel because it has more out-of-the-box features.

The log collection facilities must be maintained. Maintaining the solution requires a team of fewer than five people. It mainly involves ensuring that the rules are up to date, the connectors and log collection mechanisms are working correctly, and that they're up to date. It also involves ensuring that the right rules are deployed and the automation rules are in place.

Our ROI is 50% over and above what we spend on it in terms of what we can get back from Microsoft Sentinel, everything we use it for, and the time we save.

Some of the licensing models can be a little bit difficult to understand and confusing at times, but overall it's a reasonable licensing model compared to some other SIEMs that charge you a lot per data.

There are additional fees for things like data usage and CPU cycles. When you're developing queries or working on queries, make sure that they're optimized so you don't use as much CPU when they run.

We spoke with Google about Chronicle Backstory. It looks pretty powerful, but it wasn't mature enough for what we were looking for at that time.

The only other real standalone solution I've had a good experience with is Splunk and Splunk Phantom. In terms of cost, it's astronomically different. Microsoft Sentinel can sometimes be expensive depending on how many logs you're taking, but it will never be in the same realm as Splunk. Sentinel is easy to use, but Splunk is so expensive because it's very easy to use.

Microsoft Sentinel is a better SOAR solution than Phantom. Phantom has good integrations, but it isn't really built for custom scripting. If you're going to be paying more, you would expect that to be better. Sentinel is better in that aspect. Sentinel's cost-effectiveness blows a lot of other solutions out of the water, especially if you're already in Azure and you can leverage some relationships to bring that cost down.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten. It's heading in the right direction, but it's already pretty good and mature.

If a security colleague said it's better to go with the best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor security suite, I would understand that completely. Some people see tying yourself into a single vendor as a vulnerability. It's not quite spread out, but I think you can manage a single vendor security solution if you have a good relationship with the vendor and you really leverage your connections within that business.

It's good to diversify your products and make sure that you have a suite of products available from different companies and that you use the best that's available. In terms of this technology stack, it's pretty good for what it does.

My advice is to really focus on what's possible and what you could do with the SIEM. There are a lot of features that don't get used and maximized for their purpose from day one. It takes a couple of months to properly deploy the solution to full maturity.