Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

We work as a managed security services provider (MSSP). We have different clients who have their own security team. 

One company that I worked for recently had a security team of three people, then they hired us for 24/7 analysis and monitoring. For that, I solely worked on building this product, then there are the eight to nine people who do 24/7 monitoring and analysis.

Sentinel is a full-fledged SIEM and SOAR solution. It is made to enhance your security posture and entirely centered around enhancing security. Every feature that is built into Azure Sentinel is for enhancing security posture.

It has increased our security posture a lot because there are a lot of services natively integrated to Azure Sentinel from Microsoft, e.g., Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Office 365. 

From an analyst's point of view, we have created a lot of automation. This has affected the productivity of analysts because we have automated a lot of tasks that we used to do manually. From an end user's perspective, they don't even notice most of the time because most of our end users are mostly non-technical. They don't feel the difference. It is all about the security and operations teams who have felt the difference after moving from LogRhythm to Azure Sentinel.

It is cloud-based, so there isn't an accessibility issue. You don't have to worry about dialing a VPN to access it. Azure does require that for an on-prem solution that the security part is entirely on Microsoft's and Azure's sign-in and login processes.

Because it is a cloud-based deployment, we don't need to worry about hardware infrastructure. That is taken care of by Microsoft.

Azure Application Gateway makes things a lot easier. You can create dashboards, alert rules, hunting and custom queries, and functions with it.

Its integration capabilities are great. We have integrated everything from on-prem to the cloud.

There are certain delays. For example, if an alert has been rated on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, it might take up to an hour for that alert to reach Sentinel. This should ideally take no more than one or two seconds.

There are a couple of delays with the service-to-service integration with Azure Sentinel as well as the tracking point.

I have been using it for 14 to 15 months.

Azure Sentinel is pretty stable. Sometimes, the agents installed on endpoints go down for a bit. Also, we have faced a lot of issues with its correctors in particular. However, the platform is highly stable, and there have been no issues with that.

For operations, one to two people are actively using the solution. For analysis, there are eight to 10 people who are actively using it.

Sentinel is scalable. If you want, you can hook up a lower balance security corrector. So, there are no issues with scalability.

We have coverage for around 60% to 70% of our environment. While this is not an ideal state, it has the capability to go to an ideal state, if needed.

I have worked with Azure Sentinel for four clients. With only one of those clients, the support was great. For the last three clients, there were a lot of delays. For example, the issues that could have been resolved within one or two hours did not get resolved for a month or two. So, it depends on your support plan. It depends on the networking connections that you have with Microsoft. If you are on your own with a lower priority plan, it will take a lot of time to resolve minor issues. Therefore, Microsoft support is not that great. They are highly understaffed. I would rate them as six or seven out of 10.

Neutral

We had a full-fledged SIEM, LogRhythm, already working, but we wanted to migrate towards something that was cloud-based and more inclusive of all technologies. So, we shifted to Azure Sentinel and migrated all our log sources onto Azure Sentinel. We also added a lot of log sources besides those that were reporting to LogRhythm.

We have used a lot of SIEMs. We have used Wazuh, QRadar, Rapid7's SIEM, EventLog Analyzer (ELA), and Splunk. We used Wazuh with ELK Stack, then we shifted to Azure Sentinel because of client requirements.

The initial setup was really straightforward because I had already worked with FireEye Security Orchestrator, so the automation parts were not that difficult. There were a couple of things that got me confused, but it was pretty straightforward overall.

Initially, the deployment took seven and a half months.

We used a lot of forums. We used Microsoft support and online help. We used a lot of things to get everything into one picture. There is plenty of help available online for any log sources that you want to move to Azure Sentinel.

I have worked with a lot of SIEMs. We are using Sentinel three to four times more than other SIEMs that we have used. Azure Sentinel's only limitation is its price point. Sentinel costs a lot if your ingestion goes up to a certain point.

Initially, you should create cost alerts in the cost management of Azure. With one of my clients, we deployed the solution. We estimated that the ingestion would be up to this particular mark, but that ingestion somehow got way beyond that. Within a month to a month and a half, they got charged 35,000 CAD, which was a huge turn off for us. So, at the very beginning, do your cost estimation, then apply a cost alert in the cost management of Azure. You will then get notified if anything goes out of bounds or unexpected happens. After that, start building your entire security operation center on Sentinel.

The SOAR capabilities of Azure Sentinel are great. FireEye Security Orchestrator looks like an infant in front of Azure Sentinel's SOAR capabilities, which is great.

The solution is great. As far as the product itself is concerned, not the pricing, I would rate it as nine out of 10. Including pricing, I would rate the product as five to six out of 10.

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. 

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.

We have possible use cases for the solution. We have ten or 12 different use cases under this solution.

The Log analytics are useful. You can review many details. 

The portal and the full integration and collaboration between the cloud workloads and multi-tenants have been useful. We can use it with Sharepoint and Exchange.

The solution helps us prioritize all of our threats. It's one of the most important and critical systems we have here. 

We have a lot of Microsoft solutions. For example, we also use Defender for endpoints and Microsoft Cloud. We mostly use Microsoft products, although we also use Crowdstrike. 

It was easy to integrate Defender for Endpoint. Each of these solutions works natively together. It's very crucial that they work together. 

Microsoft is very comprehensive. It helps protect us and offers very clear information. It's easy to assess everything. It's a good user experience. 

We make use of Microsoft Defender for Cloud's bi-directional sync capabilities. We have different customers under our umbrella and multiple subsidiaries. Not all have access to the same license. We don't have the same security exposure everywhere. We can pick and choose who needs access.

Sentinel does enable us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. This is crucial. That said, it can cost us a lot of money. We try to get feature visibility and enhance the collected logs to be able to identify only certain logs that would need to be uploaded. That said, it's very crucial we can ingest data from anywhere.  

We can investigate threats and respond holistically from one place, one dashboard. Having one dashboard is important as it saves the team from headaches. We can collect all the information we need in one view.

The comprehensiveness of Sentinel is good in that it helps us identify most of our gaps in security. In the last few years, we have been able to fill in most of the gaps.

Once we enabled the connectors and started getting incident reports to our dashboard we were able to realize the benefits of the solution. It took about one month to begin to get the value of this product.

Sentinel helps automate routine tasks and helps automate the findings via high-value alerts. We've been able to automate a lot of the cycle and leave the investigation to humans. Support is very crucial and we can take the right actions fast.

The product helps us prepare for potential threats before they hit and we can take proactive steps. We're very satisfied in terms of security operations.

Before implementing the solution, we didn't know we were wasting a lot of time. Once the solution was in place, we discovered a lot of gaps across the traditional way we were handling security. 

I can't say if we are saving money. However, we're investing in the right places. We're now utilizing services we actually need. From a business perspective, although it does have a cost, it's saving the business since it's protecting us from any security breach.

I'd like to see more integration with other technologies beyond the Microsoft OS. 

I would like to see more AI used in processes.

I've been using the solution for three or four years. 

The stability is not an issue. 

We do have plans to increase usage. The solution has the ability to scale. 

We have not opened a ticket for technical support yet. So far, we haven't had any issues. 

My understanding is Microsoft does not have good support and has done a lot of outsourcing. In general, they used to be brilliant as they were focused on customer satisfaction and engaged with experts, however, the quality is not as good.

Neutral

We also use Crowdstrike as our EDR solution. However, before Sentinel, I did not use anything else in this category.

I took part in the initial deployment. The process was very straightforward. It took about one week to onboard all that we needed. We did it in three phases. First, we did a demo and looked for items that needed to be addressed. We then onboarded the device and put the analytics and logs in place. 

We had a team of three on hand that handled the deployment. They also handle support and maintenance. 

We initially had the assistance of Microsoft partners. However, we failed to get all of the information we needed. We found it more valuable to get assistance from the vendor directly. 

I can't speak to the exact cost.

We are a customer of Microsoft. 

During implementation, it's helpful to get the vendor engaged in the implementation. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It's good to go with a single-vendor strategy. I've recommended this product to others.

The user experience should be the number one priority. Microsoft is working on this every day. It's very important to us that the user experience is maintained and there's no conflict between the products or connectors. Having one dashboard makes it easier for admins and businesses to be in touch, engage, and share. For example, my manager can see my reports even if he's not knowledgeable in the technology.

We use it for security. It's at the forefront of managing the security within our organization. We use the platform as our main SIEM for enterprise security whereby we have several tools that feed into Microsoft Sentinel and then from there, we have the use cases. It's a major tool for security monitoring within the enterprise.

Microsoft Sentinel provides the capability to integrate different log sources. On top of having several data connectors in place, you can also do integration with a threat intelligence platform to enhance and enrich the data that's available. You can collect as many logs and build all the use cases. 

Microsoft Sentinel helps to prioritize threats across the enterprise. We do threat categorization based on a risk-based approach. We categorize incidents as critical, high, and medium. The platform gives us the capability of categorizing the threats based on our assets' criticality and the type of data on our systems. At the end of the day, it does help in managing the threats within the organization. There are different levels of threats depending on the data that we have.

We also use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We have integrated Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with Microsoft Sentinel. Most of the alerts that come on our Microsoft Defender for Endpoint are fed into Microsoft Sentinel. We manage those alerts through Microsoft Sentinel, but when we are doing our investigations, we always leverage Microsoft Defender for Endpoint because we are able to do the investigation from the original source. Integrating a Microsoft product with other Microsoft products is not as difficult as compared to integrating Microsoft products with other vendor applications. With the inbuilt data connectors that already exist in Microsoft Sentinel, it's much easier to do the integrations with the Azure environment and other Microsoft products. If there's no data connector, it's somehow tricky. If we have a data connector in place, it's better. We also need to do some customization of the data that we ingest because we need to have the right size of the data that we feed into Microsoft Sentinel because of the cost aspect. At the end of the day, we managed to do an integration of on-prem AD with Microsoft Sentinel via a platform that acts as a bridge between them

Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint work together natively. The alerts are fed into Microsoft Sentinel seamlessly, but when it comes to investigations, you need to leverage Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to isolate a device and to see some of the timelines or actions that were done with that machine. You can't do that with Microsoft Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to investigate threats from one place, but it doesn't let us respond from one place. For responding, we need to narrow down the source of the threat. If it has been flagged from a Cisco perimeter solution that we use, such as Cisco Meraki, we need to go back and check in that platform. If it's flagging an issue that's happening on an endpoint, we need to go back to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and do further investigation to respond.

Microsoft Sentinel helps to automate routine tasks. We have playbooks and once we establish a baseline or a routine task that needs to be done, we can just automate it through the playbook.

We have the Sentinel dashboard, but we still need other dashboards for other logs, such as from email. We can't see email logs from Sentinel. We still need a network security monitoring platform. It has helped us to secure 90% of our cloud environment.

With the integrations we have, its threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and to take proactive steps. We get visibility into what's happening on the AD on a real-time basis. If there's any issue going on with the AD, we are able to fix that within the minimum time possible. It also helps with the visibility of different resources across the cloud environment. However, it can't do all that by itself. We also need other tools. 

It has saved us time. It has helped in handling most of the issues within the cloud environments or any misconfigurations done on the cloud environment. We are able to handle any issues within the shortest time possible. In terms of threat detection, I can give it a nine out of ten. If we didn't have Microsoft Sentinel, it would have taken us three to four days to discover a security incident that is happening or any security misconfiguration in the cloud environment. Within a week, it saves me about three days.

It has saved us money from a security risk perspective, but from a technology perspective, it hasn't saved much. The main value that it's giving to the organization is from a security perspective.

It has saved our time to detect, but that also depends on the original platform. If the original platform, such as Microsoft Defender, fails to detect incidents, then Microsoft Sentinel will definitely not flag anything. The feed that Microsoft Sentinel gets comes from other platforms. With better fine-tuning across the other platforms and with good integrations, it can really help.

Playbooks are valuable. When it comes to automation, it helps in terms of managing the logs. It brings the SOAR capability or the SOAR perspective to the platform with the high usage of Microsoft products within our environment. We are utilizing most of the Azure resources. Our AD runs on Azure. We have on-prem and Azure AD, so we have the integrations. At the end of the day, when we are managing the security, we have the capability of initiating some options from Microsoft Sentinel and directly to AD. We also have automation with Cisco Meraki. We have configured playbooks where if there is a suspicious IP, it blocks the IP.

Microsoft Sentinel needs to be improved on the metrics part. I've had an issue in the recent past while trying to do my metrics from it. It gives me an initial report, but sometimes an incident is created on Microsoft Sentinel, but you realize that when a lot of information is being fed from Microsoft Defender to Microsoft Sentinel, instead of feeding the existing alert, Microsoft Sentinel creates a new alert. So, metrics-wise, it can do better. It can also do better in terms of managing the endpoint notifications.

We do have in-built or out-of-the-box metrics that are shown on the dashboard, but it doesn't give the kind of metrics that we need from our environment whereby we need to check the meantime to detect and meantime to resolve an incident. I have to do it manually. I have to pull all the logs or all the alerts that are fed into Sentinel over a certain period. We do this on a monthly basis, so I go into Microsoft Sentinel and pull all the alerts or incidents we closed over a period of thirty days. I then calculate the meantime to detect and the mean time to resolve. I have to check when all the tickets were created, when they were handled by the analysts, and when they were closed. I do a manual metrics calculation after pulling all the data. I believe Microsoft can do better on the metrics side of Sentinel. They can provide monthly reports. If I want to submit the reports to my senior management, it will be much easier for me to pull the data as a report. Currently, you can't pull any reports from Sentinel. It would be helpful if they can build a reporting tool within it and allow me to have my own customization. I should be able to customize the reports based on my needs. For example, I should be able to generate a report only for incidents with high and medium severity.

It should also provide information on trends within the platform. There should be reports on specific alerts or security incidents.

They should build more analytics rules to assess key security threats. I have had to build a lot of custom analytics rules. There should be more of them out of the box.

There should be more information about how to utilize the notebooks. They can have a better approach to enlightening the end-users about the straightforward use of notebooks. The data point analysis rules and automation are straightforward compared to the way you utilize the notebooks. They can do better in terms of sharing how we can utilize the notebooks. 

We are able to ingest data across all our tenants and on-prem solutions, but we have been chasing Microsoft for the longest time possible for ingesting some data from Microsoft Dynamics 365. The kind of logs that we need or the kind of security monitoring that we need to do on Microsoft Dynamics 365 versus what's available through data connector tools is different. The best advice that they have managed to give us is to monitor the database logs, but we can't go into monitoring database logs because that's a different platform. There are several things that we want to address across Microsoft Dynamics 365, but the kind of logs that we get from the data connector are not of any significance. It would be better if they could give us customization for that one. That's the worst application from Microsoft to add because we can't monitor any business processes in that application, and there's no capability to do even customization. We are so frustrated with that.

It's quite comprehensive in threat intelligence capabilities, but it takes some time to establish a baseline. They can also improve the UEBA module so that it can help us address and have an overview of the risk. It's not yet that complete. It can establish a baseline for a user, but it doesn't inform how I can leverage the capability to address risks.

We can also have more integrations within Microsoft Sentinel with TI feeds out of the box. Currently, we don't have something out of the box for other TI feeds. Microsoft has its own TI feed, but we aren't utilizing that.

Microsoft Sentinel should provide more capability to end-users for customization of the logs they feed into Microsoft Sentinel.

It has been two years.

We haven't had any issues with it so far. It's very stable. 

It's scalable. There are data connectors for different technologies and products.

I've not contacted their support for Microsoft Sentinel.

I've used QRadar.

We are ingesting on-prem and cloud logs. The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't that straightforward because of the integrations.

We had help from a Microsoft partner for visibility and integrations. We had about five engineers involved in its implementation.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require any maintenance from our side.

Microsoft Sentinel is costly, but it provides value in terms of managing security or managing the threats within our organization.

The return on investment is in terms of better security, visibility, and management. If you don't know what's going on in the cloud environment or the on-prem environment, you might need to pay a huge price in terms of compliance or ransomware to restore your data. We have seen value in investing in Microsoft Sentinel because we are building a better security capability within our environment.

The current licensing is based on the logs that are being ingested on the platform. Most of the SIEM solutions utilize that pricing model, but Microsoft should give us a customization option for controlling the kind of logs that we feed into Microsoft Sentinel. That will be much better. Otherwise, the pricing is a bit higher.

We evaluated other solutions. The reason why we chose Microsoft Sentinel was because of the cloud visibility. We needed a lot of visibility across the cloud environment, and choosing another product that's not Microsoft native wouldn't have been easy in terms of integrations and shipping logs from Microsoft Sentinel to on-prem.

A good thing about Microsoft Sentinel as compared to the other platform is that most organizations run on Azure, and the integration of Microsoft Sentinel is much easier with other products, but when it comes to other SIEM solutions, integrating them with Microsoft sometimes becomes an issue.

You need to customize the kind of logs that you feed to Microsoft Sentinel. If you just plug-in data connectors and don't do any customization and feed everything to Microsoft Sentinel, it will be very expensive in terms of cost. You only need the traffic that assists you in addressing security issues within your environment. You only need the information that gives you visibility to address security issues.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten.

Our organization is an SSP, a service provider for manual threat detection and hunting. We use Microsoft Sentinel for threat detection. We have a few clients using Microsoft Sentinel, and we provide SOAR services to them.

Having the ability to respond holistically from one place with Microsoft Sentinel is very useful. We don't need to log into different security consoles. It is less hectic and reduces our time to respond and resolve the issue.

The solution has helped improve our organization by detecting and hunting threats. The solution also correlates alerts from other solutions, such as Defender, Office 365, and other Endpoint solutions. Microsoft Sentinel has automated responses that help us reduce the number of analysts required for example, from ten to six because most of the tasks are done automatically.

The solution's automation of routine tasks helps us automate the finding of high-value alerts by reducing the manual work from 30 minutes down to three. 90 percent of the work is done by Sentinel which runs the playbook and provides us with all the data required to make a decision quickly.

The solution has helped eliminate the need to use multiple dashboards by incorporating SIEM plus SOAR into one convenient location. We don't need to log into each of the solutions individually. We can directly correlate the alerts and incidents from our Sentinel console. Sentinel reduces our time because we don't need to check multiple tabs for multiple solutions. All the information required to investigate and make a decision can be found in the solution's panel view.

We don't have any out-of-the-box threat intelligence from Microsoft, but with the integration of some open-source solutions and premium sources, Microsoft Sentinel helps us take proactive steps before threats enter our environment.

We have custom rules created to check IPs or domains for potential threats. Whenever an IP or domain is visible in our logs, the solution will automatically correlate with the threat intelligence feed and create an alert. If we skip the correlation portion and an alert has been created for a malicious IP or a malicious domain, the solution can check the reputation in different reputation sources such as a virus portal, or threat recorded future, and it will auto-populate the information for the analyst which helps us prepare for potential threats.

The solution has definitely saved us 90 percent of our time. Microsoft Sentinel reduces our time to detect, respond, and resolve incidents. Most of the incidents are detected automatically and we just need the data to make a decision. We don't have to go look for different clues or reputations over the internet or use other solutions.

Microsoft Sentinel has saved us from incurring costs related to a breach by protecting us.

The solution detects incidents and alerts us in real-time based on custom rules that we create or the out-of-the-box rules that are part of Sentinel. The information that auto-populates when we run the playbook reduces our response time in most cases because all the relevant data required for our investigation is provided on the incident details page.

Logic apps, playbooks, and dashboarding are all valuable features of this solution. 

Microsoft Sentinel prioritizes threats across our organization because the solution allows us to correlate using multiple solutions including Defender.

Integrating Microsoft solutions with each other is very easy. The integrated solutions work together to deliver coordinated detection and response in our environment.

The solution enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. We can write AQL queries and also create rules to detect the alerts. In the event that we don't have rules, we can proactively hunt through KQL queries.

The workbook based on KQL queries, which is the query language is very extensive compared to other solutions such as QRada and Splunk.

The solution requires no in-house maintenance because it is all handled by Microsoft. We only need to monitor the updates.

The playbook development environment is not as rich as it should be. There are multiple occasions when we face problems while creating the playbook. 

The cost is not straightforward and would benefit from a single charge model. 

The UI is not impressive, we need to train our analysts to conduct the investigation. Unlike IBM QRadar which has a different UI for searching, there is no UI where we can conduct searches with Sentinel. With Sentinel, all our searches require a KQL query, and if our analysts are not familiar with KQL queries, we have to train them. 

The data ingestion can use improvement. There are a few scenarios where we have experienced a delay in data ingestion.

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

Sentinel is quite stable because it's a SaaS-based offering, so we don't have to worry about our stability. The solution is available 99.99999 percent of the time. The only time we have an issue is if there is a problem with the Azure portal. Microsoft handles the stability well.

We can scale the solution as much as we want, and with a few clicks, we can increase or decrease capacity.

We currently have four engineering teams that handle the deployments and use case development as well as a SOAR team that consists of ten technical people who all use the solution.

Microsoft Sentinel support is really good. They respond quickly to our requests and they try to resolve our issues as soon as possible. From my experience, Microsoft has the best support.

Positive

For SIEM, we previously used IBM QRadar and Splunk Enterprise Security. For SOAR, We have used IBM Resilient, Palo Alto XSOAR, and D3 SOAR, which is a new tool. D3 SOAR is a startup based in Canada and we used it for POC, but we have not used it in production. Sentinel is a SaaS-based solution. There is less administration required and with a few clicks, we can deploy Microsoft Sentinel, whereas, with other solutions, we have to build everything from scratch. There are other SaaS-based solutions but Sentinel is one of the most popular and because a lot of organizations are already using Microsoft and Azure products, Sentinel is the best compatible solution.

The initial setup for Sentinel is straightforward and the best I have worked with to date. We are able to deploy within half an hour and we only require one person to complete the implementation. 

The implementation was completed in-house.

From a cost perspective, there are some additional charges in addition to the licensing. Initially, the cost appears expensive, but over time, the solution justifies that cost. The cost is not straightforward, but instead really complex. We are charged for data ingestion as well as data leaving the environment. We are also charged for running playbooks and for logic apps. Compared with SIEM solutions, whose cost is simply based on EPS or data storage, Microsoft Sentinel's cost is complex. Over time we can predict what the cost of using the solution will be. Other standalone SOAR tools have fixed licensing and their cost is simple. We don't need to pay for each command we run or each integration we have or each automation we do. With Microsoft Sentinel, there is a cost associated with each of the connectors that we use in our playbook. Every time we run that playbook, there will be charges, but the charges are minimal unless we run the playbook repeatedly, then over time the cost shoots up.

We occasionally test POC and we are still evaluating other solutions.

I give the solution nine out of ten.

My impression of the visibility into threats that Microsoft Sentinel provides is that the solution is not perfect, but since it is part of Microsoft Workspace, Microsoft already provides so many services to clients, and Microsoft Sentinel is one of them. If we are already using Azure and other services from Microsoft, then Sentinel is easy to implement and use compared to other similar solutions. If I was not using Microsoft Solutions, then I can use other solutions, such as IBM QRadar or Splunk, and when it comes to XSOAR, Palo Alto XSOAR is a much better solution.

We use multiple solutions from Microsoft within our organization including Defender and Endpoint. We have integrated Endpoint with Defender and Microsoft Security Center to receive alerts.

Microsoft Sentinel has out-of-the-box support for up to 90 percent of solutions where we can find a connector to ingest the data directly, but for the remaining 10 percent, we need to write custom tables.

The ability to ingest data is the backbone of our security. If we don't ingest the data, we won't be able to perform anything at all in SIEM. SIEM is based on data ingestion. Once the data is ingested, then on top of that data, we can monitor and detect or hunt, whatever we want. We can create a reporting dashboard, but the data needs to be there.

Microsoft Sentinel's UEBA is quite capable. For SIEM, Splunk and IBM QRadar are slightly better than Sentinel, but Sentinel is catching up fast. The solution has only been in the market for two or three years and has already captured a large share with increasing popularity. For SOAR, Palo Alto XSOAR is much better than Microsoft Sentinel because Sentinel is a SIEM plus SOAR solution whereas Palo Alto XSOAR is a SOAR-focused solution only. What Microsoft Sentinel provides is one solution for SIEM plus SOAR, where we can detect and also respond in one place.

Currently, we have one environment based in a US data center, but we have the ability for multiple solutions in multiple regions within Azure, and we can integrate them using a master and slave configuration that will allow us to run all the queries from the master console.

Using a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor suite is fine if we have a SIEM solution, a SOAR solution, or an Endpoint detection solution until a time when they are no longer compatible with each other and we can not integrate them. If we can not integrate the solutions it becomes difficult for our teams to log into and monitor multiple solutions separately.

I definitely recommend Microsoft Sentinel, but I suggest basing the decision on proof of concept by gathering the requirements, security solutions, and additional log source devices an organization has before using the solution. There are multiple solutions available that may be more suitable in some cases.

We require a comprehensive, scalable solution for cyber threat protection. 

The interface is simple. It was easy to click through and to refer back and assess things. 

We can do frequent training sessions so that people or end users are able to get used to the system.

Microsoft Defender is proven to be able to incorporate with this product. We also utilize the Power BI dashboard. We wanted to monitor the logins. It's helpful for threat investigations. We're able to use the session queue report to identify the frameworks having issues.

The workflow is quite smart. Incidents alerts can be generated automatically. It has good automation capabilities and that helps us respond to incidents quickly.

Sentinel provide our customers with a unified set of tools to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. It's actually a part of Defender. It's unified within the operating platform. This allows for the mobility of the end user.

Our customers use Sentinel to help secure hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. We do have a limited amount of space. Out of ten or so clients, five or six have adopted a cloud protection system.

We can use it with Microsoft Athena and we can manage compliance and see logs for analytics. Sentinel can correlate signals from first and third party sources into a single high-confidence incident. Since the process is automated, it makes our response times faster. This saves the team's time.

We do make use of the solution's AI capabilities. The machine learning is very mature. Its machine learning has been very good overall. It's also something that enhances response times and threat analysis. 

It's provided us with improved visibility into user and network behavior.

Sentinel has reduced the work involved in the event investigation by quite a lot.

From a client perspective, they'd like to see more cost savings. I'm not sure if Sentinel gives a POC for free.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't received any complaints and haven't had outages.

The solution is easily scalable. Of course, we do have to do due diligence with our Oracle system architecture.

We have an SLA that says there will be a receiving engineer that will respond if the system is down. Technical support is great. They might have different tiers of service.

Positive

I did not personally deploy the product. I just work with it.

There is some maintenance. We do have a resident engineer that's certified on troubleshooting.

We have a technical partner that helps with deployment. 

The solution is less expensive than an APM option. If the client wants to have a complete solution that covers the whole big organization, a good option will be going with Microsoft Sentinel. For the features it has, the price is justified.

We are an SSI system integrator.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

For those interested in adopting the solution, I'd suggest looking at the costing and billing and ensuring you have the budget and maybe doing a POC for 45 days or two months so that they can really experience the product.

We use Microsoft Sentinel for centralized log aggregation and security management. Our environment uses a variety of security products to strengthen its security. This has made it difficult for the SOC team to analyze logs from different consoles and products. To ease the team's workload and help them prioritize events and attacks, we decided to acquire a centralized console. We chose Sentinel because it provides a centralized console where we can ingest and analyze logs. The logs that Sentinel analyzes add value.

Sentinel's threat visibility is good. It has analytics and threat detection capabilities that we can add to our own playbooks. We can use the predefined log analytics to create our own custom rules. Using these custom rules with predefined logs further improves our environment's security posture.

Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. When we have a lot of alerts and incidents, it is better to understand if they are false positives, because the SOC team sometimes wastes time on false positives, which are not very relevant. We must prioritize positive alerts, which should be given the highest priority. In order to solve this problem.

The manufacturing environment I work in is not very critical, so a simple attack is unlikely to have a major impact on the business. However, data is important in any business, and a data breach can damage our reputation. Therefore, it is important to have a good security posture to avoid threats. Threats and attacks can happen even with the highest level of security. Therefore, we look for products that can give us visibility into our environment and help us to proactively solve problems. Microsoft proactively identifies threats and informs its peers and partners. This allows us to take action to assess the impact of these threats on our environment. By taking proactive measures, we can prevent threats from harming our environment.

We also use Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Defender for Identity. We have integrated these solutions with Microsoft Sentinel, and their logs are ingested by Sentinel. We do not incur any costs for ingesting Office 365 logs because Microsoft provides a free login exchange for Microsoft Office 365 and, I believe, for Defender as well into our Sentinel for analysis.

Our Microsoft products work seamlessly together to provide coordinated detection and response in our environment. We use a lot of Microsoft products, and it is best to use them in the same environment. This makes integration and collaboration easier. We also have licensing agreements that give us discounts when we use multiple products together. For example, we use Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and security products. We are also migrating our workloads to Azure. We have already migrated many workloads to Azure, and we are in the process of migrating the remaining workloads. We are heavily dependent on Microsoft, so we believe it is best to use one cloud provider. This makes it easier to manage different services. Additionally, Microsoft provides us with a lot of help and benefits, which can save us money. Cost is one of the factors that businesses consider, and IT is a major investment for businesses. Even though our business is not in the IT industry, IT plays a vital role in driving the business forward. Therefore, our organization needs to ensure that their IT investments are having a positive impact.

The comprehensiveness of the threat protection provided by our Microsoft security products is good. They have a large number of predefined indicators of compromise and a comprehensive team that monitors threats around the world. We receive notifications and newsletters from Microsoft whenever a new threat emerges. When an organization does not have experts on its team, it is very difficult to identify zero-day vulnerabilities or attacks. This makes it difficult for them to identify and mitigate these threats. Microsoft, on the other hand, proactively identifies threats and informs its teams and partners so that they can mitigate or prevent them in their environments.

Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire IT ecosystem, including network devices, servers, endpoints, and firewalls. This is important because if we are not monitoring all of our devices, we cannot know what threats they are facing or what attacks they have already been subjected to. Sentinel scans every device in the environment because it is difficult to see how many devices are compromised by a threat when we have an inventory of thousands of devices. This is why we need a centralized console where we can ingest all of our important logs and correlate them to identify threats. We need to know when our environment has been attacked by zero-day vulnerabilities. If we see that two devices have been affected, we still do not know how many additional devices the attack has compromised. This can only be known if we have all of our logs in our console. Sentinel provides us with a valuable capability: we can simply identify the source, user, or affected machines, and Sentinel will tell us how many machines have already been compromised and how far the threat has spread. This information allows us to isolate or quarantine the affected machines so that they cannot access more of our environment or steal more data.

We can react and respond holistically from one place with Sentinel.

The best part of Sentinel is its built-in SOAR, user and entity behavior analytics, and threat intelligence capabilities, which collaborate with the SIEM. Other products typically sell these capabilities as separate products. When we automate tasks, we reduce the team's manual effort. Whenever we detect an attack or need to provide analytics, we generate a lot of events and alerts. If we don't correlate these events and automatically resolve them, repetitive tasks will have to be performed by team members. This is not an efficient use of resources. Repetitive tasks can be automated by writing scripts and putting them into the system. Sentinel correlates events and creates incidents for us. These incidents can be resolved by scripts, such as by informing users that their IDs have been compromised and they need to reset their passwords or their IDs will be blocked. This saves SOC time so that they can focus on more important tasks, such as detecting and responding to threats that are already impacting the environment. Sentinel's features help organizations reduce manual and repetitive effort.

Sentinel has helped our organization by providing seamless collection and correlation of all logs. It is important to correlate logs into alerts and then to incidents, as this prevents the team that receives the alerts from becoming overloaded. Sentinel's analytics capabilities are also beneficial, as they allow me to easily perform searches and analyses of incidents. I do not have to spend much effort to determine the source of an incident, its impact, or how far it has spread through our environment. Additionally, Sentinel's automation features, such as its playbooks, templates, and integrations, help us to reduce manual effort.

Automating routine tasks that help find high-value alerts reduces the cost and workload of our SOC team. We have created several automation use cases by discussing them with multiple stakeholders and analyzing how frequently we receive the same type of incident alerts. When we receive the same type of incident alerts, we can correlate them and create scripts or automate solutions to resolve them. This helps to reduce the team's workload and headaches. We have already incorporated this automation into our SOC processes. If an incident is created, it is automatically resolved without any user or machine interaction. If we receive an alert that the resolution failed, some team members investigate the cause, such as a missing or disabled user ID or a technical system issue.

Automation has reduced our manual tasks, saving us around 30 percent of our time so that we can focus on more important tasks.

Previously, when I joined the organization, they were using Splunk on-premises and other security tools, such as Trend Micro and Darktrace devices, to collect logs. The security operations center team had to log into each console to see the logs, investigate them, and determine how to mitigate the alerts. This process was slow and inefficient, especially in the event of a critical attack. Sentinel provides a centralized console for log collection and analysis which helps the SOC team respond to alerts more quickly and reduce the impact of threats.

Microsoft Sentinel helped us eliminate the need for multiple dashboards by providing a single XDR dashboard. They have data connectors that can integrate with different security tools because they partner with other security companies to provide us with the functionality we need to integrate into our environment. Microsoft is at its best when we can integrate with our peers and security companies that are bringing new features to improve our security posture. We can then integrate these features with Sentinel, benefit from them, and ingest our logs into Sentinel as well. We no longer need to log in to multiple security tools; we can simply go to Sentinel, view the incidents and alerts that are being generated, and take action.

The automation feature is valuable. There are many events that happen, and we require manual effort from our SOC team to mitigate each one. When we started automating tasks, it helped us to reduce the time it takes to react to attacks. Attacks may not be able to penetrate our environment as easily because of this. Therefore, I believe that Sentinel's automation is the best.

The integration is not that difficult. The configuration is simple, but the data connector documentation is lacking in useful information. If Microsoft improves the documentation, we will be able to see how to complete the integration from start to finish. In the past, we have encountered problems during the integration process because the documentation was incomplete. For example, we recently deployed Microsoft Defender for Identity with the help of our Active Directory team. Initially, they told us that only a few ports were required, but later they said that more ports were needed. Our environment did not allow these additional ports, and we were not aware of this requirement. This delayed the project and caused frustration for our team members. The customer also expected the project to be completed sooner, but unexpected firewall rules and undocumented configuration requirements prevented us from doing so. We had to open a case with Microsoft for assistance, and we were eventually able to resolve the issue.

The playbook is a bit difficult and could be improved. For those who do not have a deep understanding of playbooks or programming languages, it would be better to have extensive documentation and information available online. When I started working with Sentinel, there were times when we had to refer to the documentation to get information about the configuration or implementation steps. If we encountered errors in the implementation, we had to rely on the internet to figure out how to fix them. The information available online is not that comprehensive and does not cover specific maintenance tasks. If the documentation were improved a bit, and the playbook and automation were made easier to use, it would be a great benefit for technical users.

The AI and Machine Learning can be improved.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for over one year.

I have not seen any downtime with Sentinel. Sentinel is stable.

Sentinel is highly scalable. We can easily integrate more devices without any effort. Microsoft has a large data center, and they are always ready to add our devices.

Microsoft technical support has declined in quality over the years. I have only been using Sentinel for a year, but I have experience with Microsoft technical support through Azure and other Microsoft products. In the past, we were able to resolve tickets quickly with minimal back-and-forth. However, recently, the quality of support has degraded. We had a few critical cases that directly impacted production, but Microsoft did not assign their senior engineers to these cases. This wasted a lot of our time, as we had to explain the problems to multiple support representatives.

Neutral

We previously used Splunk SOAR in conjunction with Trend Micro and Darktrace to ingest logs, but we switched to Sentinel because it is more seamless.

The initial setup was successful. The configuration is not difficult. There were some challenging areas. However, we had access to free tools and a Microsoft contact who was always available to help us if we encountered any knowledge gaps. When setting up Sentinel for the first time in our environment, we always have an expert with us to assist with the setup, as not everyone has extensive knowledge of implementing the product. The expert is there to help us with the implementation if we get stuck on a step.

We decided which devices and types of alerts or information we wanted to ingest. At that time, we were not using automation. Our environment was in poor condition, and we were not utilizing the automated features of Sentinel. We only required the basic features of Sentinel, which were to ingest logs from the devices we were interested in, correlate them, analyze them, and integrate them with our service tools and alerting. For alerting, we used ServiceNow as our ticketing system. We would receive a ticket from ServiceNow for the SOC team, and then the SOC team would investigate and mitigate the issue. However, as time went on, the number of events increased, and the time it took to investigate them also increased. If we did not automate our environment, we would have to keep increasing the size of our SOC team or the number of SOC members to handle the workload. We could not meet the priority requirements. That is when we proposed using some of the automation features to help with low-priority alerts.

The deployment required three to four people. I joined the team for the implementation phase. So, by the time I joined, a lot of decisions had already been made, and a low-level plan had been decided upon. This was a low-level design and plan that we had to follow.

We had help from our Microsoft representative for the implementation. This contact was provided to us by Microsoft from the initial trial period all the way through the implementation.

Currently, given our use case, the cost of Sentinel is justified, but it is expensive. It is not so cheap that any organization can afford it. However, if an organization has a requirement for good security posture and can invest in security tools, they should have at least a decent budget to afford Sentinel. Sentinel does offer good features, such as SIEM, SOAR, and automation. However, we need to monitor our budget because ingestion can increase at any time and exceed our budget. We can set alerts to notify us if our budget is increasing significantly on a monthly or yearly basis. We can then control our budget by adjusting what we ingest. We can ingest any amount of data because there is a lot of data flowing in. However, some data is not necessary to ingest because it is not valuable to our analytics. Therefore, being careful about what data we ingest through Sentinel will help us stay within our budget.

We evaluated IBM QRadar and Splunk. Splunk has been in the market for a long time and is trusted by many organizations. While it was once a leader in its field, it does not seem to be keeping up with new features and automation. However, I am not aware of their current state of development.

We saw good features in both Splunk and QRadar, but QRadar had more features that were relevant to us. However, we are moving more towards the cloud. Previously, we had on-premises infrastructure, but we migrated to Azure when a new management team came in.

When we evaluated Microsoft Sentinel, we found that it had good functionality and met our requirements. We also liked that it is a cloud-based solution, so we do not have to worry about underlying hardware, features, operating systems, or management. We simply need to configure the application, which is relatively straightforward. We also do not need to make any upfront capital expenditures.

However, we need to consider the cost of ingesting logs into our environment. Microsoft charges for the amount of data ingested per day, so we need to keep our costs within budget.

QRadar is more complex and difficult to configure than Sentinel. Sentinel is easy to expand. If we add new devices to our environment, we can simply connect them directly to Sentinel. We do not need to worry about additional hardware or configuration.

Overall, Sentinel is a good choice for us because it is cloud-based, easy to configure, and scalable.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten.

Whether to use separate SIEM and SOAR solutions or Microsoft Sentinel depends on each organization's specific needs. All SIEM and SOAR tools are expensive because they provide essential security features. Organizations with the resources to pay for these features may choose to purchase Sentinel or another SIEM or SOAR solution. However, small and medium-sized businesses may not be able to afford these tools. Instead, they may choose to use a third-party service provider that already has a license for an SIEM solution such as QRadar or Sentinel.

Sentinel ingests data from over 1,500 endpoints, including technical devices, Windows devices, and Linux devices in our environment.

There is no maintenance required on our end. Microsoft is doing everything for us. We only have to have our configurations in place.

Before using Sentinel, organizations should clearly understand their use cases and requirements. They can take a trial of Sentinel and collaborate with Microsoft to create use cases that demonstrate the value of the investment. Because there are thousands of SIEM and SOAR tools on the market, organizations should evaluate multiple solutions to see what benefits they offer. They can then create use cases for each solution in their environment and take trials to implement them. Organizations should compare the solutions based on visibility, budget, and additional features. Anyone who is considering using a SIEM or SOAR solution should evaluate multiple solutions. Budgeting is very important.