Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

Our first use case is related to centralized log aggregation and security management. We have a number of servers at the user level and data center level, and I cannot use multiple tools to correlate all the information. My overall infrastructure is on Azure. We have a hybrid approach for the security environment by using Sentinel. So, hybrid security is one of the use cases, and unified security management is another use case.

It has helped us in three ways. One is IT, one is security, and one is compliance. Before Sentinel, our IT was mature, but our security and compliance were not mature enough in terms of certain controls, client requirements, and global-level regulatory compliance. By implementing the SIEM along with Security Center, we have improved security to a mature level, and we are able to meet the compliance reporting and client requirements for security within the organization.

It has an in-depth defense strategy. It is not limited to giving an alert; it also does correlation. There are three things involved when it comes to a SIEM solution: threats, alerts, and incidents. Sentinel gives you granular and concise information in the UI format about where the log has been generated. It doesn't only not give the timestamp, etc. This information is useful for the L1 and L2 SOC managers.

It has good built-in threat intelligence tools. You can configure a policy set and connectors, and you don't need to have any extra tools to investigate a particular platform. We can directly use the built-in threat intelligence tools and investigate a particular threat and get the answers from that.

We are using Microsoft stack. We use SharePoint. We use OneDrive for cloud storage. We use Teams for our internal productivity and communication, and we use Outlook for emails. For us, it provides 100% visibility because our infrastructure is on Microsoft stack. That's the reason why I'm very comfortable with Sentinel and its security. However, that might not be the case if we were not in Microsoft's ecosystem.

We are using Microsoft Defender. The integration with Microsoft Defender takes a few seconds. In the connector, you just need to click a button, and it will automatically connect. However, for data ingestion, it will take some time to configure the backend log, workspaces, etc.

It is useful for comprehensive reporting. We need to prepare RFPs for our clients. We need to do reporting on particular threats and their resolution. So, it is useful for our RFPs and our internal security enhancements.

It is helpful for security posture management. It has good threat intelligence, and it provides deep analysis. The security engine of Microsoft Sentinel takes the raw data of the logs and correlates and analyses them based on the security rules that we have created. It uses threat-intelligence algorithms to map what's happening within a particular log. For example, if somebody is trying to log into an MS Office account, it will try to see what logs are available for this particular user and whether there is any anomaly or unwanted access. It gives you all that information, which is very important from the compliance perspective. It is mandatory to have such information if you have ISO 27001, HIPAA, or other compliances.

It enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. It is not only about detecting threats. It is also all about investigating and responding to threats. I can specify how the alerts should be sent for immediate response. Microsoft Sentinel provides a lot of automation capabilities around reporting.

With the help of incidents that we are observing and doing the analysis of the threats, we are able to better tune our infrastructure. When we come across an incident or a loophole, we can quickly go ahead and review that particular loophole and take action, such as closing the ports. A common issue is management ports being open to the public.

It saves time and reduces the response time to incidents. We have all the information on the dashboard. We don't need to go ahead and download the reports.

There are a lot of dashboards available out of the box, and we can also create custom dashboards based on our requirements. There is also one dashboard where we can see the summary of all incidents and alerts. Everything can be correlated with the main dashboard.

We can use playbooks and data analytics. We have one system called pre-policy definitions where our internal team can work on the usability of a particular product. We get a risk-based ranking. Based on this risk-based ranking, we will create policies and incorporate data analytics to get the threats and alerts. We are almost 100% comfortable with Sentinel in terms of the rules and threat detections.

It improves our time to detect and respond. On detecting a threat, it alerts us within seconds.

The AI and ML of Azure Sentinel are valuable. We can use machine learning models at the tenant level and within Office 365 and Microsoft stack. We don't need to depend upon any other connectors. It automatically provisions the native Microsoft products.

Playbooks are also valuable. When I compare it with the playbooks in other SIEM solutions, such as Splunk, AlienVault, or QRadar, the playbooks that Sentinel is providing are better.

The SOAR architecture is also valuable. We use productivity apps, such as Outlook and Teams. If a security breach is happening, we automatically get security alerts on Teams and Outlook. Automation is one of its benefits.

We are working with a number of products around the cybersecurity and IoT divisions. We have Privileged Identity Management and a lot of firewalls to protect the organizations, such as Sophos, Fortinet, and Palo Alto. Based on my experience over three years, if you have your products in the Microsoft or Azure environment or a hybrid environment around Microsoft, all these solutions work well together natively, but with non-Microsoft products, there are definitely integration issues. Exporting the logs is very difficult, and the API calls are not being generated frequently from the Microsoft end. There are some issues with cross-platform integration, and you need to have the expertise to resolve the issues. They are working on improving the integration with other vendors, but as compared to other platforms, such as Prisma Cloud Security, the integration is not up to the mark.

The second improvement area is log ingestion. Sometimes, we are observing large ingestion delays. We expect logs within 5 minutes, but it takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

They can work on their documentation. For Sentinel, not many user or SOP information documents are available on the internet. They should provide more information related to how to deploy your Sentinel and various available options. Currently, the information is not so accurate. They say something at one place, and then there is something else at other places.

It has been about two years.

It is stable. They are enhancing it and upgrading it as well.

It is scalable. It is being used across all departments. We took it for about 80 devices, but, within 24 hours, we mapped it to 240 devices.

Technical support is very straightforward. They will not help you out with your specific use cases or requirements, but they will give you a basic understanding of how a particular feature works in Sentinel.

We didn't use any other solution in this company. We went for this because as per our compliance requirements, we needed to have this installation in place. About 80% of our environment is on Microsoft, and we could just spin up Azure Sentinel.

It is straightforward. Usually, you can deploy within seconds, but in order to replicate an agent on your Sentinel, it will take about 12 to 24 hours.

We engaged Microsoft experts to deploy the agents across the devices on the cloud. It didn't take much time on the cloud, but for on-prem, it takes some time.

It has saved a lot of time. Implementing a SIEM solution from a third-party vendor, such as AlienVault OSSIM, can take about 45 days to 60 days of time, but we can roll out Sentinel within 15 days if everything is on Microsoft.

For implementation, we have about three people. One is from the endpoint security team. One is from the compliance team, and one is from the security operations team.

It is a cloud solution. So, no maintenance is required.

We have reached our compliance goals, and we have been able to meet our client's requirements. We are getting a lot of revenue with this compliance.

It has saved us money. It would be about $2,500 to $3,000 per month.

It varies on a case-by-case basis. It is about $2,000 per month. The cost is very low in comparison to other SIEMs if you are already a Microsoft customer. If you are using the complete Microsoft stack, the cost reduces by almost 42% to 50%.

Its cost depends on the number of logs and the type of subscription you have. You need to have an Azure subscription, and there are charges for log ingestion, and there are charges for the connectors.

I would strongly recommend it, but it also depends on the infrastructure. I would advise understanding your infrastructure and use cases, such as whether your use case is for compliance or for meeting certain client requirements. Based on that, you can go ahead and sign up for Sentinel.

If you have the native Microsoft stack, you can easily ingest data from your ecosystem. There is no need to think about all the other things or vendors. However, in a non-Microsoft environment where, for example, you have endpoint security from Trend Micro, email security for Mimecast, and IPS and IDS from Sophos, FortiGate, or any other solution, or cloud workloads on AWS, Microsoft Sentinel is not recommended. You can go for other solutions, such as Splunk or QRadar. If about 80% of your infrastructure is on Microsoft, you can definitely go with Microsoft Sentinel. It will also be better commercially.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 based on my use case.

Microsoft Sentinel is a monitoring tool. It is a SIEM solution and is used to gather logs. It allows us to analyze and understand the flow of information based on the events that happen and the systems we connect it to. 

I explain it to my customers as being almost like an octopus. It sits in the middle of a tank, and it has all these tentacles that connect to different systems. We bring that information in via those connections, and then we query them. We can centrally analyze, examine, and understand the data that comes in through the analytics or the capabilities that Azure links to Microsoft Sentinel, which is Azure Log Analytics Workspace. We then use queries to help us understand or make sense of the data. We can have dashboards and visualize them. 

We use it to set up monitoring for cloud infrastructure and we use it as part of a larger monitoring capability around setting up a SOC capability. We are then able to keep track of infrastructure and mitigate risks.

Microsoft Sentinel gives visibility to some degree to all of the customers that I work with. It has given us more visibility into the accurate state of the endpoints being monitored in near real-time. 

With the solution, we are now able to respond to incidents in a more timely fashion, which helps us. It helped us to understand what is happening and make informed decisions as a result. It has given us a more comprehensive and holistic view of the ecosystem that exists, and not just an individual piece of that ecosystem. It does not give a view of just one server. It also gives a view of the supporting infrastructure around it. It has given us a lot more visibility, and it has made us smarter in terms of being able to defend ourselves against bad threat actors and the harm they look to do. It made us better armed and more informed, and therefore we can offer a better defense that will hopefully ward off some of those bad actions.

Microsoft Sentinel helps to prioritize threats across the enterprise in several ways. This capability is linked to other technology elements that make up the overall security posture of the Microsoft offering. Microsoft Sentinel, in particular, allows us to look at the flow of information coming through the connectors from various systems. This helps us create alerts and analyze that data so that we can bubble up and see what is happening. We can tie that into the Microsoft Defender stack or the products in the Microsoft Defender ecosystem, and we can take action and monitor. 

Whether it is being alerted, manually choosing to do something, or automating through the broader security capabilities of the platform, we can take action. When we tie in the broader security capabilities that involve governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC), and we have all the tools at our disposal to do that, Microsoft Sentinel becomes a huge ingestion engine that brings in signals. The telemetry and data from all the monitored endpoints allow other capabilities to access that data so that we can monitor it. We are then not only well-informed, but we can also choose how to respond. We can respond through a combination of automation and manual actions. If something occurs, we can then kick off an incident response to deal with it. If needed, we can quarantine and mitigate it. We have a rich set of capabilities but also a very flexible set of opportunities to respond because we are given near real-time information. We can analyze that information in near real-time to make informed choices when it comes to threat intelligence, threat mitigation, and threat assessment.

I use all of the products that Microsoft has in the market in various architectures or configurations with different customers, and I have used them for many years. Various customers use the entire suite of offerings that Microsoft has in the security space in terms of governance, risk management, and compliance, such as Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender. There are also solutions like Privileged Identity Management (PIM), which is now a part of Microsoft Entra, which has been renamed. I have integrated these products and set up the architectures or designs for customers. The setup depends on the size of the customer and some smaller businesses do not use all of them. They license at lower levels and do not have the business case, the resources, or the need to use them all. Larger companies tend to utilize more of them. Because I work with different-sized companies, I set the solutions up and have used them in a variety of circumstances across the board for different companies. 

In the beginning, like any technology, it was a little harder to integrate when the products were new. As they matured and went through iterations, they became easier to work with. Utilizing a new product is more painful than using a product that has perhaps been out for a year or two, that has been vetted and maybe has gone through one major update or release. The integration has gotten better over time, and the product lines continue to mature and become more powerful as a result.

Microsoft security products work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across the environment. For this, you need to use the appropriate connectors to bring in the information from both Microsoft-centric and third-party systems that you want to incorporate and monitor. It is bounded by the vision of the architecture that allows you to connect those systems and the availability of those connectors. Assuming those systems are connected properly, brought online, and are reporting, it gives you the depth of visibility that you need to manage both Microsoft and non-Microsoft systems.

Microsoft security products provide a very thorough set of security. Microsoft is looking at billions, perhaps a trillion, individual data points a day at this point across the Microsoft ecosystem, which includes everything Microsoft does, all customers, and all interactions. They take all that information and analyze it with dedicated security teams, machine learning and artificial intelligence, business analytics, etc. They turn that information around and make it available for customers who are consuming the threat analysis and threat intelligence capabilities on the platform. Some of the solutions are available for free to everybody regardless of licensing. For others, you need enhanced licensing to take advantage of it fully. The threat intelligence feeds, the live analysis, and the security posture that Microsoft provides to its customers globally as part of the shared responsibility model have matured tremendously. They are the best. You get incredible value for the amount of work that goes into providing that. The customers I work with are very happy with the work that Microsoft does and continues to do in that space.

We use the bi-directional sync capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Cloud in some cases. It is a very useful feature for myself and my customers. It is very important because it allows us to use the Defender product, which is made up of maybe 20 individual offerings at this point. There are a lot of different sub-areas that you have that you can attach the Defender product to. This concept allows us to be able to have the endpoints monitored, whether they are the servers or the service that Defender would monitor and protect. It allows us to understand what is happening with them and to have near real-time updates about their status. We can see the impact of potential threats that are attaching and risks that may become apparent, and we can see the impact of remediation or the things that are being done to stop those things or perhaps forestall them, hopefully, to prevent them from harming. This capability is very important, and it is one of the secrets that allow that platform to not only be very flexible but also very impactful in terms of monitoring the bulk of the infrastructure and services that most customers would have running in a public cloud, whether it is Microsoft or any other public cloud, such as Amazon, Google, etc. We can monitor any infrastructure and understand it, especially customers' environments that are hybrid where they have on-premises as well as cloud or multi-cloud infrastructure with more than one cloud. To be able to monitor both on-premises and multi-cloud environments is a requirement today, and Microsoft provides those capabilities but not all other providers do. 

It enables us to ingest data from the entire ecosystem as long as we are using a connector to link to the infrastructure that we need to monitor and as long as there is a connector for monitoring that infrastructure. So, as long as the pipe exists, we connect the pipe, and we can monitor the infrastructure. For a majority of mainline infrastructure or a majority of third-party vendor systems today, there are connectors. For some smaller systems or proprietary or custom systems that some companies run, there might not be connectors, but for mainline systems that you would buy, acquire, or use from large-scale SaaS vendors, connectors have been there for a while. As long as we are running connectors to that infrastructure, we can monitor almost anything that we have.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. We have a central dashboard that we can use to monitor and then from there, do the analysis and also create the remediation if necessary. This functionality is very important. The biggest mistake vendors make in tool design from a UI/UX or user interface/user experience perspective is that they do not make things centrally available and obvious for the administrator or the end user who is going to run or use that system. Generally, if something is overly complicated and not very intuitive, it is hard to get people to buy into using something. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can have everything in one place and visualize the impact of the threats, the risks, the incoming data, and the number of incidents, events, or alerts that are happening. All those things are visually represented in the opening part of the dashboard. You could drill down from there with a navigation area that is intuitive and easily understood. That makes it very easy for different users, such as administrators and managers, and other user profiles that have different reasons for being in the tool, and that is the hallmark of a good design.

When you look at it holistically and look at what it is linked to in terms of the broader security platform that Microsoft provides, it is very strong, and it continues to get better. When you ask anyone about their thoughts about a product and how it works for their customers, the mistake that people often make in describing something is that they say, "I think it is great, and it is great for us. It does everything we need." That is good, and it should be. I can say that for the majority of my customers without any ambiguity or concern about being accurate, but the thing you have to add is that there are always things that we do not know that we need to do until they occur. We might not have seen that threat before. Maybe there is a new advanced persistent threat or zero-day exploit that we have to contend with, which we have not been aware of until now. The hallmark of a really good tool is its ability to integrate that new information in a timely fashion and have the flexibility to mature the tool over time based on feedback and iterative use. The strength that Microsoft has brought to the platform over time is the ability to listen to its customers and make sure they are offering based on that feedback. It is good, and it continues to get better. Today, it is good, and tomorrow, it will be better because of that thought process in the way they engineer over time.

Microsoft Sentinel helps automate routine tasks and the finding of high standards. If you set it up the right way, it does that as one of the key things that it is designed to do. It has streamlined our ability to respond, so response time has gone down. It has enhanced our understanding because automation is managing some of the remediation and the menial, repetitive ongoing tasks of:

• Paying attention to information flows.

• Picking out the most important elements.

• Prioritizing them and bubbling them up.

• Creating alerts around them and then telling people that these things are happening. 

Automation lets you do that without having to spend human or people cycles to do that. The automation never gets tired and it never gets bored. It never needs to take a break. It never gets distracted. Because of that, we find not only more things we need to react to, but we react to the things that we truly should be chasing. We are not distracted as much by things that seem to be important, but we find out that they are just ghosts. They are false flags. The ability to bring machine learning, artificial intelligence, business analytics, and data visualization as a part of automation has filtered out a lot of the background noise that distracts. It has allowed us to hone in and refine our activity cycles around the most important things that we have to pay attention to.

Microsoft Sentinel helps eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and gives one XDR dashboard if you set it up the right way. I have seen it set up in ways where it does not do that because it is not optimized, but if you are using it the right way, if you understand the tool and how to integrate it properly, then it gives you that single dashboard where you can directly find the information or link through a smaller visual tile that will take you to that information that you need if you need to drill down in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Its threat intelligence helps to prepare for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps. If you are integrating the threat intelligence feeds from Microsoft and looking at them, everything is relative. They are there if you are smart enough to consume them and understand what you are looking at. In other words, people who are paying attention to them and are using them properly are getting tremendous value out of them. Microsoft globally examines billions, if not a trillion, of individual telemetry data points every day and incorporates that into their threat analysis feeds, so no individual company, irrespective of how big they are and how much money they have, can bring that kind of at-scale analysis to that problem. As a result, you are getting a tremendous amount of data that is being vetted, analyzed, and distilled down to meaningful actionable intelligence. It is consumable because it is presented in a very summarized and succinct way. It is very valuable, but you have to be able to understand that and utilize that to draw value from it.

We have saved me time with Sentinel. The ability to have the power of Microsoft as a global scanning organization service provider at my disposal is helping me to better understand the environment I operate in through threat intelligence and threat analysis. In addition, the ability to automate at scale across the platform and to have the research and design that is being done to continuously upgrade and add features to those platforms has made me a much more capable and therefore, more successful security practitioner. It is hard to quantify the time saved. It would probably be a very extreme exercise to go back and do that, but it is fair to say that over a year, we have probably saved a thousand or more human hours. I look across a team for one of the customers that I work with, it is fair to say that we have saved at least a thousand human hours for a year by relying more on the automation toolsets. That is about ninety hours a month on average. We can break it down to 15 or 20 hours a week or something like that, but the reality is that it is about a thousand or more hours that we have saved in a year.

Time to detection has decreased, and the time to respond has gone. They both have decreased. That has been an outcome that we have seen and is measurable. It goes back to the investments you make in building out that architecture in terms of:

• How many systems are you monitoring or how many are you connecting?

• How much data do you have coming in? 

• What are you doing with that data and how are you using it? 

If you are building out a full SOC analysis capability or a full monitoring solution, and you are typing this into incident response and alerting and event continuous monitoring through automation, time to respond and time to solution is going to decrease as a result.

It can connect to an ever-growing number of platforms and systems within the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365 or Office 365, as well as to external services and systems that can be brought in and managed. We can manage on-premises infrastructure. We can manage not just the things that are running in Azure in the public cloud, but through Azure Arc and the hybrid capabilities, we can monitor on-premises servers and endpoints. We can monitor VMware infrastructure, for instance, running as part of a hybrid environment. The continuing evolution of what we call the connectors, which is the marketplace that lets us connect these systems to Microsoft Sentinel, is probably one of the most important features.

The reliance on a very simple but very powerful query language called Kusto Query Language or KQL that Microsoft uses to allow us to log into the analytics workspace to assess and analyze the data is also valuable. That has made it very approachable and very scalable. Those are very big and important things for me as a consultant, as an architect, and as a person who is implementing these solutions for customers and who is explaining them, and ultimately working with them. This makes the product not only usable but also very flexible. Those are two very important elements.

Everyone has their favorites. There is always room for improvement, and everybody will say, "I wish you could do this for me or that for me." It is a personal thing based on how you use the tool. I do not necessarily have those thoughts, and they are probably not valuable because they are unique to the context of the user, but broadly, where it can continue to improve is by adding more connectors to more systems. 

The really interesting area where we are already seeing the impact is the use of more artificial intelligence. There could be the ability to bring AI into the analysis capabilities of the toolset in more ways so that we can utilize the power that computer analysis at scale has. That is because we are limited. As humans, we can only look at so much information, see so many patterns, and absorb so much in any given cycle of a workday, but artificial intelligence and automation engines do not take breaks. They do not stop. They do not need to. They can go deeper, and they can see more data and ingest more to find patterns that, as humans, we are not going to be able to see. The evolving technology in this area is all moving towards the use of artificial intelligence, embedding it in multiple areas in the platform so that we can be told that there are things that we need to pay attention to that are becoming a problem as opposed to things that are already a problem. Where the biggest improvements can happen is how we move that ability to identify emerging threats closer to the point of contact so that we can interject and essentially stop and disrupt the kill chain of an event series before it harms. Currently, the problem we often have is that things get bad, and until they get bad, we do not really know what is happening, and we do not know how to respond, so we spend a lot of time responding to incidents that have already started or have unfortunately unfolded fully in a reactive manner. The value proposition in terms of improvement down the road is getting better at predictive defense and proactive response before events take place to stop them before they start. That is the future that we are moving towards, and that is where the biggest improvement lies.

Sentinel, which is now called Microsoft Sentinel, used to be called Azure Sentinel. It was renamed about a year and a half or two years ago, but I have used Sentinel for about four years. It was probably released in 2019.

It is very stable. I have had little to no difficulty with it in the more than four years that I have used it or deployed it. I cannot think of a time in the last four years when it was unstable or unstable enough that I had to open a support ticket. I have had issues with it because people have misconfigured it or not set it up properly, but those issues were not related to the platform itself. Those were human interactions that were complicating it because it was not set up the right way. When it is set up correctly, it is a very solid platform with minimal to no downtime. There were no major service disruptions that I remember that caused problems.

It is very scalable. You do not think of scalability necessarily the same way you would if you were setting up a cluster to run virtual machines, for instance, because there, you have to add resources, and you are monitoring to make sure that there are enough resources versus the load in the system. Microsoft Sentinel is a managed solution. You are deploying it, but then Microsoft is scaling it and managing it on the backend for you, so you do not control some of the things that would impact scalability directly. Microsoft is hosting it. It is essentially a service you are consuming. In my history with the product, it has always met my expectations, and I have never had an issue where it could not perform because of a resource constraint, so its scalability is solid, and it is always available when necessary. It is not scalable in the same sense as you would control it by adding hosts to a cluster. It is a different kind of scalability, but it has been rock solid all the time I have been working with it.

In terms of the environment, I have multiple customers, so each one is different, but generically, it is safe to say that it is deployed to monitor infrastructure that is in multiple geographies, multiple data centers, or multiple places both on-premises and in the cloud. It could be hybrid as well as multi-cloud. The infrastructure is being monitored from a variety of different locations. Microsoft Sentinel itself is typically installed and instantiated in one instance. You set it up inside of an Azure subscription and you have one instance. If you need more than one, you might set up more than one depending on the geography and the needs of the organization, but typically, we have one central Microsoft Sentinel instance running, and then you will bring that information into it through the connectors. It is typically going to be a single instance. It will usually monitor geographically distributed architecture, and it will usually operate at scale, so there will be quite a bit of information coming into that at any given moment.

Like anything else, you can get support depending on how you are using the tool and the level at which you are using it. You get basic support from Microsoft. If you have a problem, they are very good at telling you if there are service issues. If you are paying additionally, you can get premium support to support you with the tool. There is an additional fee for platinum-level support or premium support. Their support is very good if you are paying for it and you are able to utilize it. If you are just able to open a basic ticket because you are having a problem, support is good, but you are going to be limited in the help you are going to get. To talk to a high-level engineer to deal with complicated issues, you are going to need to pay extra money for support. Overall, I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have used several different solutions over time with different customers for different reasons. I work with a lot of different customers. I set up solutions for different customers. They have different technologies and different needs, and some of them have a bias towards certain products and against others, but I have used products like ConnectWise, which is a SIEM solution, and Splunk, which is probably one of the biggest ones out there that most people would name if you ask them. Splunk is probably at the top or near the top of everybody's list. Datadog would be another big one. I have used LogPoint and GrayLog. I have also used ManageEngine's Log360. SolarWinds is another popular one that I have come across pretty often. I have used many more than that, but those are probably the top five or six that I have used. They are the ones that customers tend to use a lot. Some of them are still using those products and have chosen not to move, but the ones that have chosen to move have done that because of two things. The cost plays a part. They have the ability to leverage a tool that is already built into the platform and that may be easier to work with and integrate in a more readily accessible fashion, and it would be as expensive and maybe less expensive over time. It might also seem to be a better architectural choice for them as they look at an upcoming renewal cycle, or they have heard or been told that they need a certain capability or feature and the vendor that they are currently using does not have that or it is not as easily accessible or readily available, but Microsoft Sentinel has that capability. It has connectors to those other platforms, but for whatever reason, their particular vendor does not have that connector, or they might promise to deliver it but it is not going to be ready for six months. It comes down to features and cost. These are the two main reasons or two main motivators to drive people to migrate.

In terms of the cost and ease of use of Microsoft Sentinel against standalone SIEM and SOAR solutions, it is difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison. That is because, in theory, you can look at Microsoft Sentinel as a single standalone product with its own cost associated with it, but it is linked to, consumed by, and used in partnership with many other systems and tools that also have a licensing cost. Some of it is built-in and some of it is an add-on, depending on where you are and how you choose to license. In other words, Microsoft Defender is a per instance per month cost that is additional to using the Microsoft Sentinel product, and what you get with a standalone solution is essentially just the SIEM or the SOAR capability. You are not getting the capability to blend them across the platform, or if the vendor does both, you are buying them as an all-in-one solution and you are paying a monthly fee per user based on licensing. 

From my perspective, cost comparisons are not as accurate. When a customer asks whether Microsoft Sentinel is going to cost them less or more than using this other tool, it is a very simplistic way of looking at the tool, and it is a very operational-centric or OpEx discussion. When anyone asks about the monthly fee for the investment in this tool, you have to be more strategic. When you look at a tool, features, and capabilities, the capital expense is broader than just the operational expense. You have to understand the strategy associated with the tool decision and the impact and value of the tool. 

Microsoft Sentinel gives a good value for money or a return on investment in terms of what it costs you to run it. When comparing it to any of the other major competitors in the market, it is as cost-effective and perhaps even more cost-effective than some of them. It certainly is very competitive, but people do not necessarily understand the subtlety in that assessment in terms of how they are integrating the Microsoft Sentinel solution or the third-party solution into the broader context of their infrastructure and security posture. That is where they run into issues that become more prohibited from a cost perspective, both hard and soft. For example, the hard cost could be $15 a month per user to license or $15 a month per endpoint and $100 per gigabyte of storage or something like that. Those numbers are wildly inaccurate, but you do have hard costs, and then you have soft costs, which include what it costs you to train people who have to use that technology or to train people who have to manage it ongoing and integrate it. You might have to hire consultants to do that, for instance. Those are hard and soft costs. When you are using a Microsoft product and you are Microsoft-centric, you overcome some of those soft costs because you have people who already have skills on the platform. You are already integrating that technology. Microsoft is doing that for you. You do not have to do it yourself. As a result, some of what I refer to as hidden costs are not as high with a Microsoft solution as they would be with a third-party solution. If you are already Microsoft-centric and you are using a majority of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365-based infrastructure in some form, it is easier to implement that technology. It costs less when you go forward with Microsoft Sentinel than it does when you try to bring in a third-party external SIEM or SOAR and tie it into the Microsoft platforms and have it do the things that you are looking for it to do.

It is predominantly deployed for public cloud use, meaning customers hosting on a public cloud are using it. They are hosting in Azure, for instance, and they are running their cloud infrastructure in that cloud environment. You can link to on-premises resources in hybrid scenarios, and you can certainly make the case that it can be used for private cloud as well because you can extend it to the on-premises environment. It can be used to ingest information in a multi-cloud environment, meaning you can bring in infrastructure information from Amazon or Google, the other two major public cloud provider platforms, as well as VMware, which, in its own right, is a public cloud provider. So, it can be used or potentially be available to consume data from any of those areas.

I have been involved in the deployment of hundreds of instances of Microsoft Sentinel. Its initial deployment is straightforward. In terms of implementation strategy or how to approach it, it is important to spend a lot of time with whoever the customer is. I work with multiple customers. I ask them what sound like fairly simple and simplistic questions but are very important questions. What are they looking to accomplish by deploying a SIEM solution? What is the business requirement that we are addressing by deploying the solution? We need to define that and understand that because oftentimes, we find that the customer says, "Well, we think we need, for instance, X." We talk about it, but realize what they really need is perhaps X with other things or it is not X at all. It is really W. They just thought it was X because somebody told them that. They did not know any better, so asking W&H is important.

• Who is this for?

• Who are the stakeholders?

• Why are we doing this?

• What are we looking to accomplish?

• When are we looking to get it done?

• What is the timeline?

The where and the how are not as important because it is typically in the cloud, and we are going to have qualified people deploy this architecture and we are going to run it in Microsoft, Amazon, or whatever. If we ask those questions upfront, then we can come up with a deployment plan and architecture solution that approximates the customers' needs but also meets their expectations, so for me, a project's success or failure lies in planning. The majority of the work you do has to be done in the planning cycle before you do implementation. If you are really strong in planning, then implementation is relatively straightforward. There are not a lot of surprises. As long as you are technically competent, you can do your deployments, and they should be relatively straightforward and minimal risk to the organization in terms of the deployment. If you do not get your planning right, you are opening up a tremendous amount of risk and liability in the organization.

In terms of maintenance, you cannot set it and forget it. Like any other product, it does require maintenance. If you are smart about it and you set it up the right way the first time, it will take care of itself, and it will certainly operate well at scale, but you have to examine it on an ongoing basis. There is always an opportunity to refine and update connectors. You can add new connectors as you need to extend the reach of the tool. You may have to look at the volume of data that is coming in to refine the amount of data that you want to store, pay for, and analyze, and then you have to look at the queries you are running to be able to stay on top of the data to extrapolate meaning. So, there is maintenance that goes into using a tool like this. There is no checklist that you go through every day, but there are absolutely things that have to be done on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to keep the tool running properly.

I am the one who handles the deployment. It is rare that I would not do it myself or work with a team that would be empowered to do it as part of that.

The deployment, depending on the size of the deployment, could be done by as little as one person. It does not necessarily need a huge number of people to be associated with it. The bigger need there is what you do once the initial deployment is done, meaning fine-tuning the operation of that. When you add all that in, you typically look at a team of anywhere from three to six individuals. There are incident management and response and SOC analysis people. There are also network people. There are different people who would play a part in ultimately standing up and optimizing a tool like this, but usually, four to six people play a part on average.

There is absolutely an ROI if it is architected properly and the customer has the right expectations going in.

Microsoft Sentinel has saved my customers money. There is an initial investment upfront, so you have to spend money to save money. There is an initial investment upfront of hard and soft hours, but if the systems are set up properly and optimized and you have people who understand them, one of the things that you are able to do is look at the redundancies in your security stack or in your provisioning. You can look at tools that you may be able to move away from at the end of a license period instead of renewing, for instance. You can do away with that redundancy and focus on simply using the Microsoft toolset, so you tend to find that there is definitely an economy of scale there in terms of recouping those returns on investment. There may be a one to three-year cycle to see those savings. It depends on where you are with redundant tool sets that you have identified to be eliminated and where you are with a contractual licensing obligation of time cycle or license period before you have to pay to renew based on current investment, so it may lag a little bit. You do not tend to see those results right away. They tend to lag anywhere from 12 to 36 months, but at the end of, for instance, a three-year cycle, you are not spending another $300,000 to re-license a new tool. You are saving that money. You can then work backward and say that on average, you are now saving x amount of dollars a month going forward because you are not making that investment anymore. You definitely do see investments that yield value, but they tend to lag.

It is priced fairly given the value that you get from the use of the product. The biggest mistake people make with Microsoft Sentinel is not understanding the pricing model and the amount of data that they are going to be running through the tool because you are paying based on the flow. You are paying based on the amount of data that is moving through the tool. People do not plan, and therefore, they get surprised by the cost associated with using the tool. They connect everything because they want to know everything, but connecting everything is very expensive. They might not need to know everything. That is what I talk about with customers. It would be nice to know everything, but it might not be affordable or cost-effective. Microsoft Sentinel provides good value for the money. It is competitive with any of the other offerings out there based on the cost, but the mistake customers make is that they do not understand the cost model for using a SIEM solution regardless of whose solution they are using. When they get visibility into that model, it becomes a lot easier for them to make informed decisions.

I certainly evaluate products all the time. I am always looking to see what capabilities exist and which vendor can offer me the best mix of features and capabilities for the price, and then I make recommendations to my customers as a result of that. Microsoft Sentinel is a newer product in the market in terms of time. It has only been around for about four years, whereas some of the other products, such as Splunk, have been around a lot longer, so I tend to find people evaluating Microsoft Sentinel versus the other products they already possess when they are looking to move.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise doing their due diligence. They have to understand the technology, the capabilities, and the limitations. They need to assess the business requirements that they are trying to address by deploying a SIEM solution, whether it is Microsoft or not. They need to understand what those key business requirements or key objectives are, and then evaluate the tools to make sure that those tools can achieve those objectives. They can then make an informed decision accordingly.

Microsoft Sentinel is one piece of the puzzle. Threat intelligence or threat analysis is a broader aspect of the security platform that Microsoft provides. It is certainly reliant on the data that Microsoft Sentinel provides, but there is a lot more to it than that. Overall, Microsoft has made tremendous investments in the last five to ten years. Especially in the last five years, in that space, they have developed a threat intelligence, threat analysis, and threat awareness capability that rivals any of the top platforms that are out there today. They continue to mature and grow that capability by maturing the products that support it. Microsoft Sentinel is one aspect of that. The Microsoft Defender stack or all different Defender products are a part of that. A few years ago, it would have been very hard to make the statement or make the case that Microsoft has a mature offering that is certainly at the very top along with other offerings that are often talked about as being at the top in that field. Today, Microsoft competes at the top tier of that field, and their solution is as mature as any of the ones in the market. The challenge with Microsoft solution is that it is very specific and uniquely honed for the Microsoft infrastructure. That is not a bad thing, but it is something that you need to be aware of. It is specifically designed to work with, work for, and wrap around Microsoft's public cloud offering Microsoft Azure and the supporting elements in Microsoft 365, etc. So, as long as you are Microsoft-centric in your stack, in your technology, in your architecture, it is a very valuable piece of the overall threat posture management that a company needs, but if your investment in technology is heavily weighted outside of Microsoft, it is of less value because you need to be Microsoft centric and Microsoft forward to be able to fully leverage that platform.

To a security colleague who says it is better to go with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor’s security suite, I would say that it depends on the nature of the organization's technology architecture. If the organization is overwhelmingly single-technology-centric, meaning they use Microsoft almost exclusively, you can make the case either way. Using an external third party not tied to Microsoft is important because now you are splitting your investment, and you are not gambling only on one provider, which is the argument you always hear people make when they say, "Do not put all your eggs in one basket." The counter to that argument is who knows my environment better than the vendor that has made all the technology that I am integrating, and who would be better to monitor it than the vendor that makes all the technology? When I have customers that are single-technology-stack customers, they are almost exclusively or predominantly Microsoft, I counsel them to think strongly about using Microsoft products unless there is a compelling reason not to because Microsoft is going to make a much better solution than a third-party vendor that has to figure out how to connect to Microsoft to use that product properly. Organizations that have a mixed technology environment do not use only one vendor. To be fair, many small, medium, and large organizations are mixed technology environments, and it would be foolish to only rely on one vendor's security solution.

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

I'm using it as a SIEM solution. If I consider the leading clouds, especially Google and Amazon, so we don't have a dedicated SIEM solution available in either and we have to create a SIEM solution by using the native services of those clouds. But Microsoft Sentinel gives us an opportunity to use a direct SIEM solution. 

I have clients from different regions and they already have environments on the cloud with various vendors, as well as on-prem. The problem they came to me with was that they wanted to secure their environments. They wanted to monitor all the vulnerability management, patches, and vulnerability scans in a single place. They have third-party data sources that they wanted to monitor things in a single dashboard. I suggested they use Microsoft Sentinel because it can integrate many third-party vendors into a single picture.

Those are the kinds of scenarios in which I suggest that my clients use Microsoft Sentinel.

One thing that makes our work easier is that Sentinel enables you to investigate threats and respond from one place. We don't need to jump into different portals. We configure the rules there and we have the response plans as well as the recommendations from the Sentinel itself and, from there, we can take action. It saves time. That is a good and really important feature.

Working with Sentinel, trust is something we have gained. My company is a consulting firm and we have multiple clients in different regions. We have Australian clients and have to deal with Australian policies, as well as in India where there are different kinds of government policies. With all these policies that our clients have to accommodate, when we deploy Sentinel, the trust we are gaining from them is good.

We are also able to optimize costs, have stability, and an improved work culture by using Sentinel.

Another benefit is the automation of routine functions, like the creation of incidents. Our SOC doesn't need to create incidents manually. We have playbooks to automate things. That saves time on a daily basis.

A monotonous job was the need to send an email to an affected user to tell them to take an action because their third-party tool was something we didn't have access to. For example, we do not have visibility into the portal of Palo Alto, CyberArk, or Zscaler. My team's job in that situation was to send an email for every alert to tell someone to take action. Now, they don't need to waste their time. With automation, we can create a playbook for that. When an alert is generated, it automatically triggers the affected user to take action accordingly. In the time we have saved, my team has been able to learn and customize KQL queries and enhance their KQL skills.

Another area where it is helping us is in creating a single dashboard for our environment. We can collect all the logs into a log analytics workset and run queries on top of it. We get all the results in the dashboard. Even a layman can understand this stuff. The way Microsoft presents it is really incredible. We can download that dashboard or a report from the dashboard and present it in a team meeting. That is really useful.

Overall, per week, Sentinel saves us 40 to 45 hours, per person. We have a team of 20 people who log in to Sentinel and each of those people is saving something like 40 to 45 hours by using it. In that time we can work on different technologies. It has also definitely decreased our time to detection by 80 percent.

The most amazing aspect of Microsoft Sentinel is the daily upgrading of the product. They have third-party connectors that their people are enhancing on a daily basis. That is what I like about the product. Their people are not sitting idly and saying, "Okay, we have created the product, now just use it." It's nothing like that. They are continuously working on it to make it number one in the market.

It also has a playbook feature so that we can do automation in Sentinel itself, based on the data sources and the logs that we are receiving. That means we don't need to do manual stuff again and again.

Using Sentinel, we can collect all the logs of third-party vendors and use them to analyze what kinds of scenarios are going on in the environment. On top of that, we can create analytics rules to monitor the environment and take action accordingly if there is a suspicious or malicious event.

Something else that is great is the visibility into threats. We have an AI feature enabled in Sentinel and that gives us great visibility into the data sources we have integrated. And for data sources that we don't have integrated, we have a Zero Trust feature and we get great visibility into the threat log. Visibility-wise, Sentinel is fantastic.

The ingestion of data from our entire environment is very important to our security operations. We have clients in insurance and multiple firms that deal with taxation, and we need to do an audit yearly. To do that, we need the data from the whole environment to be ingested into the workspace.

They can work on the EDR side of things. It is already really superb, because of the kinds of features we get with the EDR solution. It's not a standard EDR and they have recently enhanced things. But the problem is with onboarding devices. I have different OS flavors, including a large number of Linux, Windows, macOS, and some on-prem machines as well.

Every time we need to onboard these kinds of machines into the EDR, we need to do it with the help of Intune, to sync up the devices, and do the configuration. I'm looking for something on the EDR side that will reduce this kind of work. They can eliminate having to do manual configuration for the machines, and check the different types of configurations for each OS. In some cases, it does not support some OSs. If they could reduce this type of work, that would be really amazing.

I have been using this product for the last three and a half years.

It is reliable. I would rate it a nine out of 10 for performance and reliability.

The scalability is also a nine out of 10.

We have the solution in different locations and regions. Most of my clients are in Singapore, Australia, and India and we have some European clients as well. On average, our clients have 2,200 employees.

Most of the time, their technical support is very good and very supportive. But sometimes we feel that they don't want to help us. Recently, we had a major issue and we tried to involve a Microsoft engineer. I felt he was not aware of the things we were asking for. 

I said, "That machine is hosted on Microsoft Azure and you and people are managing that stuff, so you need to know that machine inside and out." He said, "No, the configuration and integration parts, in the machine itself, is something I'm not aware of. You people did this, and you need to take care of it." I told him that the challenge we were facing was with the configuration and we do not get those kinds of logs. I suggested he engage some Linux OS expertise for this call, but he said, "No, we don't have a Linux OS expert."

Sometimes we face this kind of challenge, but most of the time their people are very helpful.

Neutral

It is a very simple process to integrate things. On a scale of one to 10, where 10 is "easy," I would rate it at nine. We have a team that takes part with me in the implementation and we divide the work.

And we don't need to worry too much about maintenance. Microsoft takes care of that part.

We do it all in-house.

Microsoft can enhance the licensing side. I feel there is confusion sometimes. They should have a list of features when we opt for Microsoft Sentinel. They should have a single license in which we have the opportunity to use the EDR or CASB solution. Right now, for Sentinel, we have to pay for a license for something in the Azure portal. Then, if we want to work with CASB, we need to buy a different license. And if we want to go for EDR, we need to buy another license. They do provide a type of comparison with a combo of licenses, but I feel very confused sometimes about subscriptions and licensing.

Also, sometimes it's quite tough to reach them when we need a license. We have to wait for some time. When we drop an email to contact them, it is at least 24 until they reply. They should be able to get back to us in one hour or even 30 minutes. They do have a premium feature where, within one or two hours, they are bound to respond to a query. But with licensing, sometimes this is a challenge. They don't respond on time.

If I compare Sentinel with standalone SIEM and SOAR solutions when it comes to cost, Sentinel is good. It is really cheap but that does not mean it compromises on features, ease of use, or flexibility, compared to what the other vendors are providing. When I look at other similar solutions, like Splunk, QRadar, and ArcSight, they are charging more than Microsoft, but ultimately they are not giving us the features that Microsoft is offering us.

Sentinel is far better than these other solutions. I have worked with Splunk in the past and many of my colleagues are working in the QRadar as well. When I talk to them, and when I compare the features, these solutions are not at all near to Microsoft Sentinel.

So while we do create a type of SIEM solution in other platforms in the cloud, using the native services, Microsoft gives us a direct solution at a very reasonable rate. They are charging less money, but they will never compromise the quality or the features. Microsoft is updating Sentinel on a regular basis. If I look at Sentinel three and a half years back, and the Sentinel of today, the difference is really unbelievable.

As part of our consulting team, I have never suggested that someone go for a third-party solution. Some of my clients have a whole environment on AWS and GCP and they have said, "Can we create some kind of SIEM solution for my cloud by using something we have in Microsoft?" I give them a comparison between using the native services and Microsoft Sentinel. The main point I tell them is about the cost. They are convinced and say, "Okay, if we get those kinds of features at that cost, we are good to go with the Microsoft Sentinel." And they don't need to migrate their whole environment into Sentinel or Microsoft Azure. They can continue to use whatever they are using. We can onboard their logs into Sentinel and, on top of that, create use cases and dashboards, and they can monitor things.

Microsoft is proactive in helping you be ready for potential threats, but I'm not involved in that part. It's something my counterpart takes care of. But I have heard from them that it is proactive.

We also use Microsoft's CASB solution, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Defender for Endpoint. There is some complexity when it comes to integration of Defender for Endpoint. This is the feedback I have submitted to Microsoft. When we do the integration of Defender for Endpoint, we have more than 12,000 machines, with different OSs. Onboarding all those machines into the environment is a challenge because of the large number of machines.

Although it's not creating any kind of mess, compared with Sentinel or the CASB product, Defender for Endpoint is something Microsoft can work on to create an option where we don't need to onboard all these machines into Intune and then into Defender for Endpoint. If that step can be omitted, Defender for Point will also be a good solution because it is also working on an AI basis.

These Microsoft products do work together to deliver coordinated detection and response. We simultaneously get the benefits of all these products.

We are also using Microsoft Defender for Cloud to see the security posture of our environment and it also has some great features. It helps us understand vulnerability issues and, on the top of that, we get recommendations for resolving those issues. The security posture is based on the policies it has, as well as third-party CIS benchmarks that people are using in the backend to provide the recommendations. It's good.

We have created an automation rule, but not directly using Defender for Cloud's bi-directional feature. The automation we have created is logic using a bidirectional aspect for Sentinel incidents. When we get incidents in Sentinel, we can trigger those same incidents in ServiceNow as well. We have a SOC team that manages our incident response plan and ServiceNow. Once they take an action in ServiceNow, they don't need to go to Microsoft Sentinel again and take action on the incident. It will automatically reflect the action they have taken.

Between best-of-breed versus a single vendor for security, Microsoft is on top. They are continuously enhancing their product and other cloud platforms don't have a direct SIEM solution. We need to customize other solutions every time if we want to opt for another cloud vendor. This is the advantage of Microsoft Sentinel at this point in time.

I would recommend Microsoft Sentinel to anybody.

I and my colleagues feel that Microsoft Sentinel is the number-one product for anyone considering something similar. We have other tools as well, but none compare with Sentinel.

We utilize Microsoft Sentinel to monitor files for suspicious activities, such as unauthorized user login information, remote logins from outside the secure region, and primarily attachments.

Microsoft Sentinel offers good visibility into threats because we can integrate it with both Defender for Cloud and Defender for Endpoint. We conducted a test to determine the extent of visibility achievable through Sentinel integration, aiming to identify the primary sources of attacks.

We also use Microsoft Office 365, Defender for Cloud, and Defender for Endpoint.

When it concerns cybersecurity, particularly regarding zero-day attacks, Microsoft tends to promptly release TVEs. These updates enable us to patch systems that are susceptible to specific zero-day attacks.

Sentinel allows us to gather data from our entire ecosystem. We can install connectors or an agent on the user's system, or we can do it manually.

Sentinel enables us to investigate threats and respond promptly from a unified platform. Upon receiving alerts, we can navigate to the corresponding tab for analytics, where we can initiate an investigation to view comprehensive details about the threat's origin and its interactions.

It has assisted our organization in enhancing our preparedness and thwarting phishing emails and attacks. We encounter attacks on a daily basis from individuals attempting to execute scripts via websites. Every month, we can conduct simulations to train our personnel in recognizing and evading threats. Sentinel is particularly effective in mitigating risks posed by employees who click on dubious email attachments.

Sentinel assists in automating routine tasks and identifying high-value alerts. Although I haven't extensively used it, playbooks can be employed to create automated responses for alerts and to resolve them.

It assists in eliminating the need to utilize multiple dashboards. We configured one of our servers as a honeypot, enabling us to observe all access and related details from a unified dashboard.

The threat intelligence assists us in preparing for potential threats before they occur and taking any necessary proactive measures. When a potential threat is identified, we are also given recommendations on how to proceed.

Sentinel has helped decrease our time to detect and respond. The automation has reduced the time I spend on low-level threats, allowing me to focus on the priority threats.

Microsoft Sentinel comes preloaded with templates for teaching and analytics rules. we can also create our own.

We need to continually test and define analytics rules due to the possibility of triggering false positives if we simply use the preloaded templates and neglect them.

We attempted to integrate our Microsoft solutions, but we occasionally faced problems when connecting with other systems. While it functioned effectively with Linux and Unix systems, a Windows 11 update led to complications. Sentinel was unable to capture essential logs on certain computers. As a result, we were compelled to create two SIEMs using Splunk and QualysGuard. This was necessary because certain operating systems experienced issues, particularly after receiving updates.

Although Sentinel is a comprehensive security solution, it could be more user-friendly. When I started using it, it was a bit confusing. I think that certain features should be placed in separate tabs instead of being clustered together in one place.

The KQL query does not function effectively with Windows 11 machines, and in the majority of machine-based investigations, KQL queries are essential for organizing the data during investigations.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for two years.

I have not experienced any stability issues with Microsoft Sentinel.

Scaling is straightforward. For instance, if an organization opts to establish a new department and intends to add ten machines to that department, all that is required is to create a new load analysis workspace, incorporate the machines into that workspace, and subsequently link it to Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel requires an E5 license. When considering this from the perspective of a large enterprise organization, the cost might be justified. However, for smaller organizations, it is comparatively expensive when compared to other SIEM and SOAR solutions. Open-source SIEMs like OSSEC are also available. These can be integrated with other open-source tools to address similar issues as Microsoft Sentinel, often at minimal or no cost.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten.

Our Microsoft security solutions both cooperate and have limitations in working seamlessly together to provide coordinated detection and response across our environment. The individual who initially implemented these solutions did so in a manner that prevents us from accessing all the necessary information to effectively utilize Sentinel with a single administrative account, as intended.

Most of our servers are on-premises but we have two that are connected to Defender for Cloud. Those are mostly pickup servers.

Microsoft takes care of the maintenance for Sentinel.

Using a best-of-breed strategy is superior to relying on a single-vendor security suite. I have observed while working with Splunk and QualysGuard, that they are capable of detecting certain low-level threats more promptly than Sentinel. Occasionally, these threats manage to slip through when using Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel is a commendable solution, and its value justifies the cost. However, it should be noted that it comes with a significant price tag. Therefore, any organization considering implementing this solution should ensure they are financially prepared for it. I strongly advise obtaining certification and acquiring proficiency in using Sentinel. It is an excellent tool equipped with numerous features. Unfortunately, many users remain unaware of these features or lack the understanding of how to utilize them effectively. It's worth mentioning that Microsoft Defender and Intune serve to further enhance Sentinel's capabilities, elevating it into an even more powerful tool.

I work as a security team leader and consultant in the Netherlands. Additionally, I am the main architect for my organization. Our current focus is on building our own Security Operations Center for media entities, and we offer this service to our customers as well. Our solution ensures zero bypasses and integrates the XDR suite of our clients. Therefore, any customer looking for the same solution can benefit from our expertise.

Microsoft Sentinel has the potential to assist us in prioritizing threats across our entire enterprise. However, its effectiveness relies heavily on the quality of our analytics roles. If we have appropriate alerts in place, we can avoid unnecessary noise. If we can accurately prioritize incidents and assign the appropriate level, it will significantly aid us. Additionally, automation can help analysts make informed decisions by consolidating incidents and alerts.

I have completed many customer integrations. Currently, I am working with one of the largest healthcare retailers and a very large insurance company. They have a variety of other products, such as effective AI, Infoblocks, and Akamai as a last resort. Our goal is to consolidate all the alerts from these products into Sentinel, which sometimes requires processing or editing. We refer to this as social editing, which essentially means fixing issues. Ultimately, our objective is to have a comprehensive overview of everything in a single dashboard.

The effectiveness of the integrated solutions that work together natively varies. At times, a data connector may work well, while at other times, it may not. I have noticed that Sentinel has significant potential for the development of data connectors and passes. This observation is due to one of my customers requiring a considerable amount of additional processing for data connectors, which prompted us to make a request to Microsoft. Currently, we are pleased to see that Microsoft is integrating this functionality. On the other hand, we also have plans to work with a local collector that involves parsing logs and collecting log data using custom parsing services.

The effectiveness of integrated security products in providing comprehensive threat protection is improving. However, there is a risk of overlap in the functionalities of Microsoft's various products, leading to duplicate alerts or unwanted charges. Nonetheless, compliance is improving. Additionally, the endpoint portal is starting to function more like an application portal for multiple products. Using only the Defender portal instead of Sentinel would benefit many customers at present, though additional sources may provide added value. There are also many developments in this area worth exploring.

Microsoft Sentinel has the capability to collect data from our entire ecosystem, but it comes with a cost. As the head of IT, I would have the ability to obtain any sensitive data that I need. If there is a substantial amount of data, I can handle it. However, we need to establish a use case for the data before proceeding, as it could become too expensive for us to handle. Therefore, we will not be ingesting all the data available.

Microsoft Sentinel allows us to investigate and respond to threats holistically from a single platform. This capability is powerful because we can create our own queries, and the language used is user-friendly. However, we must ensure that the data in Sentinel is properly structured. This means ensuring that our timestamps are consistent and accurate and that the quality of our data is high. By doing so, querying becomes easy and effective.

If we have a background in Azure, then it's relatively easy to understand the SOAR capabilities since it's built on Azure foundations and logic apps. This makes it more powerful.

The cost of Microsoft Sentinel is reasonable when compared to other SIEM and SOAR solutions. While the cost of ingestion may be high, the platform offers numerous capabilities for automation, alerting, monitoring, and operations. Therefore, we are receiving good value for our investment, even though it may not be the cheapest option on the market. Microsoft Sentinel's ongoing development of new features justifies the price point. For example, I compared it to a customer who used Splunk last year, and Splunk was more expensive and had fewer features.

Sentinel assists in automating routine tasks and identifying high-value alerts. For instance, we can configure it to automatically detect risks on specific accounts and receive notifications through an automatic inbox. While we exercise caution in implementing automation, we can leverage it during hours when staffing is limited to ensure timely and appropriate actions.

Sentinel's threat intelligence helps us prepare for potential threats and take action before they can impact us. Obtaining threat intelligence feeds from Microsoft would also be beneficial. We may eventually need to acquire an Excel feed, either from Microsoft or another source, but we must ensure that these expenses provide tangible value. I believe that the machine learning used by Microsoft Infusionsoft provides valuable threat intelligence with reliable patterns.

I've noticed that some customers are using on-premises environments such as Oxite for this particular task. However, since we're on a cloud platform, we don't have to handle and operate the systems as much because they are cloud services. This allows us to focus on the platform, the content, and making it work. The integration with Microsoft works well, and we can use similar queries in Sentinel as we do in Defender for Endpoint, which saves us time.

If we compare the current situation to that of five years ago, we can see that every company was spending less on this type of product because the threat wasn't as significant. However, over time, we have witnessed a significant increase in cyberattacks. As a result, every budget has been increased to address this issue. Therefore, in my opinion, Sentinel is not merely saving money; rather, we are utilizing our resources more efficiently.

I believe one of the main advantages is Microsoft Sentinel's seamless integration with other Microsoft products. This means that if we need to work with customers who already use the entire defense suite, we can easily collaborate with them. Additionally, the KQL language created is very robust and has a manageable learning curve for those who already have some experience. Furthermore, we can use KQL in other Microsoft platforms, making it a versatile tool. The AI aspect is also noteworthy, as it utilizes existing resources in Azure. For instance, if we have previous experience building Azure functions or using wireless technology, we can incorporate these skills into our playbook development in Sentinel.

Microsoft Sentinel provides visibility into threats, and the incident alert display has improved. However, I don't believe it is efficient or pleasant to work with, especially for specialists who work with it all day. We are considering putting our incident alerts into ServiceNow first, which would improve instant handling, logging, and monitoring, and streamline the investigation process. This is a potential area for improvement, but currently, the system is workable and easy to use. I understand that improvements are in progress, and I expect the system to get even better with time.

When we look at external SOAR and orchestration platforms, we have a better overview of all the rules, their behavior, and the correlation between them. From a technical perspective, it works well, but from a functional overview, there's room for improvement. For example, we need a clear understanding of what playbooks we have in our SOAR capabilities. Currently, we have a long list, and we need to know what each playbook does. If we want to add some playbooks in Azure, we need to consider the playbooks that we have in Azure that are not related to any schedule. This can make the environment a bit messy. While building them ourselves, we can have a clear understanding of the why, what, and how, but it can be complicated to know which playbook does what at a given moment or what role it best fits.

Currently, the watchlist feature is being utilized, and although there have been improvements, it is still not fully optimized. When examining the watchlist, it appears that it is not adequately supported in Sentinel's repository feature. As a result, we are constantly having to find workarounds, which is functional but require more effort. It is possible for Microsoft to improve efficiency, but they have not done so yet. 

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for three years.

Last year, there were some issues with Azure Sentinel, which is a specific service within the Azure platform. These issues affected the performance of Sentinel and caused some concerns. While the situation has improved, there may be further challenges as the platform continues to grow. As a cloud service, there is a risk of outages, which can be difficult to address. Overall, there are currently no complaints about the stability of Azure Sentinel, but it is important to stay vigilant about potential issues that may arise.

Sentinel's scalability is impressive. Currently, we have not encountered any limitations. While there may be a limit on the number of rules with a large amount of data, we have not reached that point. The system performs well, aided by the basic and archive loss features. In the event that those features are insufficient, we still have additional options available. Overall, I believe that Sentinel is highly scalable.

We used to utilize ArcSight Interset, an outdated on-premises product that wasn't suitable for our move to the cloud or offering services to our customers. Since we mainly use Microsoft products, we switched to Sentinel enthusiastically. Sentinel is a perfect fit for our organization.

The initial setup was straightforward and adoption was fast. Currently, our approach within the organization is, to begin with a simple implementation and ensure it is functional before incorporating more complex integrations. We started with basic tasks such as editing data files and integrating on-premises data responses. Once we have established a solid foundation, we will build upon it to create a more advanced version.

If we take all areas into account, we would need a considerable number of people for deployment. I believe we would need around 15 to 20 individuals, including engineering consultants, ServiceNow personnel, and others.

I give Microsoft Sentinel an eight out of ten.

We use the entire range of security measures except for Defender for IP. This is similar to how we use Defender for servers. In Azure, these measures are used on the front-end point, server, and callbacks. As for our customer implementations, I am responsible for carrying them out. For our own laptops, we have a strategy where we use Carbon Black instead of Defender for Endpoint. However, we still use Defender AV, and for other cloud applications, we use Defender for Office 365. The reason we continue to use Carbon Black is due to its legacy status.

Sentinel is a cloud service platform that is particularly useful for those who require sizable, scalable, and high-performing solutions.

Sentinel always requires some maintenance, which includes examining the ingested data to determine if it is being used for a specific purpose. It is important to evaluate the amount of data being stored and ensure that we are paying the correct price. Additionally, any necessary updates should be made to patch up any queries. These actions will result in improved efficiency and effectiveness.

The choice of the best-of-breed solution depends on the company's specific needs, but given the shortage of skilled personnel in many organizations, managing multiple products can be challenging. If we opt for a best-of-breed solution, we may end up having to maintain expertise in several different areas. On the other hand, choosing a single vendor, such as Microsoft, can be advantageous in terms of discounts, support, and skill maintenance. Our experience suggests that when evaluating a solution, it's essential to know the requirements, risks, and desired outcomes beforehand, rather than trying to ingest all available data, which can be costly and inefficient.

We use Microsoft Sentinel for log aggregation, data connectors, and alerts.

In terms of visibility, Microsoft Sentinel captures a lot of useful data.

Microsoft Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. It shows us the most vulnerable assets, and because we have agents on every machine, we know exactly where to go to investigate. This is important for staying secure as a company. It allows us to cover our own bases by seeing what is happening in real-time and taking proactive steps to address threats, rather than reacting to them after they have already occurred. We can stay up-to-date with security measures and ensure that we follow through and execute our security plan.

We integrated Microsoft Sentinel with Defender for Cloud, Endpoint, and Defender Vulnerability Management. 

Microsoft is not the most vendor-friendly company in terms of integrations and connections, but we were able to get it working in the end, so we cannot really complain.

Microsoft's security tools work natively together to deliver coordinated detection responses across our environment.

The comprehensive threat protection that Microsoft Sentinel provides is good. They provide really good information. We are able to create documents, perform root cause analysis, and analyze anything we need to. Log integration is also key. We are able to find potentially malicious files, correlate events to alerts, and then take action on alerts. So, the comprehensiveness is pretty straightforward.

We use Cloud and Endpoint security. We have our Defender cloud, and then Defender agents on each endpoint. The bidirectional sync capability is important, and it is a work in progress. We are in the process of off-boarding our contract with CrowdStrike. We are moving all of our cybersecurity needs to Microsoft Defender, which is included in our existing Microsoft licenses. This makes financial sense, and CrowdStrike was not providing us with much value.

The system allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem, which is very important. This is our main source of correlation of logs to alerts. Therefore, we definitely need to get every single log source, and possibly a few more.

The system allows us to investigate and respond holistically from one place.

It is a very comprehensive tool to use. However, the supporting documentation is limited to initial troubleshooting. This is where I find the most difficulty in explaining how good the tool is. Other than that, the tool is pretty straightforward. There is enough documentation to get us started. However, beyond that, we will need to rely on online forums and other open-source resources to learn more about the tool.

When comparing Microsoft Sentinel to other SIEMs in terms of cost, we are saving money because it is included with our Microsoft 365 E5 licenses. This also helps us to reduce the number of different types of software that we need to use. We do like redundancy in terms of coverage, but the cost of multiple solutions adds up. We want to be able to use one central location for all of our security software. This is one of the reasons why we choose Microsoft Sentinel over third-party solutions. As we move into larger projects, we need to have a centralized place for all of our security policies and procedures.

Microsoft Sentinel helps us automate routine tasks and find high-value alerts. We also use Sentinel as a store for our alerts. This allows us to automate most of our responses if not all of them. We also tailored our alerts to specific events that occur in our environment.

Microsoft Sentinel helps eliminate the need to use multiple dashboards by providing a single XDR dashboard. We currently use Sentinel's workbooks, which provide a dashboard that we can use for metrics, reporting, and other purposes. This makes it easier to relay information upwards, as it is presented in a more visually appealing and easy-to-understand manner. For example, we can use pie charts, bar charts, and line charts to represent data in a way that is easy to understand. This makes it easier to convey information to upper management, such as where we are most vulnerable and what steps we need to take to improve our security.

Microsoft Sentinel helps us prepare for potential threats before they hit by taking proactive steps. We can also detect ongoing incidents. For example, if we receive a ticket or alert that is ongoing and will not go away, we can automate a response to it and add it to our playbook. This way, if a similar incident occurs in the future, we will know what to do to respond immediately.

In terms of automation, I believe we save about 20 to 22 hours per week by closing tickets. We receive about 50 to 100 tickets per day, and we automated about 80 percent of those. This means that we can now close tickets without having to manually review them. This saved us a significant amount of time, which we can now use on other tasks.

We are on the smaller side in terms of the number of logs that come in. So, I don't think it's necessary to compare at this level of data ingestion. However, I can definitely see that if we scale and grow in the future, it will save us a lot of money, especially in terms of manpower and hours that we have to dedicate to automation or non-automated tasks. For example, in the six months that we've had Sentinel up and running, we've saved 755 hours in automation alone.

We currently meet all of our service level agreements in terms of incident response. This definitely saved us time, and we also receive email alerts directly so that we know as soon as something happens.

Log aggregation and data connectors are the most valuable features. We have a plethora of data connectors, so being able to get all of our logs into a central location is very helpful.

For certain vendors, some of the data that Microsoft Sentinel captures is redacted due to privacy reasons. In the future, it would be helpful to have this data unredacted so that we can have a better understanding of it.

Microsoft Sentinel is not the most user-friendly tool. Other tools, such as Splunk SIEM or any other SIEM, are better and easier to use.

Our threat-hunting capabilities can definitely be improved. We do use workbooks to view incoming data, but threat hunting is where we can really find those underlying issues that may not be immediately visible. We will use these alerts as a starting point for our hunting. If we can correlate two different events and identify the same root cause, it will save us a lot of time and resources.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for six months.

I would definitely rate Microsoft's technical support low. First, it is very difficult to reach a real person. We are always directed to a bot, which can only diagnose some issues. If we do need to speak to a real person, the wait time is very long. It can take hours or even days to get a call or video conference. Second, the documentation is outdated. This is especially true since Microsoft recently rebranded Azure Sentinel as Microsoft Sentinel. The new documentation is not yet available, and the old documentation is no longer accurate.

Negative

Microsoft Sentinel is included in our E5 license.

I give Microsoft Sentinel a seven out of ten. It has good capabilities, including a large number of native connectors. It is a well-known brand, so it is likely that many third-party vendors will integrate with it in the future. This will give Sentinel a wider range of data sources to collect from. In terms of data connectors, I think Microsoft Sentinel is one of the better options available. However, some of its competitors, such as Splunk and SentinelOne, have better interfaces and support. They may also have some proprietary capabilities that Microsoft Sentinel does not offer.

I believe that duplicating security measures is a good thing. It is also important to have redundancy in tools. If we have multiple tools that cover the same thing, we will have more eyes and visibility, and we will be able to remediate issues as they arise. Therefore, using multiple vendors, platforms, and consoles is the way to go. If we use only one tool for everything, it will be like a Swiss Army knife. We will definitely run into problems. I believe that we should avoid single points of failure at all costs. We should have redundancy in tools, but not just in tools. It is also beneficial for our team to all know the same tool or a specific suite.

Sentinel is Microsoft's SIEM solution, similar to QRadar, Splunk, etc. It is the primary tool used by our Security Operations Center.

Sentinel enhances our visibility by integrating with on-prem and cloud log sources. It provides visibility into any cloud environment, including GCP and AWS, not just Azure. With Sentinel, we get end-to-end coverage of all types of infrastructure. Last week, I was talking to a client who already had a SIEM solution, and they had just deployed Sentinel through us. I asked them why they wanted Sentinel when they already have an MSP. They told me their SIEM solution doesn't cover the cloud, so there's clearly a gap. Sentinel covers on-premise and all the cloud providers. It has a highly flexible ingestion method. There are seven or eight ways to ingest.

A lack of total visibility is a significant pain point for security analysts working on a SIEM solution. Furthermore, even if they have visibility, they might not be able to take remedial action because the company lacks a license or a separate SOAR solution. In that case, you need to have integration for each playbook. Sentinel addresses all of these issues out of the box. 

The SOAR component of Sentinel can automate some routine tasks. Sentinel comes with around 180 different playbooks you can execute with one click. If you face a type of incident, you can run a specific playbook or automate it to run each time the incident is triggered. These automation features make our lives easier. Analysts have to do the same tasks over and over again. It's a nightmare that makes you want to give up sometimes. You are dealing with the same incidents many times daily for many MSPs and customers. The playbook is incredibly beneficial.

It also reduces the number of dashboards we need to check, and you can create a custom dashboard. There are also several preset dashboards from Microsoft that are solution-specific. For example, if I'm using Defender for Office, it has a separate dashboard for Office that I can customize. I can also see everything from one console if I want. It's highly flexible.

Sentinel saves time because you don't need to look at multiple SIEM solutions, like IBM, Splunk, AlienVault, McAfee, etc. You need to spend time deploying those solutions, and there's a learning curve, whereas Sentinel is cloud-native. You click "next," "next," and "next," and the whole solution is deployed in the cloud in five minutes. Other parts, like integration, are native. It takes only a click to integrate all the services. Sentinel has its own agent, so it's easy to deploy the agent and start collecting logs. Overall, Sentinel requires less effort than other solutions.

It also saves us money because deployment costs less. Many SIEM solutions charge for the log forwarders deployed in the client's system. Sentinel is free. You have a VM in the cloud or on the client infrastructure, and there is just a script to turn that server into a log forwarder. 

Sentinel speeds up our response, but I don't have any hard numbers. It depends on how well you have configured it. You can go to an incident and then click on each playbook in sequence, or it can be automated to run a playbook when an incident is triggered. You don't need to go into the interface and do anything.

Sentinel proactively responds by detecting IOCs in our environment and automatically triggering an incident. The threat intelligence feed is typically based on IOCs, like malicious IP, UR, hostname, file hash, etc. However, real proactive response requires you to buy threat intel from different providers. Those companies provide you with information before an attack occurs anywhere. For example, there could be dark web forums where attackers discuss an attack on organization XYZ, and the threat intel provider informs us about that. That's an entirely different thing, but Microsoft has built-in rules for any threat intelligence matches. 

I've worked on most of the top SIEM solutions, and Sentinel has an edge in most areas. For example, it has built-in SOAR capabilities, allowing you to run playbooks automatically. Other vendors typically offer SOAR as a separate licensed solution or module, but you get it free with Sentinel. In-depth incident integration is available out of the box. 

Having all these solutions built into a single platform is an advantage. Once any malware is detected, it only takes a single click to run the playbook, and it will do the desired actions. It may be blocking an IP address or isolating a machine. 

The SOAR, UEBA, automated detection and response, and threat intelligence capabilities are comprehensive. I have 10-plus years of experience working with different SIEM solutions. This is the best by far. Everything is integrated, and there is so much flexibility, whether you're trying to customize ingestion or run custom playbooks.

Sentinel performs well when searching a large amount of data, like two months of logs. Sentinel uses underlying big data and KQL, which is highly efficient in query performance. I also like Sentinel's user behavior analytics. UEBA is another solution vendors typically sell as a separate product, but it's included with Sentinel for free. It has integration with other multiple cloud platforms, whereas most vendors lack this capability. 

When comparing visibility, we need to also compare at the company level. Microsoft doesn't only provide a security solution. They have a cloud platform with many services and security products that feed threat intelligence into Sentinel. There are many backend things that Microsoft does in cybersecurity. That is an added advantage that comes with this solution.

The native integration with the vast Microsoft ecosystem is a huge advantage. Another good aspect about Sentinel is that you can integrate all the Microsoft technologies with one click using the backend APIs. It's a seamless process because Sentinel is a Microsoft-native solution. It doesn't take much effort to do the integration.

We also use Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud, and Azure firewall. Most of our customers already use some Microsoft services, so when we integrate their environments, we integrate Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Office 365. We also have Azure Activity, Azure Identity Protection, and many other solutions from Microsoft.

Microsoft products can be integrated with one click. You check a box, and it integrates with that service on the backend. You only need to set the permissions only. Integrating third-party solutions requires the same effort that would be necessary for any other SIEM solution. 

All the solutions work together seamlessly to protect our environment. For example, Defender for Endpoint detects threats on the endpoints, and you see the same alerts within Sentinel. If Defender for Office detects a malicious email, it feeds that incident to Sentinel. The whole ecosystem is integrated there.

Sentinel ingests data from our entire environment. There are seven or eight ways to ingest data. You can install agents through LogStack or do it through APA calls. There are many ways to ingest everything that's required. We have had cases of custom applications running critical services for clients who wanted to ensure they were being monitored. 

The out-of-the-box integration wasn't there, but other methods of ingesting the solution exist. We used one of the custom methods with LogStack, and we could use onboard these applications. Managed services need to have that kind of flexibility for product onboarding.

We have been working with multiple customers, and every time we onboard a customer, we are missing an essential feature that surprisingly doesn't exist in Sentinel. We searched the forums and knowledge bases but couldn't find a solution. When you onboard new customers, you need to enable the data connectors. That part is easy, but you must create rules from scratch for every associated connector. You click "next," "next," "next," and it requires five clicks for each analytical rule. Imagine we have a customer with 150 rules.

It can be a nightmare. It would be much easier if Microsoft provided a way to select all the rules you need, and you can click once to create them. I went to multiple forums to find a way to automate this. Unfortunately, the best I can do is a semi-automated method. Half of them can be automated, but you must do the rest manually. 

For now, we are doing it manually, and our DevOps team is assigned to do this. Some APIs could be used. We leverage the Azure Insights PowerShell module to do the automation part. Currently, the team is working on it, but I know from the discussion that the solution would only be semi-automated. We can't fully automate this because it simply lacks that capability. Many people in the Microsoft community have already requested this solution. Hopefully, Microsoft will implement this feature.

These solutions provide comprehensive protection, but there is always room for improvement. For example, virus removal has 98 different antivirus engines associated. Still, if you are searching for a malicious IP address or a hostname, some solutions will pick it up, and others won't. It's okay overall. I wouldn't say it isn't good enough. It does what we need, but sometimes another solution does it better. It depends on who detects it first.

I've been using Sentinel for nearly a year.

Sentinel is a cloud-based solution, so everything is handled by Microsoft. We haven't experienced any outages. With any on-premise solution, you will see downtime when there are problems or changes in the infrastructure.

Sentinel is highly scalable. It's on the cloud, so we can scale up to any level. There are two models: pay-go and commitment tier. The commitment tier is there to help reduce costs. If you're a large organization with high volumes of data coming in, Microsoft recommends the commitment tier, which will save you 40-60%. Scalability isn't a problem.

I rate Microsoft support nine out of 10. Within all Microsoft services, there is a link you can use to contact support and raise a ticket based on severity. If it's something that will impact business, they are available 24/7. Once we get a call from them, they follow up around the clock until it's closed. It isn't bad.

Positive

I've worked on Splunk, QRadar, LogRhythm, AlienVault, McAfee, Juniper STRM, etc. I started using Sentinel when I joined this company. We are Microsoft Gold partners. However, my feedback is neutral as an analyst. Compared to other solutions I've used, Microsoft is easier in terms of integration and deployment.

We've seen an ROI. Having used multiple SIEM solutions, I would recommend Microsoft Sentinel for the ROI, integration, cloud visibility, customization, etc. 

The price is reasonable because Sentinel includes features like user behavior analytics and SOAR that are typically sold separately. Overall, a standalone on-prem solution would require some high-end servers at a different cost. It is a cloud-based solution, so there are backend cloud computing costs, but they are negligible. 

The most significant cost factor is log ingestion. The best approach with any SIEM solution is only to ingest the necessary security-specific logs. You consume the EPS licenses, memory, bandwidth, and CPU. It doesn't make sense to forward and dump everything into any SIEM solution. If you are doing the architecture correctly, you send the right amount of logs.

On top of that, Sentinel provides you with a workbook that tells you which log costs how much. You can optimize that part so it's cost-effective. Its dashboard offers clear graphs and charts, showing which log sources ingest the most logs, contributing to the cost. We can easily cut 40-60% of the price if we do appropriate fine-tuning. As long as you're doing the fine-tuning regularly, it's a highly cost-efficient solution.

I rate Sentinel 10 out of 10. At the same time, I understand no solution is perfect. I've had multiple issues with SIEM solutions I've used previously. Sentinel is missing one minor feature that could be added eventually. I have no complaints about the core functionality.

A large enterprise client contacted us about replacing Splunk with Sentinel, and their team wanted a side-by-side comparison. They're pretty new to SOC, and I've been in the field for a long time, so I told them that it's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison. In many instances, you won't see much difference between the two, and Sentinel might beat Splunk in certain cases.

However, the essential component they would be missing in the comparison is the ecosystem. Sentinel can leverage a huge ecosystem on the backend that Splunk or any other solution simply can't. Splunk specializes in SIEM, but Microsoft covers the full cybersecurity spectrum. When comparing solutions, customers should look at the whole ecosystem and not only product features. 

A best-in-breed strategy works for some categories of security products. For example, it was an organizational policy that we would not purchase all of our firewall-related products from one vendor. However, SIEM only does detection based on the type of logs ingested. An organization might have firewalls from Cisco, Fortinet, and Juniper. At the end of the day, these three firewall brands are feeding the logs into one security solution, which is Sentinel. It's a single pane of glass that correlates all threats across your enterprise. It doesn't make sense to have multiple SIEM solutions.

The only cases where it makes sense are in large enterprises like oil and gas. For example, they may have an IT environment and an OT environment. In the IT environment, they have one solution and a different solution in the OT environment. They are silos being managed by different teams. They may have separate budgets and decision-making processes. That's why they have different solutions. Other than that, I really don't see any reason for having two different SIEM solutions in place.

Our two primary uses for the solution are incident management and threat hunting. We use Sentinel and other Microsoft security products for security investigations, threat, team, and incident management purposes. The tool is deployed across multiple departments and locations, with around 8,000 total end users.

We use multiple Microsoft security products, the full Defender suite including Defender for Cloud, Cloud Apps, and Identity, all integrated with Sentinel. 

Integrating multiple solutions is straightforward; as they are all Microsoft products, it's easy for Sentinel to ingest the logs and data connectors. The process is very simple, and we can configure log sources or data connectors in Sentinel in a couple of clicks.  

As a next-generation AI-powered SIEM and SOAR tool, Sentinel provides an all-encompassing cyber defense at the cloud scale. The solution's machine learning capabilities make threat hunting and identification rapid across the entire cloud environment.

The solution provides excellent visibility into threats; it's integrated with Microsoft's threat intelligence platform, which forwards information to Sentinel. We have robust threat detection 24/7.   

Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise, an essential function that lets us focus on investigating and resolving high-priority incidents first. When the most significant threats are dealt with, we can move on to the medium and low-priority issues.  

The multiple Microsoft solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment; they work very well together, and we trust these products to investigate matters further. 

The Microsoft solutions provide comprehensive threat protection across our entire organization.  

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem, which is crucial to our security operation. We require the data not just from Microsoft products but also from different firewalls and other security products, including firewall proxies, web proxies, logs, etc. We can quickly integrate multiple data sources in just a few steps. 

The solution's threat intelligence helps prepare us for potential threats before they hit and take proactive steps. Sentinel's intelligent and fast threat detection allows us to respond rapidly to critical and high-priority incidents by leveraging built-in automation and orchestration tools. 

Using Sentinel gives us time savings of 30-40%.  

The solution also decreased our time to detect and respond by 30-40%. 

Sentinel is a SIEM and SOAR tool, so its automation is the best feature; we can reduce human interaction, freeing up our human resources.

The built-in AI and machine learning are excellent; they reduce the number of false positives by around 90%.

The centralized threat collection is a valuable feature. 

The solution is cloud-native, so it's faster and easier to deploy as there is no hardware or software to implement.

The product is flexible enough to deploy in the cloud and on-prem, which is an advantage over other SIEM tools.

Sentinel allows us to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place, which is crucial because time management is essential during a security investigation. Having all the relevant data in one place enables security analysts to investigate and resolve quickly.   

The solution's built-in SOAR, UEBA, and threat intelligence capabilities provide comprehensive protection. The SOAR capability is excellent and better than other products on the market, reducing our dependence on security analysts, and IT takes less investigation time. We can leverage the UEBA to focus on risky users and entities first during an investigation, which is an integral part of the process. 

Compared to standalone SIEM and SOAR products, Sentinel reduces infrastructure costs by around 50% due to the cloud and reduced maintenance relative to legacy solutions. Sentinel is also approximately 70% faster to deploy than legacy solutions with the same rules. 

The solution helped to automate routine tasks and the finding of high-value alerts. This reduced our dependency on security analysts and their workloads because the solution reduced false positive alerts by about 90%. This freed up our analysts and is the most significant benefit of automation.  

The product helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and gave us one XDR dashboard, which provides us with greater visibility and a reduced time to investigate and resolve.  

The data connectors for third-party tools could be improved, as some aren't available in Sentinel. They need to be available in the data connector panel. 

The solution could have more favorable pricing; the cost is relatively high compared to other SIEM tools, which can be prohibitive for smaller organizations. 

We've been using the solution for over a year. 

Sentinel is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is good and responsive, but in some cases, it took a long time to resolve our issue.

Positive

We previously used IBM QRadar as a SIEM tool and switched because Sentinel is cloud-native and has more comprehensive capabilities, including SOAR capabilities. Sentinel fits our clients' requirements better, as many of them utilize the MS Defender security suite, which gives them a specific grant for free data ingestion. The solution also provides greater visibility.

I wasn't involved in the solution's initial setup, and in terms of maintenance, it's very lightweight; updates are Microsoft's responsibility, so we don't need to do anything.

Sentinel is expensive relative to other products of the class, so it often isn't affordable for small-scale businesses. However, considering the solution has more extensive capabilities than others, the price is not so high. Pricing is based on GBs of ingested daily data, either by a pay-as-you-go or subscription model.

The product saved us money, but actual savings depend on the project size, as the pricing is per GB of ingested data. Our savings are approximately 40-50%. 

We evaluated various solutions, including LogRhythm SIEM, Splunk, and Sumo Logic Security. We chose Sentinel because it's more advanced, cost-efficient has greater capabilities and fulfills our requirements better than the other products.

I rate Sentinel nine out of ten. 

To a security colleague who says it's better to go with a best-of-breed strategy over a single vendor's security suite, it's better to go with multiple vendors. This provides better visibility and avoids a single point of failure.

My advice to others considering the product is it depends on the project requirements. For larger organizations, I recommend Sentinel, as it's very advanced. However, for smaller-scale industries, Splunk and IBM QRadar are good options. For primarily cloud-based organizations with the majority of users in the cloud, then Sentinel is again an excellent choice.

We use it for our security operations center. We have private and multi-cloud environments.

It enables data integration within our hybrid, multi-cloud environment, and it makes this data integration very easy for our security operations center.

Sentinel has helped improve our visibility into user and network behavior. It helps in identifying risky users, creating a watch list for specific users and their activities, which is very important.

It has also been saving us time. It's a complete cloud-based solution, so there is no time wasted on setting up servers, infrastructure, et cetera.

It also reduces the work involved in event investigation because it puts together detection logic through detection rules. That helps in automating incident identification.

The features that stand out are the 

• detection engine
• integration with multiple data sources.

And while it does not give the tools to detect and investigate, it provides
the ability to integrate multiple tools together on the platform. This is very important for us. Sentinel provides very good integration with Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate. That is a very handy feature.

It provides a good user interface for an operations analyst and makes it easy for an ops analyst to do incident analysis and investigations.

One key area that can be improved is by building a strong integration with our XDR platform.

I have been using Microsoft Sentinel for over a year. I'm a product manager, and I do not do hands-on deployment, but I do product definition, platform selection, and product feature definition.

It is a stable product.

The technical support team is good. They have account managers aligned with our customers. It is a good, scalable model.

Neutral

We started with Sentinel only. We have had some experience with Splunk, but Sentinel is more mature, flexible, and scalable.

The install or setup time is very small. Without Sentinel, it would usually take 15 to 30 days to set up a SIEM solution in an environment. With Sentinel, it is very easy. A completely production-grade environment can be set up within a week.

Setting up Sentinel is straightforward. Because it is a cloud-based solution, there is no infrastructure deployment involved. Much of the implementation can be done in automated ways. We leverage that automation for implementation. It doesn't require much staff. It is very automated.

It requires maintenance, and that is part of what we cover by providing our customers with managed services.

Our team does the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

The licensing cost is available on the Microsoft Azure calculator. It depends on the size of the deployment, the size of the data ingestion. It is consumption-based pricing. It is an affordable solution.

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.