Microsoft Sentinel Reviews

Sentinel ingests all the logs from various security products across on-premise and virtual servers. It has a lot of flexibility regarding different third parties that are not Microsoft, which I liked. We had some very, probably not as well-known systems from which it would ingest information. So it was nice to see that it was very flexible.

We have a hybrid setup with Sentinel deployed on the Azure cloud. We've got about 20 server endpoints, 400 desktop or laptop endpoints, and 1,520 network endpoints. The company has around 400 employees and a 10-person IT team operating out of one location in Alabama. 

Sentinel provides a single pane of glass for reviewing logs from disparate sources. Everything is on one XDR dashboard. We have a smaller IT team, so it's cumbersome to go to various places to get information and manage it. Having a clearinghouse of information makes it quicker to get to the critical items and resolve any problem.

Sentinel saved us time because we can find the information we need directly. It's hard to quantify that because we still need to look through lots of information. Without Sentinel, it would take about one to three hours each week to compile information from different sources.

It helps us proactively prevent threats. Sentinel is integrated with Defender and CloudApp. It gives us suggestions about best practices in security and recommends actions if it sees something within the network that seems out of line. The investigation part is thorough. We can figure out exactly what's wrong and what we need to check. Afterward, we have to go to a secondary product.

Sentinel's most important feature is the ability to centralize all the logs in one place. There's no need to search multiple systems for information. The automation capabilities are excellent and can be extended. We haven't tried to extend the automation features, but what is built in is great. 

The solution also has native integration with Microsoft Teams. It creates a Teams chat when there's an issue, so one of our analysts can look at it immediately. It can automatically flag something instead of sending an alert to an email that someone may not read until three weeks later.

Sentinel provides decent visibility, but it's sometimes a little cumbersome to get to the information I want because there is so much information. I would also like to see more seamless integration between Sentinel and third-party security products. 

When alerts appear in the Sentinel console, I can research them and see what to do, but I need to leave Sentinel and go to a second product to execute whatever I need to do. I would like to be able to fix everything within the Sentinel console.  

We used Sentinel for about six months.

We haven't had any issues with Sentinel so far. The uptime has been 100 percent. 

Sentinel is capable of handling all that we ingest. I think we've hit 80 to 100 Gigabytes so far, and it continues to scale upward. I'm pleased with it. It's a rolling scale, so it scales up as needed based on the number of logs you ingest. As long as you're willing to pay to house the data, they'll continue to scale upward with you.

We haven't had to contact Microsoft support for Sentinel yet. That worries me. Sometimes Microsoft support can be a little difficult to reach.

Sentinel was our first foray into the SIEM world. That's one reason we went back and reviewed it again this summer. We wanted to be sure we picked a good product. They mostly gave demos, so we probably didn't get the full run of these secondary products, but it at least gave us a feel for what else was out there.

Setting up Sentinel was pretty straightforward. We set everything up through Azure, and they had excellent documentation as far as integrating modules. They had scripts we could run within other environments to ingest the logs. Getting information into the system was fairly smooth. 

We had to spin up a new virtual machine for Linux because it required a Linux virtual machine within our on-premises environment to send log files. That was the biggest step I had to do. Spinning up another virtual machine is no big deal. 

We didn't pay for any implementation help. Our IT team spent a day talking through the plan. We let the server person spin up our VM and our network person got all the network stuff in place. We came back together and made sure the logs were delivered. Overall, it was a roughly two-week process of setting up and reviewing everything to ensure everything is working correctly. After deployment, there's no maintenance. It's in Azure, so Microsoft handles all the updates and server roles. It's seamless from a maintenance standpoint.

Sentinel was deployed by a four-person in-house IT team consisting of a network admin, systems admin, and a junior engineer who floated between all of us, helping out where they could. I supervised the deployment as the director. 

The jury is still out on whether we see a return, but I am pleased with the investment. Sentinel provides us with some new insights. It helps us improve our security posture with proactive measures, like informing us of best practices. 

These features helped us evaluate things within our network and cloud environments that we needed to tweak. That was a pretty helpful bonus. 

Sentinel's price is comparable to pretty much everything out there. None of it is cheap, but we didn't think we could save money by going a different route. Sentinel was part of our Azure expenditures, so it was easier to add the expense instead of having a completely separate vendor.

The licensing is straightforward because it's within Azure. There are lots of features in Azure that they gave us as a package. It's nice to do this without having to carve out special budgetary items. The flexibility was helpful. 

We looked at a couple of different solutions, including Splunk and Arctic Wolf. We primarily chose Sentinel because we had already carved out a budget within Azure for Sentinel. We could keep it within Azure and roll that into our Azure expenses versus carving out a new budget item for these other products. That was the biggest motivation.

Sentinel kept pace with the other major players in the field. We considered whether there was a better product to ingest all data. We didn't find anything new or different. 

I rate Microsoft Sentinel eight out of ten. If you plan to implement Sentinel, I recommend spending time thinking about all the sources of data you want to ingest. It's flexible in terms of how much you can ingest, but you may not want to pay that much. It might be better to only connect your critical systems to it.

If you're hesitant to adopt Sentinel, you should do a demo. The single pane of glass is nice to have. You'd really have to talk me out of that.

It's mostly used for cloud-based analytics for proactive incident response. As an enterprise product, it falls under next-gen SIEM.

An advantage of Sentinel is that Microsoft has acquired RiskIQ as a threat intel platform and they've amalgamated it into the platform. When any analytical (or correlation) rule triggers, the enrichment is bundled within the solution. We don't need to input anything, it is there by default. Every rule is enriched right at the triggering or detection stage, which eases the job of the SOC analyst. The platform has become so intelligent compared to other solutions. When an alert is triggered, the enrichment happens so that we know exactly at that moment the true or false posture. This is a mature feature compared to the rest of the providers.

Most of our customers use M365 with E3 or E5 licenses, and some use Business Premium, which provides the entire bundle of M365 Security including EDR, DLP, Zero Trust, and email security. There are two native advantages for customers that use M365 Security and Sentinel. The first advantage is that the log or security-event ingestion into Sentinel is free. Cost-wise, they're saving a lot and that is a major advantage.

The other advantage is that when you use M365 Security with Sentinel, you get multi-domain visibility. That means when attacks happen with different kill-chains, in different stages through the email channel or a web channel, there is intelligence-sharing and that is a missing piece when customers integrate non-Microsoft solutions with Sentinel. With Microsoft, it is all included and the intelligence is seamlessly shared. The moment an email security issue is detected, it is sent to the Sentinel platform as well as to the M365 Defender platform. The moment it is flagged, it can trigger.

That way, if the email security missed something, the EDR will pick up a signal triggered by a payload or by a script being shared and will trigger back to the email security to put that particular email onto a blacklist. This cross-intelligence is happening without even a SIEM coming into play.

And a type of SOAR functionality is found within M365 Defender. It can run a complete, automated investigation response at the email security level, meaning the XDR platform level. When M365 Security is combined with Sentinel it gives the customer more power to remediate attacks faster. Detection and response are more powerful when M365 Defender and Sentinel are combined, compared to a customer going with a third-party solution and Sentinel.

Sentinel has an investigation pane to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place, where SOC analysts can drill down. It will gather all the artifacts so that the analysts can drill down without even leaving the page. They can see the start of the attack and the sequence of events from Sentinel. And on the investigation page, SOC analysts can create a note with their comments. They can also call for a response action from that particular page.

Also, most of the next-gen cloud analytics vendors don't provide a common MSSP platform for the service provider to operate. That means we have to build our own analytics in front of those solutions. Sentinel has something called Lighthouse where we can query and hunt and pull all the metadata into an MSSP platform. That means multi-customer threat prioritization can be done because we have complete visibility of all our customers. We can see how an attack pattern is evolving in different verticals. Our analysts can see exactly what the top-10-priority events are from all of our customers. Even if we have a targeted vertical, such as BFSI, we can create a use case around that and apply it to a customer that has not been targeted. We can leverage multiple verticals and multiple customers and see if a new pattern is emerging around it. Those processes are very easy with Sentinel as an MSSP platform.

Because we use 75 percent of the automation possible through the platform we are able to reduce MTTA. It is also helpful that we get all the security incidents including the threat, vulnerability, and security score in one place of control. We don't have to go to one place for XDR, another for email, another for EDR, and a fourth for CASB. Another time saver is the automated investigation response playbooks that are bundled with the solution. They are available for email, EDR, and CASB. As soon as a threat is detected, they will contain it and it will give you a status of partially or fully remediated. Most of our customers have gone for 100 percent automation and remediation. These features save at least 50 percent of the time it would otherwise take.

In terms of cost savings, in addition to the savings on log-ingestion, Microsoft Sentinel uses hyperscaler features with low-tier, medium-tier, and hot storage. For customers that need long-term data storage, this is the ideal platform. If you go with Securonix or Palo Alto, you won't see cost savings. But here, they can choose how long they want to keep data in a hot tier or a low or medium tier. That also helps save a lot on costs.

It's a Big Data security analytics platform. Among the unique features is the fact that it has built-in UEBA and analytical capabilities. It allows you to use the out-of-the-box machine learning and AI capabilities, but it also allows you to bring your own AI/ML, by bringing in your own IPs and allowing the platform to accept them and run that on top of it.

In addition, the SOAR component is a pay-per-use model. Compared to any other product, where customization is not available, you can fine-tune the SOAR and you'll be charged only when your playbooks are triggered. That is the beauty of the solution because the SOAR is the costliest component in the market today. Other vendors charge heavily for the SOAR, but with Sentinel it is upside-down: the SOAR is the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the least costly and it delivers more value to the customer.

The SOAR engine also uniquely helps us to automate most of the incidents with automated enrichment and that cuts out the L1 analyst work.

And combining M365 with Sentinel, if you want to call it integration, takes just a few clicks: "next, next finish." If it is all M365-native, it is a maximum of three or four steps and you'll be able to ingest all the logs into Sentinel.

That is true even with AWS or GCP because most of the connectors are already available out-of-the-box. You just click, put in your subscription details, include your IAM, and you are finished. Within five to six steps, you can integrate AWS workloads and the logs can be ingested into Sentinel. When it comes to a third party specifically, such as log sources in a data center or on-premises, we need a log collector so that the logs can be forwarded to the Sentinel platform. And when it comes to servers or something where there is an agent for Windows or Linux, the agent can collect the logs and ship them to the Sentinel platform. I don't see any difficulties in integrating any of the log sources, even to the extent of collecting IoT log sources.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud has multiple components such as Defender for Servers, Defender for PaaS, and Defender for databases. For customers in Azure, there are a lot of use cases specific to protecting workloads and PaaS and SaaS in Azure and beyond Azure, if a customer also has on-premises locations. There is EDR for Windows and Linux servers, and it even protects different kinds of containers. With Defender for Cloud, all these sources can be seamlessly integrated and you can then track the security incidents in Microsoft's XDR platform. That means you have one more workspace, under Azure, not Defender for Cloud, where you can see the security incidents. In addition, it can be integrated with Sentinel for EDR deep-dive analytics. It can also protect workloads in AWS. We have customers for whom we are protecting their AWS workloads. Even EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service, on AWS can be integrated, as can the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And with Defender for Cloud, security alert ingestion is free

Only one thing is missing: NDR is not available out of the box. The competitive cloud-native SIEM providers have the NDR component. Currently, Sentinel needs NDR to be powered from either Corelight or some other NDR provider. It needs a third-party OEM. Other than that, it supports the entire gamut of solutions.

Also, we are helping customers build custom data-source integration. Microsoft needs to look at some strategic development on the partner front for out-of-the-box integration.

We are an MSSP and we have offered Microsoft Sentinel as a service to our customers for close to one and half years. Before I joined this organization, I worked with another organization that provided Microsoft Sentinel as a service for close to one year.

The platform is pretty stable. I generally do not have any problems with it unless an issue arises while deploying a playbook. The platform is 98 percent stable. That other 2 percent only happens when you start working deep on customization. Out-of-the-box, everything has been tested and there aren't any problems. But when you try to create something on your own, that's where you may need Microsoft support.

You can scale it as much as you want. There are no limitations on scaling it.

It supports multi-region environments. Even if it is a large organization with multiple regions and multiple subscriptions, it can collect the data within the regions. With GDPR, logs should stay within the country. The solution can comply with the law of the land and still serve multiple locations.

Sentinel Lighthouse is not only meant for MSSPs. A large organization with diverse geography can meet the local data-residency laws, and Lighthouse will still act as a platform to connect all the regions and provide a centralized dashboard and visibility as an organization. So it can work if the customer has only one region and if there are multiple regions. It is a unique platform.

Also, every six months they develop a lot of playbooks as well as from the marketplace, the Microsoft Sentinel Content hub. MSSPs like us can use it to create content and put it into the marketplace so that other customers or service providers can use them. Similarly, when those parties develop things, they are available to us.

Microsoft is almost too active. We receive something new to offer to our customers every month or two. We also operate Splunk and QRadar but we see a lot of activity from Microsoft compared to the other vendors. That means we have a lot of value-adds to offer to our customers. These updates do not go to the customer by default. As a service provider, that helps us. We are the enablers, and a lot of these updates are free of cost for Sentinel users.

I would rate Microsoft technical support at five out of 10 because we have to go through a lot of steps before we get to the right technical stakeholder. They have to improve a lot.

Neutral

As an MSSP we also use Splunk, Qradar, and Micro Focus ArcSight. We added Microsoft as well because of customer demand. 

Existing customers that are doing a tech refresh are going for cloud-native. Digital transformation has been the driving factor. A lot of our customers have embraced microservices and they're looking for a new-age, cloud-native SIEM to support cloud-native solutions. For most of our customers that are looking at migrating to Sentinel, the major factor is the cloud. They have moved their data center servers to AWS or GCP or Azure.

The initial deployment is straightforward. There are only two or three methods, depending on whether it is on-premises log collection or M365 all-cloud, in which case it is API-based with out-of-the-box APIs. Within a few clicks, we can integrate it. It is simple and fast.

If we're dealing with all-M365 components and Azure components, we can complete deployment within a day. If we're dealing with the customer-log collection, it depends on the customer. There are some prerequisites required, but if the prerequisites are ready, then it takes, again, a day or so.

The number of people involved depends on the situation, but if there is not much more than out-of-the-box deployment, a maximum of two L1 engineers can complete all the activity.

From my perspective, the ROI is good because Microsoft keeps getting new things done without any additional cost. Every quarter there is at least a 10 to 15 percent increase with add-on components and content that are free. That is a type of enrichment that customers receive that they do not get from any other platform.

Microsoft gives a discount of 50 percent but only for customers that are clocking 100 GB and above. They should also look at medium and SMB customers in that regard.

There are a lot of advantages for customers with a Microsoft ecosystem. They need to know the tricks for optimizing the cost of Microsoft Sentinel. They need to work with the right service provider that can help them to go through the journey and optimize the cost.

For Microsoft security products there is a preview mode of up to six months, during which time they are non-billable. The customer is free to take that subscription and test it. If they like it, they will be billed but they have six months where they can evaluate the product and see the value. That is the best option and no other vendor gives a free preview for six months.

Other solutions will have two updates a year, maximum. And most of them are not updates to the features but are security or platform-stability updates. Microsoft is completely different. Because the platform is managed by them, they don't give platform updates. They give updates on the content that are free. They keep adding this data, which is helping customers to stay relevant and updated.

Our customers see a lot of value from that process. Some 60 to 70 percent move from preview mode to production.

The challenge with competitive products, or any SIEM, is that they are use-case specific: You define some correlation and they will detect it. Some of the next-gen solutions today work with analytics but the analytics are limited to the logs that have been registered. Other platforms are also not able to pinpoint the inception point of the attack. Once the attack is being reviewed, they will use log sources of that particular attack and will drill down into that particular attack scenario, but they're not able to group the attack life cycle: the initiation of that attack, and the different stages of the attack. The visibility is limited when it comes to other SIEMs.

But Sentinel has something called Fusion, which can give you multi-stage attack visibility. That is not something available from other SIEM vendors. Fusion is a very special kind of detection. It will only trigger when it sees the linkage between multiple attacks detected by multiple data sources. It will try to relate all the attacks and see if there is a link between them. It gives you a complete footprint of how that attack started, how it evolved, how it is going, and which phase it is in now. It will give a complete view of the attack, and that is a missing link compared with other SIEM vendors. This is a unique feature of Microsoft Sentinel.

Sentinel's UEBA is around 90 percent effective, and the threat intel is a 10 out of 10, but it is an add-on. If a customer takes that add-on package, it will give complete threat intel and visibility into the deep and dark web. In addition, it helps a customer to track the external attack surface. It is a comprehensive threat intel platform. 

The Sentinel SOAR is a 10 out of 10 and, if I could, I would rate it higher. Other SOAR platforms do not help reduce the price. A customer may not be able to use them after some time because they charge per SOC analyst. With Microsoft, there is no limitation on SOC analysts. It is purely billed based on consumption, which is a great advantage. Every customer can use it. It is free for up to 4,000 actions. Even if a customer goes to 50,000 actions per day, which is normally what a large-volume customer will do, he'll be charged $50, and no competitive SOAR vendor is in that league.

Understand the product capabilities first and, before finalizing your product, see how we can optimize your solutions. Also, try to see a roadmap. Then plan your TCO. Other SIEMs do not give you the advantage of free log ingestion, but if you want to understand the TCO, you need to know what your organization is open to adopting. If you integrate Microsoft solutions in different places, like cloud or CASB, it is going to give you more free ingestion and your TCO is going to be reduced drastically.

Organizations that have a Microsoft E5 license have an advantage because all the Microsoft components we have talked about are free. Unfortunately, we have also witnessed that most of our customers with an E5 license are not using the product features effectively. They need to see how they can leverage these services at the next level and then start integrating with Sentinel. That will give them a better return on investment and a proper TCO.

The platform gives you the ability to do 100 percent automation, but it is up to the service provider or the customer to decide what the percentage should be. The percentage varies from organization to organization. In our organization, we are using 75 percent of the automation before it reaches a SOC analyst. At a certain point, we want to see our SOC Analyst intervene. We want to do that remaining 25 percent manually, where the analyst can call for further responses.

Threat intelligence, in my opinion, is not generally going to work in a predictive mode. It is more a case of enrichment and indicators of compromise. It can only help in direction and correlation, but may not take you to a predictive mode, except if we talk about external attack surface management. The threat intel feed is going to give you an indicator of compromise and that will help you to be proactive but not predictive.

Whereas the external attack surface management and deep and dark web monitoring will monitor all your public assets. If a hacker is doing something in your public-facing assets, it will give a proactive alert that suspicious activities are happening in those assets. That will help my SOC analysts to be predictive, even before an attack happens. If somebody is trying brute force, that's where the predictive comes into play. The deep and dark web monitoring will help to monitor my brand and my domain. If hackers discuss my critical assets or my domain within a dark web chat, this intel can pick that up. In that case, they can say something predictively and that they are planning for an attack on your assets.

In terms of going with a best-of-breed strategy rather than a single vendor's security suite, customers need to be smart. Every smart solution keeps its intelligence within the solution. If the landscape includes email, web, EDR, et cetera, at a bare minimum there are eight different attack surfaces and everyone can have different controls. A SOC analyst will have to manage eight different consoles and have eight unique skill sets with deep knowledge of each product. So although individual solutions bring a lot of things to the table, the customer is not able to use those features 100 percent. We are failing when we go with individual products. An individual product may be more capable, but an organization will not be able to use the product effectively. The silos of intelligence, the number of different consoles, and the right skill sets to apply to each product are problems.

In addition, attacks are evolving and the software is evolving along with them. A product vendor may release some new features but the customer won't have the right skill set internally to understand them and apply them.

But with a single-vendor situation like Microsoft, the SOC analyst has nowhere else to go. It is one XDR platform. All the policies, all the investigation, and everything they need to apply is right in one place. There are also more Microsoft-Certified resources in the market, people who are certified in all the Microsoft products. All of a sudden, my skill set problem is solved and there is no need to look at multiple consoles, and the silos of intelligence are also solved. All three pain points are resolved.

We are developing our security signals for Microsoft Sentinel, so we are making a connector for Microsoft Sentinel. We try to use several features.

When using mobile devices, if there is an attacker or malware, the signal goes to the Microsoft Sentinel console from there. Our IT admin looks at those incidents.

The importance of that for our organization is because we are using our mobile devices for work. Mobile devices are not safe enough.

I focus on mobile devices while using Microsoft Sentinel. Mainly we want to expand our Identity performers. 

The signal correlation and dashboards features of Microsoft Sentinel are fantastic because it correlates the signal logs with other products. The customizable dashboards are also valuable.

Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources and its detection capabilities are essential.

Microsoft Sentinel can be improved in terms of automation or connecting with security products so that it is easier to use for general IT admins.

I started using Microsoft Sentinel last June, so it has been about a year.

I was not using any other solutions for this specific task before Microsoft Sentinel. We ultimately chose Microsoft Sentinel because we have partnerships.

We have not yet seen a return on investment with Microsoft Sentinel. We expect to see a return on investment this year. 

We try to use the security incidents feature in Microsoft Sentinel, but I have not seen the actual incident yet. I could not find good use cases. My experience with the collaboration capabilities of Microsoft Sentinel is limited, as I am still getting used to it.

I would rate Microsoft Sentinel a seven out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using the solution for two years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

We have a technical partner that helps with deployment. 

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

We are an SSI system integrator.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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

I use the solution to ensure proper security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise. The tool helps me to know the type of attack detection that happens and the kind of visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response we have.

We use the tool because we want a solution that can quickly analyze large volumes of data across the enterprise. Microsoft Sentinel is a one-stop solution for all our security needs. It gives threat visibility, enables proactive hunting, and provides investigation reports.

The product can integrate with any device. It has connectors. So, we do not have big issues in building connectors. Microsoft Sentinel gives us a unified set of tools to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. It also helps us recover things. It is very important to our organization. It centralizes our total threat collection and detection and generates investigation reports.

The AI capabilities must be improved. The product must efficiently leverage the AI capabilities for threat detection and response. The product does not provide auto-configuration features. So, we need to do configuration, policy changes, and group policies ourselves. If AI can do these functions, it will be easier for the customers.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The product is stable.

We have around 1500 users. We have only one administrator. The product is easily scalable. As long as the enterprise grows, we will continue using Microsoft Sentinel.

The technical support team is very good.

Positive

We were using Splunk before. We decided to switch to Microsoft Sentinel because we were unable to work on large data using Splunk. Splunk did not have AI capabilities and was not user-friendly.

The product is deployed on the cloud. It is a SaaS solution. The initial deployment was easy. We ensured that all the devices and the APIs were configured well. We needed two engineers from our team for the deployment. We have deployed the tool in a single location. The solution does not need any maintenance.

We took help from an integrator to deploy the tool. It was a user-friendly experience.

The solution is efficient. We could see the returns on investment immediately. It doesn’t take much time.

The product is costly compared to Splunk. When we pay for the product, we also have Azure Monitor Log Analytics as part of the package. It is economical for us.

We use the tool to help secure our cloud-native security solutions. By enabling us to secure our cloud environments, it acts as a single solution for attack detection and threat visibility for proactive hunting. The solution gives us a library of customizable content that helps us address our unique needs. It also gives regular patch updates. It helps us to be updated with the latest threats happening across the world.

We use the Microsoft Sentinel Content hub. Integration with Active Directory is also helpful for us. The content hub enables us to see the latest features. We have Extended Detection and Response in SentinelOne. It provides effective protection for the platform. It provides more cybersecurity by providing more visibility and protects our enterprise.

The content hub helps us centralize out-of-the-box security information and event management content. It discovers and manages the built-in content. It provides an end-to-end security for us.

Microsoft Sentinel correlates signals from first and third-party sources into a single high-confidence incident. It can extract the information through the respective APIs of the third parties. It has increased our threat intelligence, monitoring, and incident analysis efficiency.

We use Microsoft Sentinel's AI in automation. The generative AI features enable real-time threat hunting and detection. The solution has helped improve our visibility into user and network behavior. The generative AI provides better detection and response capabilities and faster response times with actionable intelligence.

The product has saved us time. It helps us get various log files. When there’s an incident, it enables us to do investigations faster. The tool saves us three days in a week. It reduces the work involved in our event investigation by streamlining the processes and making automation effective. Event investigation is much faster.

If someone is looking for a comprehensive solution, Microsoft Sentinel is a good choice. It will fulfill all our needs, including attack detection, threat visibility, and response.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The usual use cases would be starting from scratch, implementing Sentinel for clients, onboarding log sources, building analytical use case rules, and supporting the platform for operations.

The main benefit is the ease of integration. Having a cloud-based SIEM means scalability. We also received very good support and documentation from the vendor.

All of the features are great. In fact, when they add new features they are always valuable and interesting. There are so many features on offer.

I really appreciate that it is very well documented.

I also use Defender 365, including Defender for Endpoint. It's easy to integrate with Sentinel. In two clicks we can integrate them together.

I have experience with Defender for Cloud. I'm actually getting into the Center for Cloud right now, so I'm just Learning about it. 

Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem.

It's important to have data visibility for our security operations. Sentinel enables us to investigate the threats and respond from one place. That is very important for operations. We need to be able to easily look and have visibility over what's happening.

Sentinel enabled us to automate routine tasks. It helps us automate the handling of trivial tasks related to alerts. 

With the solution, we no longer have to look at multiple dashboards. I wouldn't say it has completely eliminated looking at different dashboards. As it stands right now, there are two dashboards that we will have to look at. One is Sentinel, and the other one is a ticketing system.

Compared to what's being used, it's saved us some time overall. The ease of use and the clear documentation are helpful in that regard. Someone who doesn't know how to use it can easily go in and find out.

When it comes to ingesting Azure native log sources, some of the log sources are specific to the subscription, and it is not always very clear. Sometimes, if the individual doesn't know what they are doing, they might enable it only on one subscription and not on everything that they need to monitor.

I've used the solution for two and a half years. 

I haven't experienced any stability issues. I've experienced 100% uptime. 

I've never seen it scale up or down. If necessary, it likely happens in the background. It's not visible to clients, however, I haven't noticed any issues. 

My experience with technical support is good. It was an excellent experience. They were very, very responsive to the questions that we had. If they were not able to answer on the spot, during the call, they took it back and discussed the issue with their team. Getting an answer was fairly fast. Overall, I've had a good experience with support and I can't complain.

I'd like them even more if I was able to request support on behalf of clients without having to actually access the client's Azure or having to identify the client's tenants. 

Positive

I've used Splunk, ArcSight, and QRadar. Sentinel is excellent compared to those solutions. It could always be easier, however, it's pretty much there.

I was involved in the solution's deployment. The cloud deployment takes five minutes and is very easy. The on-premise portion on the other hand, when I first did it a year and a half ago, was a little bit more complex since it involved a lot of customization. However, now it's more streamlined.

There is no maintenance necessary. It's a managed service. There's no patching of any sort. The on-premises components may require a little bit of maintenance every now and then if they need a patch or upgrade. If there are any changes in the environment they would have to be reflected in the configurations. 

I handled the implementation myself. 

I know the price, however, I don't know how it compares with other SIEM solutions. I don't have that visibility. I overheard not too long ago that Sentinel is on the expensive side. However, there are some capabilities that are fairly new that Sentinel offers to lower the cost. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would like to see more AI used in processes.

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

The stability is not an issue. 

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

I can't speak to the exact cost.

We are a customer of Microsoft. 

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

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been two years.

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

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

I've not contacted their support for Microsoft Sentinel.

I've used QRadar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our organization is a service company, therefore, we are proposing Microsoft Sentinel as an MSSP solution to our clients. Additionally, we are offering other solutions with Microsoft Sentinel. We have integrated Microsoft Sentinel with MISP, an open source intelligence trading platform, to create a deluxe solution. Furthermore, we use the five-year tool in conjunction with Microsoft Sentinel.

We pitched the solution for BFSI, healthcare, and ONG sectors.

The solution can be deployed based on the client's requirements.

Microsoft Sentinel provides visibility into threats by creating alerts, which will generate an instance and notify us. We can also view files and prioritize alerts using Microsoft Sentinel. Additionally, there is a tool with Sentinel that allows us to check alerts, which will help us identify false positives and false negatives, which is very beneficial for analysts.

Microsoft Sentinel helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise.

Microsoft Sentinel's ability to help us prioritize threats is a very important must-have feature for our organization.

Integrating Microsoft Sentinel with additional Microsoft solutions such as Microsoft Security Center is easy because we use a Microsoft agent. There is a default integration available with multiple connectors and we can use the agent to install data into Microsoft Sentinel.

The integrated solutions work natively together to deliver a coordinated detection and response across our environment. We use a playbook for the response process. We also integrated ServiceNow tools and Sentinel for ITSM. We are also designing the playbooks to meet our requirements.

Having the ability to integrate solutions with Microsoft Sentinel is an important feature.

Microsoft Sentinel provides comprehensive protection. 

Our organization has a strong partnership with Microsoft. Most of the services we receive are quite cost-effective. Microsoft provides market listings, allowing us to design our solution and place it on Microsoft's market listings, resulting in mutual benefits for both Microsoft and our organization.

We used Microsoft Defender for Cloud to get to the Azure security center for Sentinel. We wanted to work with a particular server but at the time the requirement was in order to use Defender we had to enable the solution across the subscription and not on one particular server.

Microsoft Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire system if we want.

Microsoft Sentinel enables us to investigate and respond to threats from one place. We can control everything from a single pane of glass.

Microsoft's built-in UEBA and threat intelligence capabilities play a major role in our security.

We can automate routine tasks, prioritize alerts using the playbook, and use the analytical rule's default settings when creating an alert. This helps to reduce false positives so that we only receive one alert for each issue.

Microsoft's XDR enabled us to avoid having to view multiple dashboards. We can integrate a variety of tools with Sentinel, allowing us to monitor all relevant information from a single screen.

The integration into one dashboard reduced our analytical work because it reduces the time required to review and respond to threats. 

The solution helped us prepare for potential threats proactively. Microsoft Sentinel helped our organization save money by preventing attacks. The solution helped reduce the threat detection time by up to 40 percent.

The data connectors that Microsoft Sentinel provides are easy to integrate when we work with a Microsoft agent.

The UI design for the investigation portion of Microsoft Sentinel is great.

The alerting of the queries works great and it is easy to develop a query around our requirements using Microsoft Sentinel.

The GUI functionality has room for improvement.

The playbook can sometimes be hefty and has room for improvement.

The troubleshooting has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support depends on if we have upgraded our support or not. The basic support has a wait time but the premium support is great.

Positive

We previously used IBM Security QRadar. The data connectors are more complicated and there are more configurations required with IBM Security QRadar compared to Microsoft Sentinel. The alerts are much better with Microsoft Sentinel.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The implementation is completed in-house with Microsoft documentation.

In comparison to other security solutions, Microsoft Sentinel offers a reasonable price for the features included.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The maintenance is completed by Microsoft.

I recommend Microsoft Sentinel to others.

The company I work for delivers SOC-as-a-Service, so I set up Sentinel in the customer's Azure environment and then connect it to our central Sentinel through Azure Lighthouse.

Microsoft Sentinel has made it easier for us to sell SOC-as-a-Service to, more or less, any customer and not just the big ones.

A lot of our customers run Microsoft products, and integrating those with Sentinel is simple and easy. Sentinel can be quickly deployed as well.

As long as the customers are licensed correctly and have, for example, the E5 security package, then the insights into threats provided by Sentinel are pretty good.

Sentinel helps prioritize threats well. The option to dig deeper and go into the different portals is good as well.

Our customers are very happy with incidents being closed in Sentinel and across the tenant.

We are able to fetch data from almost any source with Sentinel. There are some customers who try to customize, but we try to keep it to the out-of-the-box preconfigured data connectors or to what we can find in the Microsoft content hub.

In terms of the importance of data ingestion to our customers' security operations, they only have access to what is in Sentinel. Therefore, it's pretty important for them to have all of their data stored in one location. If it's stored on-premises in Microsoft 365 Defender, then the SOC team won't be able to access that data. Giving a good analysis will then be harder.

It's very important to us to be able to investigate threats and respond holistically from one place. We don't create several accounts for each customer. We utilize one account and then get insight into the Sentinel environments of different customers. It's great that we can do all this in one place.

The comprehensiveness of Sentinel's security protection is pretty good. The effectiveness of the web part of this depends on how well the customer has configured their Azure AD and what information they have included for each user, such as the phone number and the part of the organization where the user works.

One of the big issues for our customers is the need to look at multiple dashboards. Sentinel has eliminated this and made it a lot easier by having everything in one place.

Sentinel has definitely saved us time. It has also decreased our time to detection and our time to respond. We try to have an analysis ready within 30 minutes of an incident coming in.

Some of the data connectors are outdated, at least the ones that utilize Linux machines for log forwarding. I believe that Microsoft is already working on improving this.

I would like Microsoft Sentinel to have out-of-the-box threat intelligence because right now, the only option is to add your own threat intelligence.

I've been using Microsoft Sentinel for approximately one and a half years.

Sentinel has only been down once, as far as I know, as a result of Microsoft doing something with Azure Kubernetes, which affected log analytics and Sentinel. It was down for about 10 hours. Other than that, it's always been up.

The scalability is great. You can put unlimited logs in, as long as you can pay for it. There are commitment tiers, up to six terabytes per day, which is nowhere close to what any one of our customers is running.

I might be more fortunate than others, given the fact that I have easy access to Microsoft support. The only downside is that the support staff are not that technical, but there is a big community around Sentinel. I can ask the question on the forums instead, and I usually get an answer there. All in all, I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward. We try to utilize a baseline of analytics rules in addition to connecting any security products already owned by the customer.

We usually deploy one Sentinel per Azure tenant. Maintenance-wise, Microsoft updates the analytics rules and the engine behind Sentinel, and it may require some tuning if it creates a lot of noise. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward. Thus, in comparison to other SIEM solutions that you need to upgrade and then turn off for the functionality to be updated, Sentinel saves us time.

My colleague and I usually work with someone at the customer's location to deploy the solution.

Compared to standalone SIEM and SOAR solutions, it is easy to start off with Sentinel. For example, with QRadar there are minimum licensing requirements, EPS costs compared to how many logs are being ingested, etc.

It can become costly with Sentinel if you try to run all of the raw logs for an entire organization. If you prioritize, however, you can have a cheaper SIEM solution compared to the ones that have a starting price of 50,000 US dollars.

The pricing is based on how much you ingest, so it's pretty straightforward. There are no tiers, and you pay for what you use, unlike with other types of SIEM solutions that are usually based on tiers.

It's a great way to get insight into exactly how much you're using. If you connect a log source that utilizes too much, you could turn it off or tune it down. You could also buy tiers in Sentinel and can save money with tier commitments.

Overall, I'm satisfied with Sentinel and would give it a rating of eight out of ten.

As far as going with a best-of-breed strategy versus a single vendor's suite, Microsoft gives a pretty good solution, especially when you get the E5 security package. It gives you a good view of the security across the organization, so I don't mind going for a single vendor's suite and opting to go completely with Microsoft.