Vectra AI Reviews

We use it as an intrusion detection system to monitor traffic that's going on within our network.

There was an event that happened before I started here, a ransomware event, and Vectra AI was able to quickly detect and alert on the activity. That greatly reduced the time it took for the company to respond to the incident.

Cognito provides visibility into behaviors across the full life cycle of an attack in the network, beyond just the internet gateway. By detecting everything before the internet gateway, it's able to get a fuller picture of what was going on before the target left the network. It greatly increases our ability to investigate events that occur.

The Vectra product also triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. As a result, it helps to reduce the time to respond to incidents.

In addition, it does a really good job of bringing the higher-level alerts to our attention while not bombarding us with alerts on lower-level activities that, I find, we don't usually need to investigate. When I first started using it I was investigating everything and I quickly learned the low-level threats, as shown by their scores, were low for a reason and they really didn't need to be looked at too closely.

I would estimate it has reduced our security analyst workload by around 30 to 40 percent. It has increased our security efficiency and has also reduced the time it takes us to respond to attacks by about 50 percent.

One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team. It helps reduce workload on our team daily by performing tasks that we don't have to do manually.

It does a really good job of reducing alerts by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign for investigation.

It also does a really good job detecting things. Some things it detects are not really threats, but it is stuff that it should be detecting, even though the behavior, sometimes, isn't malicious.

It does a little bit of packet capture on alert so you can look at the packet capture activity going on, but it doesn't collect a whole lot of data. Sometimes it's only one or two frames, sometimes it does collect more. That's why they have the addition of their Recall platform, because that really does help expand the capability.

I would also like to see more documentation or user guides about using the product.

I've been using Vectra AI for a little over one year, but it was in place at our location before I started working here.

We haven't had any issues other than one power supply failure, but there was a backup power supply and they sent the replacement quickly. Other than that, I haven't seen any issues with stability of the product.

I haven't had any experience in scaling it out beyond what was set up before I started here.

We have about 1,600 employees on site, but I'm not sure how many devices that equates to. Each person has one or more devices. We're scaled out about as far as we can go.

I'm the only person using it directly in our company, as an IT security engineer II.

They have very good tech support.

Our company definitely saw return on investment when it had the ransomware attack. They were able to stop it quickly. That was definitely a huge savings. Otherise, the company was going to have to shut down production.

I don't really have anything to compare it to, but I would assume the pricing is fair.

I believe they are licensing current devices or hosts. When I was last talking to a rep, we were having to go through a true-up process, but that hasn't started yet.

I have thought of evaluating other things, just for evaluation’s sake, but I haven't done so yet.

It's helped me learn how to investigate alerts in a more efficient way.

It also captures network metadata at scale and enriches it with security information. Part of that I was able to witness using a proof of concept for the Cognito Recall platform, which collects all the metadata and then forwards it to an Amazon instance in the cloud. From there you can do a lot of correlation and you can do deep-dives into the data. That was also a really good product, and I would like for us to purchase it, but right now it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Vectra will alert on activity going to some of our cloud providers, for example Microsoft OneDrive or Teams, but our systems won't really inspect on any type of SSL traffic, and it doesn't provide that much use for external communication that's encrypted. It's something we do not have set up and that's why we're not able to get that full visibility.

Our primary use case for this solution is for security policy and to detect potential attacks on our networks.

This solution helped our mean time to identify as we can have more precise detection and documentation. At the moment, we're seeing daily detection of between 10 and 20 and if it's on the cloud, we can do 50 to 100 per day.

As we are just beginning to use Vectra AI, I find the simplicity of implementation to be quite valuable. The UI is easy to use and when we send detection to everybody, they easily understand what we are asking at the time. The sections are very precise. 

There is room for improvement in the documentation. We would like to have more details on how it detects what we see. 

I have been using Vectra AI for about four months.

This solution is stable.

This solution is quite scalable. In the beginning, we had one point of network capturing the traffic. After that, we added two points on top of it and it worked perfectly. At first, we had five gigabits per second and now we have 30 so I'll say it's a good service.

I would rate their support a ten, on a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best. The reason for this rating is that they were with us every step of the way to help and guide us through the process seamlessly.

Positive

Prior to Vectra AI, we used Gatewatcher and Microprobes and also the IPS/IDS firewall. Vectra AI is an additional layer of security.

My opinion – and a strong point for Vectra AI – is that the deployment is not complex and is quite straightforward. It was an easy deployment and someone from the company helped us on each point and guided us through important milestones. If I recall correctly, it lasted for about two weeks.

It's a bit expensive, as you can have a lot of different solutions for free. So, in the beginning, it's more expensive, but as time passes it gets better.

The issue Vectra AI helps us solve is threat prevention.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven, on a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best. The reason for this rating is that we are still in a tuning phase and it's too early to say anything about detection, but I would put ten for support.

We need to move our whole data traffic over the core switches. We also want to secure our network and have it integrated into our vCenter and into our Active Directory.

We have 18,000 IP addresses, and in Recall, we have uploads from about 250 GB per day.

One year ago, we found notebooks that were compromised with Emotet. Vectra saw that the client performed search requests to the Active Directory for a keyword root and contacted domains that are known for Emotet.

Vectra AI also found that a notebook had permanent contact with a domain outside our network.

We often use the new feature to create PCAP files from the whole data traffic. It makes it much easier to find network problems such as whether the server is responding to a request. It has nothing to do with security, but it helps a lot to find other problems.

Vectra AI helped improve our mean time to identify. For example, the Sophos client doesn't recognize anything, and without Vectra AI, we wouldn't be able to identify problems. It does it quickly.

We use the Sidekick MDR service. It's very important to us because it gives us another layer of security and a second pair of eyes. We have learned a lot from the Sidekick.

For S&D account scans, it would be easier if Vectra AI could triage with users. If a client uses a lot of accounts, then it could indicate that these accounts are benign, for example. That would help a lot.

I've been using Vectra AI since 2020.

We have not had any problems with stability.

Vectra's technical support is very fast. They have been able to resolve the tickets I created very quickly. I would rate technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial deployment is easy. You have to give them an IP address, plug it into the switch, and then get started.

We have seen an ROI. The cost of security breaches outweighs the cost of Vectra AI.

Vectra AI is not a cheap solution.

We evaluated Vectra AI and CyberSense and did POCs with both. We observed that Vectra AI was better because we can see everything. CyberSense uses a different technology. For example, it creates an Active Directory that isn't used. If someone connects to this Active Directory or starts requests, then we will get an alert. However, we think Vectra uses a better way because we can see more. It also has better technology.

Overall, I would rate Vectra AI at ten on a scale from one to ten, with ten being the best.

We've introduced Vectra AI to our clients and had it in proof of concepts with other technologies like Darktrace for network detection and response.

Vectra AI can bring the ability to detect intrusion on the network more so than legacy IDS tools. It goes beyond just doing sample packet capture as Corelight does and provides value to the customer regarding their reporting and what the tool is doing.

The solution's marketing is not good. It probably needs to refresh its branding because a lot of it is confusing. People see it as an expensive tool for what it actually does.

I have been working with Vectra AI for five years.

With tools like Vectra, the more you want to scale, the more you have to ingest, and the higher your costs are. So scalability can be there, but it also comes with an increased price.

The solution's customer support is fairly strong.

Vectra AI didn't have a SaaS model until recently. Companies don't like deploying something complex that'll turn customers away. From what I understand, Vectra AI is somewhat complex in its deployments.

The technology is strong, but everything around the technology outside of support is weak. Vectra AI needs to find a way to make it more cost-effective for customers to compete with some of the other tools on the marketplace that customers are buying. Vectra AI should do sample packet captures for clients with different use cases. They're trying to forcefully push their tool on the market when the market wants something else.

Overall, I rate Vectra AI a five out of ten.

We started with it as a replacement for the functionality we had in our SIEM solution. We mainly wanted a detection metric and something that was smart enough to detect some of the more complex attacks because we can have flow data and do nothing with it. We wanted to have some strong alerting capabilities on that. We were looking to get a detailed attack and AI perspective on it. We didn't want something that only sees something as malicious and can alert on it but also detect things that are a little bit out of the ordinary, which was something we could get with this.

It has definitely improved our mean time to identify. In some specific cases, it's making it a lot easier because the enrichment features do help in getting a more detailed view of what's going on. For example, if we see a certain connection or something that's potentially a command and control channel, we can look at who logged in last and what other processes are there. We also have a connection to our SIEM solution, so we can check what's going on there as well. So, it really helps, but it's hard to measure the time savings because we previously didn't have a solution that had the same capabilities as Vectra AI.

It has definitely had an impact on our productivity. Previously, we did have some issues with getting a more detailed view of the network because we could only do it through event-based logs from the network devices, such as firewalls and switches that were providing us with additional information. Now, because it's more detailed and also across the branch offices—which was a big point for us—we do have a more efficient structure. We don't need to do that much additional effort to get to the root cause of problems, which was an issue before.

One of the things that we didn't expect to happen was that our network team also jumped on it faster than we thought. In most cases, if it's a security tool that's working on the network part, they can also use it to find out certain flaws that have been in the system. Certain flaws, related to some legacy stuff, were already there for quite a few years, which they couldn't explain at first, but we could explain them based on the timing of certain things. For example, there were about 200 SSH connections within a night. They had seen the traffic, but they couldn't relate it to anything specifically, whereas because we saw it, we knew that it was one of our main Unix machines. We knew it was doing some kind of backup at that time. We then went to talk to the system engineer, and he could confirm that he was using a badly written script that was doing 200 connections instead of just one and sending all 200 files across it.

It's well-built, so it does its thing as a Threat Detection and Response platform for detecting and responding to threats and attacks in real-time. We use the detections that come out of Vectra, and we send them over to our SIEM solution. Especially when it comes to high alerts or alerts with high certainty and high impact, we look at them immediately, and then someone also goes through it every day to clean up. If there are certain things that we need to check, we will check them anyway. Anything that's lower on the priority list is taken care of later in the day.

One of the things that we are missing a bit is the capability to add our own rules to it. At the moment, the tech engine does its thing, but we have some cool ideas to make additional rules. There should be an option in the platform to add custom rules, or there should be some kind of user group where we can suggest them for the roadmap and see if they get evaluated and get transparent communication on whether they will be implemented in the product or not. I understand that not everything can be implemented in the product, but if everyone presses the plus one button, then you know that there's a need for it. 

There is the concept of groups within Vectra. You have IP groups, host groups, and domain groups. Wild cards would be very handy there, or side ranges would be a good one to start with. One of the big things that some of our operational people complain about is that if it's an IP and it has reverse look-ups, why do they need to make two groups—an IP group and a hostname group—just to get the same feature set?

It has been almost three years, so it has been a while.

We haven't had any issues. It's very stable, so no problem.

Their support is pretty good. They follow up fast. It's not like most other support centers we've seen in the past. They are really focused on getting us faster input.

I'd rate them a nine out of ten because there is always a little bit of room for improvement, but normally, they follow up really nicely. As opposed to others, where you mostly hear good product, bad support, in this case, it's good product, good support. That's something to keep in mind.

Positive

We had a SIEM solution that was mainly focused on event-based logging, not necessarily on the network part. We were looking at more of a network IDS solution, and that's where Vectra came in. We wanted something that was easy to use as we didn't want too much platform maintenance. We wanted something to plug into the box and make it work. At first, we didn't believe that we would be able to find something like that after we had seen Darktrace, their biggest competitor, but in the end, Vectra was a perfect fit for us because it made it very easy to insert it into our branch offices as well.

We started from scratch. Three years ago, it was harder to start with than nowadays because back then, it was still in the beginning. The Belgian team that helped us with it also didn't have the experience at that time, whereas now, it's definitely not hard to set up. It's just a matter of knowing the right things, but the support portal really helps. There's good documentation on the setup as well.

From a security perspective, it's always hard to find a return on investment. If you look from the risk mitigation perspective and what's the worst that can happen, if we can stop attacks sooner, it would result in lesser costs on remediation afterward because we were fast on the initial attack.

From a licensing perspective, the Vectra detect platform is pretty doable. Also, the hardware prices are nothing that we're not used to. The stream part is a little overpriced compared to the detect part. The reason is that you need to stream data to detect events anyway, so the data is in there. The only thing that's not available is the UI to be able to look at the stream data, which is also on the appliances but is just not activated. That's mainly the thing that we want to improve on.

We looked at the SIEM solutions and flow-capturing devices. At the time, there was also an open-source product, but I don't remember the name. It was Suricata-based, but it fell off pretty quickly because of the high platform maintenance that would have come with it.

At the moment, we don't let them do intelligent blocks. We do it ourselves, so we are still putting a manual process in place for that. We also haven't yet used Vectra MDR services.

I'd rate Vectra AI an eight out of ten. They can still move a little bit further with the streams. Especially now that ChatGPT and AI have come into the picture, we all need to up our game on the AI part.

We use Cognito.

The biggest challenge we face in protecting the organization against cyber attacks is mean time to detection, operating from a position of an assumed breach. Then being able to detect breaches or malicious traffic within the environment as quickly as possible to reduce dwell time.

We have a small environment with only 300 users. It's very technically focused given the market that we operate in. There are two data centers, four offices, a small IT and security team. Cognito allows us to make the best investment for the most return, given we don't have dedicated SOC analysts looking at a SIEM environment.

Cognito is highly successful in detecting red team engagements and giving clear broad-level assurance and confidence in the product.

It captures network metadata at scale and enriches it with security information. The add-on of Recall is an invaluable investigation tool. It's able to look back and triage incidents.

We have been enabled to do things now that we could not do before: 

• There is more detailed visibility into network behavior. 
• We have the ability to pull out anomalies. 
• The high-fidelity alerts allow our team to focus on what's important.

The administrative privilege detection feature is the most valuable feature. The admin accounts are often highly accessible to the high-risk component of the environment. If those accounts are compromised or are being used in a suspicious manner, those are high-fidelity events for us to look into.

Its ability to reduce alerts by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign for investigation is very useful. Given that we are not a dedicated SOC environment, having to trawl through several false positives is not something that we have the capacity for.

Cognito theoretically provides us with visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack in our network beyond just the internet gateway. It has not been fully tested. But hypothetically it would give us full visibility into your attack chain.

We use privileged account analytics for detecting issues with privileged accounts.

Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass.

I have been using Vectra AI for three years. 

Their stability is bulletproof. 

We're using it across our entire estate, so we don't have plans to increase usage. It's been adopted 100%. 

Their support is excellent. They're very responsive. Exactly as you would hope for from a vendor, which is rare.

Vectra AI displaced an EOL North South solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

We had appliances in each physical data center. It took three or four days to see results.

Deployment time is equivalent to other solutions we have tried. The learning curve and speed of efficiencies are higher coming from Vectra.

We deployed it with the assistance of Vectra. Our experience with them was exceptional. The engineers knew the product. Vectra is extremely responsive to assisting with technical issues. It was a very good experience.

It's hard to scientifically quantify ROI but I would say we have seen ROI, certainly from the risk and threat perspective.

After we deployed the solution it instantly began to add value to our security operations.

Pricing is comfortable. I have no issues with the pricing structure at the moment.

There are no additional costs that I'm aware of unless you layer on MSP, additional soft services, or professional services. But for the solution itself, I don't believe there are.

We looked at Darktrace. 

I think the solution would help the network, cybersecurity, and risk reduction efforts in the future if we were to adopt a SOC, it would be a key threat feed to that environment. As they continue to iterate and enhance the product, it's a critical security component for us now and for the future.

Two security senior analysts work on this solution.

My advice to anybody considering this solution is: don't delay. It does exactly what it's sold to do. It does it efficiently and effectively.

I would rate Vectra AI Cognito a nine out of ten. 

Our company is in the retail arena, and we have stores, warehouses, and a data center. Right now, we're using Vectra AI in our offices and the data center. The major issue we had was that we were completely blind inside our data center in terms of seeing what traffic we had. Our main focus with Vectra AI was to see what's happening inside the data center through virtual sensors.

We're going to expand it to include our stores because the franchisees requested that we monitor the networks in all of the stores. Every shop in our company is a franchise, and they can do whatever they want to in their shops. We won't have any idea as to what's on the network in the shops. By using Vectra AI, we will have visibility into the network.

We have started the proof of concept for our warehouses as well.

We discovered a lot of things in our network and are correcting several misconfigurations. We are learning how some apps work together and how some things shouldn't happen. It's also easier for us to identify the source of a brute force, whereas before, we didn't even know we had a brute force.

The platform is well-designed around the quadrant. We know quickly how to investigate, and the detections are clear. I like Vectra AI's integration with Active Directory and the fact that it's easy to take in hand.

We have had a few issues with the integration of Vectra AI with EDR. Some filters have not been working. We've also had issues with the brain not being powerful enough.

In the next release, I would like to see more triage choices. From my point of view, Vectra is missing a lot of choices. This is an area that they could focus on.

Vectra is also moving to a full cloud model, and I am not sure if going full cloud and leaving the on-premises environment is the way to go. We are not sure whether we'll move to the cloud with Vectra because it's hosted by AWS, which is one of our competitors. We don't like to work with anything that works on AWS.

We did a proof of concept two years ago and then deployed it in March, 2022.

We've had issues with stability. Vectra said that they underestimated the power we needed on our brain as it's very slow. We have delays that can be up to 40 seconds. We also had a hard drive that died. In one year, we've experienced three major issues.

We have different types of deployment that impact scalability a lot. The good part is that if we want to see everything that gets into the data center, we only need a single sensor in the data center. However, if we want to go in-depth in every store, then it will be a long process because we'll have to deploy thousands of sensors.

Right now, our license is for 10,000 IPs, and we hope to increase it to 110,000. If we deploy Vectra AI in the warehouse as well, we will need 25,000 extra. When we upgrade the brain server, Vectra AI should be able to scale accordingly.

When I contacted technical support, they usually take control of my laptop for an hour or more, and I can't do anything during that time. They do not explain anything and mute themselves for an hour or more. I don't know what they're doing or if they're even working on the issue.

However, they have been proactive because they know we have issues with our brain. If I have a bug, I've noticed that they usually respond quickly.

Thus, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate technical support at six.

Neutral

I've done four deployments in total, and Vectra AI is easy to deploy. On the admin interface, it's also easy to set up the integration with EDR.

It is an expensive solution, but it's not the most expensive we've seen. We also know how much we're going to pay, unlike with some other providers where all of a sudden our license explodes.

We will probably need to deploy over a thousand physical sensors. This means that the cost will automatically go up to millions. They do not sell the smallest sensors that they had in the past, which we would be glad to have right now.

We looked at ExtraHop, a VMware NDR solution, Carbon Black, and a solution from a French organization.

Carbon Black is oriented around VMware products. As such, it would have been okay for the data center, but we would have had to upgrade the entire physical infrastructure inside the data center. It would have been very expensive, and thus, we eliminated Carbon Black. The French competitor was eliminated because the solution was a few years behind.

We then talked with Vectra AI and were happy with what they offered us. We spoke with other companies that use it and found out that they were happy with it. Thus, Vectra AI got the opportunity to do the proof of concept.

Overall, I would rate Vectra AI an eight out of ten.

We have a basic Vectra environment because we mainly only use the NDR for the solution's options. We do mainly filled logins, anomalies, and network flow monitoring.

Vectra AI helped improve our mean time to identify by allowing us to have visibility and reveal some hidden or unknown things.

Vectra AI has had a positive impact on the productivity of our SOC team which is an external party. It as well had a positive impact on our IT environment for detection purposes, adapting, and hardening.

The fact that we get the visualization of what's happening on our network, which is a way of improving our security in-depth is most valuable. That's because with the information we get out of Vectra, we know how to adapt and modify things in our network.

Regarding Vectra AI attack signal intelligence, it is providing us with information on how to adapt or protect ourselves against certain attack vectors. This feature is quite helpful.

I think Vectra AI's automation, reporting, and integration could be improved.

I have been using this solution for two years now.

It's stable as it performs as we expected.

If you have enough power or bandwidth to deploy another sensor, the scalability of this solution shouldn't be very complex.

I would rate the technical support of the Vectra AI solution a seven, on a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. The reason for this rating is that they always deliver what we expect and that's good enough for us. The reason that the rating is not a ten, is that we always need to let people improve themselves.

Neutral

I joined the deployment project at a later stage and I worked on deploying the sensors and tuning false positives and similar things. My experience when it comes to deployment was quite good as we had good hands-on engineers which is why the implementation went well. Our deployment was straightforward with our hands-on approach.

When it comes to ROI, in certain places we saw the return and in certain places we didn't. When it comes to security investments and tooling of security, the return on investment takes a bit longer and you always see your investment back. At one point something will happen and you will start using the tool for the reason you bought it.

Before Vectra, we didn't have any feasibility of our network net flow, so this solution gives us a better view of what has been happening on our network and this is what we're trying to solve by implementing Vectra.

We are not using the flood detection response platform.

We are not using Vectra MDR services.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven, on a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best.