Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Pros & Cons summary

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.
Get the report

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Arista NDR's query language facilitates rapid and effective searches for network threats, making it possible to interrogate network records with ease.
The Security Knowledge Graph on Arista NDR meaningfully displays information, enhancing users' ability to quickly locate necessary data.
Encrypted traffic analysis by Arista NDR helps ensure compliance with government regulations by clearly tracking data transfers within the network, particularly through encryption methods.
Arista NDR provides robust monitoring of the network activities of insiders, contractors, partners, and suppliers, excelling in endpoint identification and correlation.
Through its threat-hunting services, Arista NDR proactively assists organizations by leveraging data insights not only from their network but also from others, enhancing preventive security measures.

CONS

Arista NDR's query language could be more user-friendly, especially for new users, and it should be more natural language-based.
There is a need for improvements in handling encrypted traffic and exploring alternative approaches since decrypting encrypted traffic is not feasible.
Arista NDR currently lacks the capability to import STIX/TAXII in an IOC format.
Integration with multiple tools is limited, requiring analysts to work separately, and needs improvement for seamless operation.
Entity resolution in Arista NDR is unreliable, with issues in correctly identifying device activities and merging devices into one entity profile incorrectly.
 

Arista NDR Pros review quotes

JC
Chief Security Officer with 51-200 employees
May 7, 2019
The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly.
RP
Senior Security Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Sep 10, 2019
The query language makes it easy to query the records on the network, to do searches for the various threat activities that we're looking for. The dashboard, the Security Knowledge Graph, displays information meaningfully and easily. I am able to find the information that I want to find pretty quickly.
reviewer1217625 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Cyber Threat Operations at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Oct 28, 2019
Other solutions will say, "Hey, this device is doing something weird." But they don't aggregate that data point with other data points. With Awake you have what's called a "fact pattern." For example, if there's a smart toaster on the third floor that is beaconing out to an IP address in North Korea, sure that's bizarre. But if that toaster was made in North Korea it's not bizarre. Taking those two data points together, and automating something using machine-learning is something that no other solution is doing right now.
Learn what your peers think about Arista NDR. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
KL
Director of Information Security at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Feb 3, 2020
This solution’s encrypted traffic analysis helps us stay in compliance with government regulations. It is all about understanding data exfiltration, what is ingressing and egressing in our network. One common attack vector is exfiltrating data using encryption. My capabilities to see potential data exfiltration over encrypted traffic is second to none now.
reviewer1342227 - PeerSpot reviewer
CISO at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
May 3, 2020
This solution help us monitor devices used on our network by insiders, contractors, partners, or suppliers. Its correlation and identification of specific endpoints is very good, especially since we have a large, virtualized environment. It discerns this fairly well. Some of the issues that we have had with other tools is we sometimes are not able to tell the difference between users on some of those virtualized instances.
EE
Chief Information Security Officer at Dolby Laboratories
Jul 16, 2020
The security knowledge graph has been very helpful in the sense that whenever you try a new security solution, especially one that's in the detection and response market, you're always worried about getting a lot of false positives or getting too many alerts and not being able to pick out the good from the bad or things that are actual security incidents versus normal day to day operations. We've been pleasantly surprised that Awake does a really good job of only alerting about things that we actually want to look into and understand. They do a good job of understanding normal operations out-of-the-box.
DS
Senior Analyst Security and Compliance at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Jul 23, 2020
We appreciate the value of the AML (structured query language). We receive security intel feeds for a specific type of malware or ransomware. AML queries looking for the activity is applied in almost real-time. Ultimately, this determines if the activity was not observed on the network.
reviewer1486446 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Security Officer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jan 14, 2021
The most valuable portion is that they offer a threat-hunting service. Using their platform, and all of the data that they're collecting, they actually help us be proactive by having really expert folks that have insight, not just into our accounts, but into other accounts as well. They can be proactive and say, 'Well, we saw this incident at some other customer. We ran that same kind of analysis for you and we didn't see that type of activity in your network.'
reviewer1467852 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Projects and IT at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
Feb 4, 2021
It gives us something that is almost like an auditing tool for all of our network controls, to see how they are performing. This is related to compliance so that we can see how we are doing with what we have already implemented. There are things that we implemented, but we really didn't know if they were working or not. We have that visibility now.
reviewer1506834 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Information Security at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Feb 10, 2021
The query language that they have is quite valuable, especially because the sensor itself is storing some network activity and we're able to query that. That has been useful in a pinch because we don't necessarily use it just for threat hunting, but we also use it for debugging network issues. We can use it to ask questions and get answers about our network. For example: Which users and devices are using the VPN for RDP access? We can write a query pretty quickly and get an answer for that.
 

Arista NDR Cons review quotes

JC
Chief Security Officer with 51-200 employees
May 7, 2019
There's room for improvement with some of the definitions, because I don't have time and I'm not a Tier 4 analyst. I believe that is something they're working towards.
RP
Senior Security Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Sep 10, 2019
I enjoy the query language, but it could be a bit more user-friendly, especially for new users who come across it... They should push it more into a natural language style as opposed to a query language.
reviewer1217625 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Cyber Threat Operations at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Oct 28, 2019
I would like to see a bit more in terms of encrypted traffic. With the advent of programs that live off the land, a smart attacker is going to leverage encryption to execute their operation. So I would like to see improvements there, where possible. Currently, we're not going to be decrypting encrypted traffic. What other approaches could be used?
Learn what your peers think about Arista NDR. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
KL
Director of Information Security at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Feb 3, 2020
I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this.
reviewer1342227 - PeerSpot reviewer
CISO at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
May 3, 2020
Be prepared to update your SOPs to have your analysts work in another tool separately. There are some limitations in the integrations right now. One of the things that I want from a security standpoint is integration with multiple tools so I don't need to have my analysts logging into each individual tool.
EE
Chief Information Security Officer at Dolby Laboratories
Jul 16, 2020
They've been focused on really developing their data science, their ability to detect, but over time, they need to be able to tie into other systems because other systems might detect something that they don't.
DS
Senior Analyst Security and Compliance at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Jul 23, 2020
Awake Security needs to move to a 24/7 support model in the MNDR space. Once they do that, it will make them even better.
reviewer1486446 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Security Officer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jan 14, 2021
When I looked at the competitors, such as Darktrace, they all have prettier interfaces. If Awake could make it a little more user-friendly, that would go a long way.
reviewer1467852 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Projects and IT at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
Feb 4, 2021
While the appliance is very good, and I think they're working on it, it would probably help if they integrated the management team cases into the appliance so that everything we are working on with them would be accessible on our platform, on the dashboard, on the portal. Right now, Awake is just an additional team that uses the appliance that we use and then we communicate with them directly. Communication isn't through the portal.
reviewer1506834 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Information Security at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Feb 10, 2021
One concern I do have with Awake is that, ideally, it should be able identify high-risk users and devices and entities. However, we don't have confidence in their entity resolution, and we've provided this feedback to Awake. My understanding is that this is where some of the AI/ML is, and it hasn't been reliable in correctly identifying which device an activity is associated with. We have also encountered issues where it has merged two devices into one entity profile when they shouldn't be merged. The entity resolution is the weakest point of Awake so far.