IBM Security QRadar Reviews

I'm an administrator. I have been leading the security operation center for the past four years. I have more than 12 members or SOC analysts for our 24/7 operations. I have been pitching the solutions to multiple customers, and I have also designed, implemented, and administered customer projects and completed them at the specified timeline.

We have many use cases. The most common use cases are related to insights into any threats from the inside and outside. I have also configured X-Force with QRadar, and we are getting all the feeds showing malware-based IPs, etc. I also have designed some anomaly-based rules in case anyone has logged in from outside Pakistan. Most of the rules are custom-based.

The QNI feature is the one I am very interested in, and I have also been interested in Watson. From the log analysis and the security perspective, we are able to dive deep into any of the logs and anomalies.

It is user-friendly, and it is easy to develop. If you know the architecture, what to develop, and how to get the output for your results, you can easily work with it.

I have also been working with other SIEM solutions, and I have observed that they have extensive Linux-based and Unix-based integrations. They have been able to support some of the Linux-based agents, which is useful to investigate and process the information on the Linux and Unix side.

It could have pre-defined automation and integration of all those device parameters that analysts have to share manually.

It is stable.

I would rate them a 3.5 out of 5.

It is not very difficult. I have done more than 10 deployments, and I have integrated and developed custom applications. I have also developed a Python-based script to support me with the things that IBM cannot support. I am using that script from the health check perspective. It gives me a high-level and low-level overview of QRadar with respect to the rules that have been triggered and the notifications that have been generated and how to tune them.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

When it sends the log source, QRadar generates a lot of noise and false positives. LogRhythm logs when the alarm rules are disabled, so it doesn't generate any noise when sending the log source. I think LogRhythm's one, this one too. QRadar, we have to cure it all the time. It's only this advantage with QRadar.

I would also like to see more integration with other vendors. IBM doesn't integrate well with products from China, like Huawei. Many Middle Eastern customers are switching to Huawei from American vendors like Cisco because of the price. In most RFPs, Huawei wins because it costs less. 

IBM needs to integrate better with Huawei. I opened one case with IBM, and they told me to submit a request for enhancement so they could write the correct DSMs to integrate with Huawei. We were very disappointed. Customers who want to implement QRadar or LogRhythm need to consider all the other components. The environment needs to be homogenous to avoid problems due to a lack of integration.

My old company used QRadar, so I still use it sometimes when I consult for them. They get stuck on a few things. I also worked on vulnerability discovery. Right now, my current customers are migrating from QRadar to LogRhythm.

QRadar is built around Red Hat Linux, which is highly robust.

IBM's support for QRadar could be improved. Sometimes it takes them two days to reply to a low-priority case. However, it tasks them about 1.5 hours to respond to a more serious case. Sometimes our customer service will think it's a priority one case, so he asks me to open it as priority one, then IBM reduces it to two or three. 

We don't have any security appliances from Huawei, but they have the best technical support. We have engineers everywhere with CRM, and they call you after the problem is resolved. IBM closes the case, and that's it. It's a very restricted environment. 

QRadar is reasonable compared to LogRhythm.

I rate IBM QRadar nine out of 10. If you're going to use QRadar, you have to be familiar with it and know all the components. IBM offers free appliances, like data nodes, that offload many processes from the collectors and the processors. 

Every engineer must understand the overall portfolio to add some value to the solutions. If a solution isn't integrated with other solutions, they are only collectors. You need to tune the rules and be up to date with the Mitre Att&ck framework all the time.

QRadar is our SIEM solution. Our use cases include authentication between logins, database security, monitoring, and user behavior analytics.

QRadar is helping us to identify ongoing, day-to-day threats. We use it to analyze the risk in our environment, including user behaviors. We can easily monitor many things using this tool.

All of the features offered by this product are useful for analysis. Essentially, everything that it offers is critical and we use it.

Several things need to be improved.

We have been struggling with the QRadar support team for quite a long time. There are things that they can reproduce in their lab environment and can fix, yet we struggled with them trying to get this done. These issues included things like custom logs. There are many things that they need to improve upon.

This product should support multiple log sources.

They need to improve their threat intelligence feed and they need to improve their user behavior analytics modules.

The risk manager module needs to be improved.

It's not a very user-friendly interface.

I have been working with IBM QRadar for seven years.

IBM QRadar is quite stable.

We have approximately 50 users and we keep expanding its usage. It is growing on the infrastructure level, as well as the EPS level.

Three or four administrators are all that is required for the maintenance.

I recommend this product for large enterprises.

We have had a lot of trouble with technical support. As of late, they take too long to respond to our issues. For 99% of our issues, they take too long to respond. It's not instant.

I do not have any experience with other SIEM solutions. QRadar is the first one for me.

The initial setup is complex because it is not managed properly.

Our implementation strategy is based on it being a distributed environment.

We completed the implementation and deployment ourselves.

We did not evaluate other options prior to selecting QRadar.

This is a good product for large enterprises. Smaller companies should implement an open-source solution but for a large enterprise, QRadar is a good product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are a product-based organization. We use this solution for a shared SOC service and security audits and compliance.

There are a lot of features in QRadar. App Exchange is the most valuable feature. User behavior analytics (UBA) is also a very good feature. Watson is also there, but we are not currently using Watson.

It is versatile and quite easy. It also has an all-in-one-box feature and good integration with AWS. 

SOAR is what is expected the most from QRadar. They have something called SOAR Resilient, and it would be great if that gets induced in SIEM. IBM QRadar (as well as McAfee ESM) should have analytics platform integration. Currently, SIEMs don't have full-fledged integration with analytics where we are able to dump our data in SIEM, and the same data can be called from different analytics applications. We should be able to bring this data to a platform like Hadoop for big data and run the analytics there. Currently, people are seeing the past data and taking some actions in the present, but when it comes to analytics, there should be futuristic data where you can predict something out of your present and past data. Apart from that, I would like to see a full-fledged ITSM tool in QRadar.

It sometimes has some technical issues that need to be checked. It requires a dedicated QRadar engineer to completely manage it. It has different module sets, such as event collector and event processor, and some technical glitches come in between. It takes the log but doesn't exactly process it in the way we want. 

If its pricing can be reduced, it would help a lot of customers in bringing in a new SIEM environment.

It is stable. There are no incidents when SIEM completely stopped. 

I have expanded it. It is very good in terms of scalability. Because it is on the cloud, it can be scaled anytime. If I want to increase my CPU's RAM, I can do it. At any point in time, if I want to get additional licenses, I can just call support, and they will provide that.

I have around six customers who are using QRadar in a shared model. We do have plans to increase its usage. We are looking after different customers, and when they're ready, we can integrate it.

They are good and responsive. However, because of COVID, of late everyone is working from home, and sometimes, their response has been a little bit slow for incidents. They did apologize for that.

It is straightforward. AWS has a feature called Marketplace in its environment. When we click it, we can load it directly. It doesn't take more than two to three days to completely deploy the infrastructure. 

They can give us some scalability and flexibility on pricing. If its pricing can be reduced, it would help a lot of customers in bringing in a new SIEM environment and grow business in the market. If I start a license today and take around 10,000 EPS, and after a month, there is an increase in the number of clients on my platform, I can increase the number of licenses. I can add 5,000 EPS on a yearly basis.

We chose QRadar over McAfee ESM.

It has good integration with AWS. AWS has come up with a Marketplace click-in option that provides direct integration between your AWS and data centers or cloud solutions through a small VPN. It allows you to bring up small environments with 5,000 EPS or 6,000 EPS or even 3,500 EPS or 2,500 EPS very quickly. It is very flexible and not at all tough for a startup engineer to click and bring solutions inside. It is quite easy.

I would rate IBM QRadar an eight out of ten.

I am a system integrator. We have installed it on-premises, on the cloud, in distributed environments, and all other environments for our clients.

We have worked with other solutions, such as LogRhythm and Splunk. Compared to others, IBM QRadar has the best price-performance ratio so that you are able to reserve minimum costs. It starts settling in fast and gets the first results very quickly. It is also very scalable.

There are a lot of things they are working on and a lot of technologies that are not yet there. They should probably work out a better reserve with their ecosystem of business partners and create wider and more in-depth qualities, third-party tools, and add-ons. These things really give immediate business value. For instance, there are many limitations in using SAP, EBS, or Micro-Dynamics. A lot of things that are happening in those platforms could also be monitored and allowed from the cybersecurity risks perspective. IBM might be leaving this gap or empty space for business partners. Some larger organizations might already be doing this.

It would be very nice if IBM can make some artificial intelligence part free of charge for all current QRadar users. This would be a big advantage as compared to other competitors.

There are companies that are going in different directions. Of course, you can't do everything inside QRadar. In general, it might be very good for all players to provide more use cases, especially regarding data protection and leakage prevention. There are some who are already doing some kind of file integrity or gathering some more information from all possible technologies for building anything related to the user and data analysis, content analysis, and management regarding the data protection.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

If the engineers are missing some technical knowledge from IBM documentation, then it might get interesting, but you can always rollback. Usually, when you are implementing innovations, as a system integrator, you usually do less on the test environment, and then you check if this works. If bigger organizations and customers want to do it by themselves, they should really stick to this approach and use a lot of material, community pages, and channels.

There is absolutely no problem with scalability. It works very fine, especially when you are running just clients. It doesn't matter how many variants you have all across the culture. You can practically have different continents. It doesn't matter how many collectors are running. You can easily distribute the current license to multiple users, and all the collectors can upload it without any restrictions.

We have worked with other solutions. Splunk is a long-term trap because it is very expensive, and it gets more and more expensive. It has different times, and it is integrated with different products. When you combine that together with licensing, it obviously fails. You are paying a lot more than QRadar.

LogRhythm has some problems with stability. We were the first partner to do some integrations with LogRhythm, but we had some problems. ArcSight was smaller at the time but not anymore. It is now a competitor. Fortinet is very good for those who are already using some software products from them.

It usually happens within two or three hours, but it also depends on the preparation. If good homework is done, then the initial setup is totally flawless. It is ready very soon. We then try it and wait for maybe a couple of days more. After that, we start fine-tuning, and then we do advanced installations.

For us, such projects usually don't start without any experience with technology and the concepts. When you are buying it, you need to know all the information systems, create a list of tasks and priorities, and understand the use case better. 

A lot of such innovations or implementations initially can be done by one person, two persons, or maybe a team of five dedicated administrators who later on will be using this technology or solution. You need to understand that there are different roles of people who are working with cybersecurity and threat management, such as an analyst, a simple technical maintenance performer, an administrator, a user behavior analyst, etc.

It is not something like a next-generation firewall, next-generation intrusion prevention, or the most complex tool that you have got, which you can install and configure and then see if it runs smoothly. It is a completely different story in QRadar or any similar technology. These solutions or technologies have to be managed continuously. 

The biggest mistake that innovations people usually make is that they don't plan the total cost of the technology tools for a period of five years, especially because they don't know what kind of new threats are coming out. Despite that, IBM is very early in doing some kind of new content packs and including data enforcement, etc. When new threats are coming in, you effectively need to adjust. The more complex use cases you have, the more complex the responses will be. You might have different systems or you might be working in different time zones.

When buying, people think that 70% to 80% percent of the initial purchase is the total they are going to spend within next year at this time, and then every next year, they will spend like 20% or 25% on the technical support, maintenance, development of the system, etc. When you are talking about a huge, complex, and central cybersecurity threat management system, it is more likely that you are implementing a document management system and some complex CIP systems, etc. The cost of the license and the cost of the hardware initially can make up around 20%, 30%, or less percent of the total budget that is needed for quality management of such solutions for a longer period of time. 

Some people think that if they buy this for 100,000 pounds or euros, the next year, they can buy just annual subscriptions for 25,000 or 20,000. You may have some internal costs for the license, etc. If you are buying for, let's say, 100,000, you might have to make your budget for 200,000 more, because it needs to have certain people who are doing everything with the solution. You need to train them and send them to the IBM international technology academies and events such as Visor to know about its management and maintenance. You probably also need to do some certification, so you need to go for a course for implementation. A lot of internal work should be done to adjust the solution with other departments, and those other departments usually don't like such central, overseeing, and controlled solution. They, later on, learn that they can get a lot of different, useful reports out of it without doing additional work. 

I would rate IBM QRadar an eight out of ten. Every technology has some weaknesses and strengths. It has a lot of points to improve, but based on everything that we have seen in the market and from other customers, this is, so far, at least in Europe, the best solution.

The tool helps with infrastructure, application, and network monitoring. 

There are areas in IBM Security QRadar that could benefit from improvement. Its ability to customize knowledge for specific purposes could be enhanced. Also, it lacks clarity in presenting details. It is also difficult to see the reports. 

I have been using the product for a year. 

The tool's technical support is good. 

Neutral

Implementing IBM Security QRadar is not overly complex. 

The product is expensive. We have purchased the perpetual license, but we pay for the support. 

I rate the tool a seven out of ten. It is a tough product. 

The most valuable features currently are the security behaviors and pdf files.

I would like to see more integration in place after the security lock.

I have been using IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics for a couple of years now.

The product is very stable.

The initial setup was straightforward and took three to four months to deploy.

We used a vendor team to assist us in the process of deployment.

I would rate IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is providing visibility for what occurs in our security system and IT assets. So all our event logs and information from a setting and criticality level go there. Additionally, there's AI used to trigger alerts when things are going bad, and then we can action them.

We find predictive analysis capabilities valuable.

The solution should include remote action capabilities.

We have been using the solution for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. Over 1,000 people in our organization use the solution.

The initial setup is moderate, and it is neither easy nor difficult. However, it took approximately one week to complete the implementation.

We implemented it through a vendor team.

We chose this solution because it was provided to us through software as a service.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved with enhanced remote control ability. I recommend the solution to new users considering it.