IBM Security QRadar Reviews

IBM QRadar is used to help our customers collect information. It collects the information from other tools on the firewall, network devices, cyber tools with both Carbon Black, Cortex, Cynet, and Darktrace.

It's a complete platform.

The interface is good.

They have more than 100 features.

It is not easy to use.

The updates are not very easy. It is very complex. I would like to see the update process simplified.

When I said "it is not easy to use", I mean that QRadar is not for beginners.
Needs high competence and skyll to use it in a satisfactory way to really help customers.
The complexity is not a flaw, but it si a necessary quality for QRadar to be a truly effective tool in a Cyber environement.

We have used IBM QRadar within the last twelve months.

IBM QRadar is a stable solution.

It's a scalable platform.

Technical support is good.

Pricing is good.

I would rate IBM QRadar an eight out of ten.

We are users and implementers of this solution. 

I like the new dashboard which enables us to understand how many real threat attempts are made in a day. I also like the QRadar incident response, we installed the QIF last week. The solution has improved visibility so that we've been able to discover that some of our customers have not had any protection and were very vulnerable. It's an important area. I also find that the user behavior analysis is relatively simple. We are customers of QRadar. 

I think the user management model is very detailed but you really have to know what you're doing just to be able to manage things. I think the solution lacks some maturity. When you put it in a large organization as a security system or a cybersecurity system and you want to enable automation, it's difficult to get that level of maturity. 

We've been using this solution for about 18 months.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. We have a total of 19 users in the company. The solution is used extensively and we plan to increase the number of users. 

The technical support could be better. I'd rather work with my implementing expert and not the OEM. Although they have the expertise, the development guys are very slow.

We tested a few other solutions including AlienVault, Splunk, Micro Focus, and Outside. QRadar was the best of the breed for our needs and for a big system like ours, it's less complex than Splunk or Outside. 

The initial setup is complex. Theory is one thing and practice is another. We had to go back and forth with IBM just to find the relevant versions with the relevant operating system to sit on the relevant virtual environment. Then we found a few bugs. We are in a production system in a very big organization so deployment was carried out in stages. It took about a month in total to get things working and to start collecting logs. We had help from IBM Azure.
Maintenance is required, you have to watch it, and work on it on a daily basis. 

We pay an annual license fee. On top of that, every model adds to the cost. It's not just the license; the sales people want you to think you're only paying for certain things but we know how it works. 

The pre-design and the low-level design should be very, very, specific. It's important to check that the compatibility is there. If not, neither IBM nor OEM will support you.

I would rate the solution more highly but it's very expensive and given the high cost, I would expect quicker and better service from the OEM so I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

We're a customer, partner, or reseller. We use QRadar on our own internal SOC. We are also a reseller of QRadar for some of the projects. So, we sell QRadar to customers, and we're also a partner because we have different models. We roll the product out to a customer as part of our service where we own it, but the customer is paying. We also do a full deployment that a customer owns. So, we are actually fulfilling all three roles.

The most valuable thing about QRadar is that you have a single window into your network, SIEM, network flows, and risk management of your assets. If you use Splunk, for instance, then you still need a full packet capture solution, whereas the full packet capture solution is integrated within QRadar. Its application ecosystem makes it very powerful in terms of doing analysis.

In terms of the GUI, they need to improve the consistency. It has been written by different teams at different times. So, when you go around the interface, you'll find a lot of inconsistencies in terms of the way it works.

I'd like them to improve the offense. When QRadar detects something, it creates what it calls offenses. So, it has a rudimentary ticketing system inside of it. This is the same interface that was there when I started using it 12 years ago. It just has not been improved. They do allow integration with IBM Resilient, but IBM Resilient is grotesquely expensive. The most effective integration that IBM offers today is with IBM Resilient, which is an instant response platform. It is a very good platform, but it is very expensive. They really should do something with the offense handling because it is very difficult to scale, and it has limitations. The maximum number of offenses that it can carry is 16K. After 16K, you have to flush your offenses out. So, it is all or nothing. You lose all your offenses up until that point in time, and you don't have any history within the offense list of older events. If you're dealing with multiple customers, this becomes problematic. That's why you need to use another product to do the actual ticketing. If you wanted the ticket existence, you would normally interface with ServiceNow, SolarWinds, or some other product like that. 

Their support should also be improved. Their support is very slow, and it is very difficult to find knowledgeable people within IBM.

Its price and licensing should be improved. It is overly expensive and overly complex in terms of licensing. 

I have been using this solution for 12 years.

Their support is very slow. it is very difficult to find knowledgeable people within IBM. I'm an expert in the use of QRadar, and I know the technical insights of QRadar very well, but it is sometimes very painful to deal with IBM's support and actually get them to do something. Their support is very difficult to work with for some customers.

I work with Prelude, which is by a French company. It is a basic beginner's SIEM. If you never had a SIEM before and you wanted to experiment, this is where you would start, but it is probably that you would leave very quickly. I've also worked with ArcSight and Splunk.

My recommendation would depend upon your technical appetite or your technical capability. QRadar is essentially a Linux-based Red Hat appliance. Unfortunately, you still need some Linux knowledge to work with this effectively. Not everything is through the GUI. 

Comparing it with Splunk, in terms of licensing, IBM's model is simpler than Splunk's model. Splunk has two models. One is volume metrics, so you pay for the number of bytes that are transmitted daily. The other one is based upon the number of events per second, which they introduced relatively recently. Splunk can be more expensive than QRadar when you start to get into adding what they call indexes. So, basically, you create specific indexes to hold, for instance, logs related to Cisco. This is implicit within QRadar, and it is designed that way, but within Splunk, if you want to get that performance and you have large volumes of logs, you need to create indexes. This is where the cost of Splunk can escalate.

Installing QRadar is very simple. You insert a DVD, boot the system, and it runs the installation after asking you a few questions. It runs pretty much automatically, and then you're up and going. From an installation point of view, it is very easy.

The only thing that you have to get right before you do the installation is your architecture because it has event collectors, event processes, flow collectors, flow processes, and a number of other components. You need to understand where they should be placed. If you want more storage, then you need to place data nodes on the ends of the processes. All this is something that you need to have in mind when you design and deploy.

It is overly expensive and overly complex in terms of licensing. They have many different appliances, which makes it extremely difficult to choose the technology. It is very difficult to choose the technology or QRadar components that you should be deploying. 

They have improved some of it in the last few years. They have made it slightly easy with the fact that you can now buy virtual versions of all the appliances, which is good, but it is still very fragmented. For instance, on some of the smaller appliances, there is no upgrade path. So, if you exceed the capacity of the appliance, you have to buy a bigger appliance, which is not helpful because it is quite a major cost. If you want to add more disks to the system, they'll say that you can't. If they ship a disk with 2 terabytes that the older appliances have, and you say to them that you can commercially get 10 terabyte disks, they will say this is not possible, even though there is no technical reason why it cannot be done. So, they're not very flexible from that point of view. For IBM, it is good because you basically have to buy new appliances, but from a customer's point of view, it is a very expensive investment.

Make sure that you have the buy-in from different teams in the company because you will need help from the network teams. You will potentially need help from IT. 

You need to have a strategy of how you onboard logs into SIEM. Do you take a risk-based approach or do you onboard everything? You should take the time to understand the architecture and the implications of design choices. For instance, QRadar Components communicate with each other using SSH tunnels. The normal practice in security is that if I put a device in a DMZ, then communication between the device on the normal network, which is a higher security zone, and the DMZ, which is a lower security zone, will be initiated from the high-security zone. You would not expect the device in the DMZ to initiate communication back into the normal network. In the case of QRadar, if you put your processes in the DMZ, then it has to communicate with the console, which means that you have to allow the processor to communicate. This has consequences. If you have remote sites or you plan to use cloud-based processes, collectors, etc, and have an internal console, the same communication channels have to exist. So, it requires some careful planning. That's the main thing.

I would rate QRadar an eight out of 10 as compared to other products.

The solution is primarily used for threat detection and response. QRadar can be integrated with other services from IBM such as Watson, among others. The main need is for threat detection, incident response, and dealing with threats or hunting threats. 

What else? I mean, it's always you're looking for threats. Usually, whoever buys this SIM solution or buys QRadar, for example, is looking for hidden threats and they get the logs to see what's happening within their system. They want a solution that looks very deep inside in order to correlate those logs and see if there's any information that they can get out of those logs or even live packets that are spanning through their networks. Therefore, it's usually threat hunting. That's the main thing, Others might use it to understand the system, and how it's performing overall.  However, that's the lesser use case.

Inside IBM QRadar there are a lot of engines that actually work to help us to do the correlation and normalization as well for the logs that we're receiving from multiple devices. IBM is very powerful in that regard. 

QRadar, as a solution, can integrate with a lot of other applications. You can write your own custom rules if you want to. We can ask it to detect whatever we want it to, even with the devices that are not supported to send logs. IBM QRadar can understand these types of commands and we can still integrate and write our own rules to help us to detect those logs that are coming from, for example, IoT devices or from other devices that usually we don't understand.

It can handle really a huge number of logs with fewer false positives. We can use the artificial intelligence and the rules that IBM is providing to make it really smart. The solution can help you predict even the false positives when we are alerting the admin or the security admin about some offenses that we have seen from the logs.

Their product is very user-friendly.

Customer service is very good and very helpful.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

The solution can scale.

The solution is very stable.

As per Gartner, maybe the price makes it so that the customers are not going for IBM QRadar. It's a little bit pricey compared to other solutions in the market. More or less that's the area that needs to be improved. That's usually the main concern that we receive from the customers - that it's a little bit pricey. That's the only thing I can say.

The custom rules could be simplified more or it should be possible to use a different language, other than the ones that the solution is already using. They should add other languages into the mix. You need some advanced customers in order to use the custom rules or to use their rules in order to configure the IBM QRadar in a proper way. Usually, they find it very difficult, especially if they don't have the experience.

Sometimes it works and catches whatever we want, however, sometimes it doesn't work. That's in rare cases, however, that's one thing that they need to maybe enhance.

I've been working with the solution for three years or so.

For stability, I'm not a customer who's using it on daily basis, however, from feedback that I'm getting from the customers who are attending to the solution, I've heard that this solution is stable. That's why it's in the leader area in Gartner. If you compare it to others in Gartner, it shows how their product is actually efficient. Whether I get QRadar, whether it's Splunk, whether it's LogRhythm, all of those products as a SIM are very good at that point. They're all quite reliable.

The scalability is very good. The product is scalable. A company shouldn't have trouble expanding it if they need to.

We typically work with banks and bigger organizations.

Technical support has been very good. They are helpful and responsive.

I've also learned a lot from the documentation, especially the online documentation. Due to the fact that I'm an official instructor for IBM, I have my other resources too, on the Learning Center from IBM. Documentation is not a problem. It's very helpful.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. It's quite easy.

The deployment takes time, definitely. You've got to prepare for your solution so that it's going to work in spanning all the other devices too. That doesn't mean it's a complex process, it just means it takes a bit.

IBM QRadar is pricey, and therefore, usually small enterprises are not able to afford it. Usually, probably most of the customers are usually large enterprises.

I'm actually teaching IBM and some services such as IBM QRadar, as part of my work. I'm familiar with Splunk, however, I'm not working with it on a daily basis. I'm teaching that technology to others. I'm not a customer. I'm using it for teaching purposes. I'm working in a training center. I'm not dealing with it on a daily basis, however, I understand how the product works. We do sometimes help integrate it and work as consultants occasionally as well.

While 7.4 is out, we're currently working with version 7.3.

Overall, I would rate the product at an eight out of ten. There's more to be done on it, however, we are mostly pleased with its capabilities.

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.

We provide cloud services to the users, and we have our own cloud setup over here. The major use case is when clients require the SOC to be set up.

Setting up the SOC itself is a huge investment. A customer has to invest a lot to build up the whole SOC environment, so, rather than the customer investing in the SOC environment and building up the SOC, we provide it as a service. Customers don't need to do any up-front investment. They use our service. We manage their security tools and security environment as per the compliance guidelines that come from the Indian government. We follow all those practices, and we help them procure more for their network and infrastructure.

QRadar, Splunk, and ArcSight are SIEM solutions with built-in AI/ML features. They can do the complete investigation and alert the admin about what is happening. They can also do the root cause analysis. 

There are many other features that come with QRadar. It has a more granular log, so you can integrate with various non-IT as well as IT-based components. You can get unstructured data to the SIEM data, and you can identify more what is happening in the network or what is happening in the central head office. You can also identify what is happening between your remote offices. You can also use it to identify what the users in the field are doing on their devices and how things are moving.

From the integration point of view, it is very centric. It gives complete control centrally. If a user is not connected to the system, whenever he comes online, we can see the policy updates over the Internet, and we can ensure that the data that is supposed to be protected is protected.

When it comes to what could be better, it is always what others are trying to do and what is the roadmap. It can have more integration. It should have more flexible RESTful APIs for integration with applications. These are the things that are always in demand for any of the SIEM solutions, not only for QRadar. 

Integration is ever-evolving. Nowadays, different versions of mobile handsets are there and data is getting scattered. Users are using their personal handsets to keep the data of the organization. So, it should have a more flexible integration, irrespective of the flavor of the firmware and iOS or Android version. It should have an API that can seamlessly get integrated. It should also provide more flexible control and a more advanced or analytical view to see what exactly is happening across the globe or network. From wherever a user is connecting and accessing the enterprise data, it should give real-time visibility and predictive visibility about what exactly is happening. These things are already there, but there should be more advanced control in terms of managing the security.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is absolutely stable. It depends upon how the implementation has been done. We definitely have the skills to do this kind of implementation. We ensure that a customer's environment is absolutely protected.

It is very scalable, but it also depends upon how the implementation was done. We are providing services to one of the major brands in India. They have somewhere around 30,000 devices. We are currently managing more than 1 lakh QRadar users.

QRadar has a good technical team. They provide timely support whenever a ticket is raised.

Deployment of such solutions always takes time because these solutions are not simple. You should have the expertise and you should understand what is really needed for the business. We understand the real business need, and accordingly, we implement the policies.

We have been managing some of the security tools for the past 11 years. We have expert engineers who can help our customers with installation, configuration, planning, designing, and other things.

If you have an environment of 5,000 or 10,000 devices, three to five people should be enough to manage it.

Customers have to purchase a license based on the number of users, devices, and applications they want to protect. It allows you to take a license on a subscription basis for three years or five years.

I would recommend this solution. If you are looking for a SIEM solution, IBM QRadar is one that you should ideally look for.

I would rate IBM QRadar a nine 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.

It is used to dive deep into threat analysis. It is a SIEM solution that can be hooked up with some of the endpoint security or threat discovery solutions such as Forescout, Qualys, Sophos, and MDM. After the endpoint security or threat discovery solution discovers the threat, QRadar takes it further from that point onwards and allows you to go deep into the threat analysis. It has a lot of integrations, such as with CMDB, and it can do the asset classification. It can also tell the CVSS score. These are the capabilities or use cases. 

Integrations are quite a useful and key feature of this solution. It has integration with the CVSS score, which is a central point for all the data and scores about the threats. There is an IBM Bluemix dashboard that is integrated with the CVSS score.

I don't look at only the features and benefits; I also look at the price. It is a bit expensive when compared with other solutions. It is expensive for specific deployment topologies, and the decision-makers go for alternatives like ArcSight. 

It should also have more AI features or capabilities for better threat intelligence. The more it uses machine learning, the better would be the dashboard, analytics, and other things.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

You can scale it easily in the cloud with a given deployment topology. We have somewhere around 50 plus users.

IBM is very strong on the technical support side. They have proper support available across different regions. After the implementation is done, the admin within the organization is in touch with IBM technical support for any day-to-day support requirements.

We have been switching for some time between Micro Focus ArcSight and IBM QRadar.

For cloud deployment, you need to go for IBM Bluemix Cloud, and you can deploy easily on a private cloud. You create the stack and use the Bluemix Cloud formation template. If you have the IBM Bluemix Cloud subscription, you can deploy it easily within maybe half a day or one day. You can create all the resources by using the Bluemix Cloud formation template.

For deployment, you need a small team of two or three because it just needs the team to provision the resources on the IBM Bluemix Cloud. For support, we need a bigger team of around 10 plus people.

It is costlier as compared to the other alternatives available in the market.

I would definitely recommend this solution. It is a good solution with good capabilities like integration with CMDB and CVSS score. The dashboard is also really nice. It can help with threat intelligence, and it also has artificial intelligence. It is a futuristic kind of technology because the more AI-driven a product is, the better are the results. We plan to keep using this solution.

I would rate IBM QRadar a seven out of ten.

We use the solution for a variety of tasks. We use it, for example, for authentication, network-related authentication, user-related tasks, and Windows UNIX servers. It's a lot. There's a ton of use cases. I really can't sync right now about every single use case, however, the main things are authentication and network-related systems and all flavors of UNIX Windows. 

It helped our organization in the sense that having it was better than nothing. However, I did not enjoy the product overall and I advised we switch to something else.

The user behavior analytics as part of our deployment was okay, even though it was clunky.

The solution can scale.

I really didn't like QRadar to be honest. I inherited it. I was part of the reason that we moved over to LogRhythm. The solution just isn't user friendly.

The solution is clunky. 

The interface could be much better.

The integration capabilities within the product are not that great.

I've been using the solution for about two years at this point. My team has been using it for two to three years, so we have a total of about five years of experience in all.

I wouldn't describe the solution as stable. 

It was really buggy. Like other app integrations, it wasn't straightforward. It was pretty clunky. We tried to integrate Qualys with it and it wasn't effective. To integrate anything took quite a bit of time and energy. It wasn't easy. When it did, it didn't work properly. It wasn't really pulling in the data correctly.

Scalability was hard as it was on-prem. We needed to add more modules, and had to add more of the servers to stack it. It wasn't that a simple task at all. I wouldn't say that it scales well, although technically, you can scale it.

When we were using the solution, we had ten to 15 users on it. They were anyone from Information Security Engineers to regular IT admins.

Technical support was awful. We often didn't even have any assistance available to us. On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate them at a three. We were very unsatisfied with the level of support we received. They just simply weren't helpful when it came down to it.

The organization didn't previously use a different solution before choosing QRadar.

We actually switched to LogRhythm as I didn't like how the solution was working for the organization.

I didn't handle the initial setup. It was handled before I arrived at the organization.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we're using.

I wouldn't recommend the solution. I'd probably tell others to shy away and look at other products like possibly Splunk, however, it's a pricey option. LogRhythm is pretty good. We're having some issues with it. That said, for the most part, it's okay. 

Exabeam also seems like it might be a good option. I haven't worked with it personally, however, I've had some experience with a POC.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a three out of ten. We didn't have a good experience with it. If it offered, for example, easier behavior analytics, easier integrations, better interface, supported model integration, and a good user interface to perform analysis I might rate it higher. Basically, it just needs to be much more user-friendly.

We use this solution for deploying and integrating log sources and use cases.

We use it to generate offensives based on normal behavior and suspicious behavior from our security tools, firewalls, and other solutions.

We have applied a set of old and new rules to QRAdar that aim to detect persistent abnormalities in our environments.

Within our organization, our security operations center and users from our local security team — roughly 10 to 12 users — use QRadar. We plan to expand to other areas of the company so that other people can use QRadar for different use cases. But right now only the security teams use it.

It's more of what it has provided for our company. We have much better visibility into our environment now. It has become much easier to create an alert for suspicious behavior, to operate on security incidents when they happen, and to drill down on specific events and figure out exactly which machines and users were involved.

I think the log search is pretty good. It's very easy to create complex searches and aggregate results and create graphics, etc. 

The rule engine is very easy to use — very flexible. We can create rules based on whatever behavior we want. It's very easy to use compared to Splunk. 

When we analyzed Splunk, that was the criteria that we looked at. Splunk was a lot more difficult to use and to create rules.

The standard rules they have are very comprehensive. There are many content packs in the apps that enrich those rules. We are still using the native rules from QRadar because there are many useful rules there. I think we're going to have a very good experience with them.

One thing one has to be aware is that qRadar doesn't have a standard UI style, but older (clunkier) and newer (more modern and easy to use) screens. The QRadar UI involves a lot of clicks and pop-ups to get where you want, which is certainly not the best UX, but isn't totally a pain also. Although it's a bit difficult to navigate through screens at first, the UX is pretty good once you learn the "qRadar way", which takes about a few weeks to master.

I have been using this solution for the last three months.

We had some bugs and we had to handle them. They impacted our deployment timeline, but all of the bugs that we had were quickly solved by engineers from IBM. Currently, we are not fully satisfied with the stability, but the support from IBM is very good and they can solve our problems very, very quickly.

There seems to be a cap-limit regarding scalability. IBM limits the amount of data you can send into the collectors so scalability-wise, it's not that optimum because sometimes we have a resource or a machine that tends to think it gets more events per second than it actually gets. Because of how the solution is made, If we send a large number of events to these event collectors, then they will start dropping events because we can't queue them. That seems to be by design — we aren't entirely satisfied with that. In this way, IBM kind of forces their customers to buy a larger license.

IBM's customer support is very good. 

We don't have any comments about community support because we don't know any communities that we can use to look up information about QRadar; however, in general, we have used IBM's documentation extensively — I think it's very useful, it's very complete, but sometimes it's a bit outdated. 

We used to use ArcSight. I can't even begin to compare these two products because ArcSight was a solution managed entirely by our security operations center team. We didn't have full knowledge of what the solution was capable of. Now we're seeing a much larger universe with QRadar — I think it's a completely different thing. QRadar is much more capable than ArcSight.

Deployment-wise it's pretty easy already; it took us one hour to get QRadar running, and then a couple of days later, we had full deployment. We then began onboarding log sources — the process of onboarding log sources has been almost painless for 90% of our log sources, which are from different vendors and different tools, and within a month we had about 70% of all of our relevant security logs in qRadar, generating many interesting offenses on a daily basis. So that has been very positive.

We had little interaction with qRadar during the process of onboarding log sources — most log sources were automatically discovered, their events were mapped correctly and parsed to extract relevant fields. A few log sources required manual intervention or installation of content packs, and some of IBM's DSMs were a bit outdated, but these issues were rather quick to fix within qRadar itself.

We used a partner company here called IT.eam, which helped us with the deployment. They are very capable and professional and it's been overall a great experience.

It's very expensive but it fits our budget. Because it's very expensive, we had to come up with ways of filtering our logs before they get into QRadar because otherwise, we'd have to buy a much greater amount of events per second, and that would be very expensive.

Splunk is virtually the same price.

I'd recommend QRadar for security teams that are more from the IT world and not so much from the development or data-science world. I think other tools, such as Splunk, are really great too, but QRadar is natively concerned with providing security rules and use cases. If you're looking for a reliable solution for security purposes only, QRadar is probably the way to go.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.