Netsurion Reviews

We use it for security incident and event management, and we use Netsurion's hosted SOC service, meaning their SOC team also assesses our events.

The solution is on-premises. We have the agent running on our Windows systems, and we have the Linux systems pumping the syslog data to the Netsurion server.

The 24/7 monitoring and alerting have positively affected our security maturity because now we have people with eyes on our security events 24/7. They are monitoring our security incidents and alerting us to any incidents that need action on our end. Overall, the SOC component of the Netsurion solution is very important because without it we would need to hire more people internally to do that work. With the hosted SOC, we don't need to have a large team on our side. While their SOC doesn't know our company and what is unique about our environment entirely at this time, they are learning it now.

All the features are valuable, so far. Some examples are the detailed responses that you find within the searches. The alerts are also valuable because they're concise and not overwhelming. The dashboard layout is also a feature I like, because it's very clear. It's not cumbersome.

When it comes to threat detection and response, Netsurion is very good. They're good at incident detection and responses. For example, they found some tools that are used by hackers, tools that were running on a system, and they immediately alerted us to that fact. We investigated it and it turned out it was an administrator using that tool. But it was a good process.

Managed Threat Protection also provides actionable threat intelligence. For example, when there was a vulnerability in the Exchange platform, they alerted us that this new threat had become known, and we were able to take action by patching our Exchange servers to secure them.

We have also integrated our endpoint security into the Netsurion SIEM. That's important because we have all the events in one place; we don't have to manage them in multiple places.

In addition, the embedded MITRE ATT&CK Framework was paramount in our decision to choose Managed Threat Protection because the MITRE Framework is the industry standard for threats. While it hasn't yet helped to identify threats we might have missed without it, we're still early on in our deployment, but eventually, once we are more mature, it will. And I believe it has helped with the time it takes Netsurion's SOC to identify and understand sophisticated threats.

The weekly reporting could use some improvement. For example, when we handed them our landscape document, it took longer than I would have liked for those details to become noticeable within the reports.

I have been using Netsurion Managed Threat Protection for about 10 months.

It is very stable.

Scaling it would be slightly complex because you would need to consciously keep track of the ports where the logs are being ingested. Scalability is not as straightforward as it could have been.

We are using it to monitor about 2,500 endpoints and we have two analysts within our organization's security department who work with the solution.

Some of the technical forethought for the deployment was not as good as I would have expected. Some of the technical blocks that can exist in an organization of our size, issues that needed to be thought about, were not taken into account at their end. That required more input on our side, so that is why I would rate their support at eight out of 10 overall. But regarding the product itself, their technical skills are a 10. It was more when it came to the difficulties in a more complex environment that they were slightly lacking.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. They provided us concise instructions on how to deploy the agents. They provided us packages that we could then deploy within our package deployment mechanisms, and they supplied us with the necessary tools to be able to deploy the agents quickly and easily.

Netsurion's support during our deployment process was very good. They were very helpful and attentive to us as customers. Their assistance in the onboarding process certainly helped with the product's time-to-value because we were able to deploy the agents in a short period of time and to start getting actionable intelligence pretty quickly.

Within a couple of weeks of their providing us the packages, we started deploying agents and, within a couple of months, we already had enough logs being ingested to have at least some initial, actionable intelligence.

The implementation strategy was, first of all, to have enough collectors around our network to ingest the logs from the sources, and enough log source ports to be able to handle the quantity of log sources coming in. After that came the preparation of the agents and the mechanism through which the agents were to be deployed. This strategy helped to make the deployment faster and easier.

It was handled internally by our IT operations.

We have seen ROI in the fact that we had actionable intelligence within six months of deployment.

The amount we pay for the service that we get is good. If it were to be much more expensive, it would not have the same value for the money.

We evaluated McAfee Managed Detection and Response, Splunk, and Rapid7 against Netsurion Managed Threat Protection. The biggest difference was the cost.

If you're concerned about Netsurion's SOC being located outside of the US, I would say that location of the SOC is irrelevant. Rather, you should evaluate the skills of the SOC and the SOC management.

And if someone at another company said they are not sure that they need managed services, I would say to them that they had better make sure they have enough money to have their own internal team.

My other advice would be to make sure that Netsurion gives you a good deal compared to the other vendors.

Since we can't have 24/7 operations for our SOC, we hire out for that and have it as a managed service. This makes much more sense and allows us to focus on the day-to-day activities of the company.

Since it is a managed service, they take care of everything for us and just reach out when they have a question, there is an incident, or an important alert. That is the most important part for me because that allows me to focus elsewhere.

It allows us to avoid needing to employ people to stay during evening hours, which is a positive.

The solution provides an embedded MITRE ATT&CK framework. The framework is relatively new. I like that it is a curated knowledge base now. It is very important because it lets everyone know what is going on and being observed in the real world. It definitely helps in the analysis of whatever threat is found. Remediation is already built into the framework.

Their SOC team manages vulnerability management and IOC reviews. They stop bad processes when they happen. The best thing is their weekly reviews of what has been going on in the infrastructure as well as the things that they see and what we should look out for.

We haven't had any incidents, which is a good thing. It is a valuable product.

The solution provides actionable threat intelligence. It is not a passive service. They go in and perform mitigations on whatever they find. It is timely. They provide context, so it is understood by anyone who receives these reports.

It is important that Netsurion Managed Threat Protection has enabled us to consolidate cybersecurity technology, including SIEM, network traffic analysis, and endpoint security.

I would like faster responses when things are found. For example, when they inform me, it is usually when they begin to respond.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework could be faster when identifying and understanding sophisticated threats. Whenever something happens, we usually get notified a couple hours later.

Their SOC team can't understand our network because they haven't worked in the actual company. This does negatively affect security posture, e.g., if you don't have knowledge about the network, then you will miss things.

Personally, I would have deployed it on its own independent server. It uses a lot of IOPS and resources. Now, we have contention between our other servers on the same cluster.

I have been using it for at least three years. It was installed at the company before I joined.

It scales fine.

It is being used throughout all our systems non-stop, so we don't have plans to increase the usage or utilize it in different ways.

One person can maintain and work with the solution.

The SOC component is the most important part of the solution. I know who the SOC team is, so it is not someone different every time. I have seen changes in the team. However, for the most part, the team is usually steady. They are professionals in this and do a good job. 

They could improve by having faster communications. They always get back to us on the same day, but it is usually a few hours later. It would be nice if it was within an hour.

Neutral

We have seen time and cost savings. It prevents us from having to hire specialized people for this type of work. We would need to hire six staff members to accommodate the same service.

If you are not going to go for their managed service, then you will need to hire a SOC team, and if you are not going to hire a SOC team, then you are messing up.

I am sure that other companies have their own SOC teams instead of having a SOC-managed service, but this solution makes it cost effective for us.

I would rate it as a six out of 10.

We use Netsurion to meet our HIPAA and PCI compliance requirements and to implement best security practices. Before we implemented Netsurion, our company had no visibility into the environment. We use it to alert us about unusual processes that may be executed. After an investigation, we whitelist or blacklist those processes. It also helps us manage our asset inventory and respond to threats as they arrive. 

Netsurion's 24/7 monitoring has enhanced the overall security of the company. They have someone looking at the data 24/7 who will call us as needed. If their team spots a malicious process after hours, they notify the appropriate person by phone. We get a lot of actionable threat intelligence from Netsurion. For example, if a user clicks on a malicious link in a web page and starts an unusual process that isn't on the white-list, Netsurion's team can detect it and prevent it from executing. Afterward, they'll notify us by telephone, so we can respond and clean up whatever damage has occurred.

With Netsurion, we've also consolidated a lot of our cybersecurity technology. Case in point, Netsurion can aggregate the log files from a Meraki wireless access point, which correlates that data, so that minimizes the time necessary to investigate. They have already taken care of the heavy work. With Netsurion, I take their data, and I know where to start.

Any security professional will agree that if you don't have a solid understanding of your inventory of assets, it's going to haunt you. In this case, it provided me the opportunity to see what's out there. This is especially crucial given that we have some BYOD devices that are not allowed onto the network. I was able to spot those devices and enable conditional access through our Azure Active Directory.

It has reduced the amount of time it takes to identify and respond to constantly evolving threats. We don't know everything. So we could have something that we've never seen before and it requires research on my part, which can be very time-consuming. I like to have the reference readily available.

The managed security solution has freed up IT staff time to work on other things. Our IT team is tiny. I am the only security person in a company with more than 5,000 employees. I don't have to focus on security 24/7, which frees up a lot of time and lets me have a work-life balance. It's equivalent to saving us the cost of three full-time employees at 40 hours a week. The SOC is an essential component. It's crucial to have those individuals correlating and reporting on alerts or taking care of events that don't need to be reported. That's a lot of manual work.

I'm new to the company and the environment, so it's valuable for me to see what is deployed and what processes are being executed in the environment to ensure that nobody is running something that may have malware or infections. Netsurion's log aggregation feature is something I use heavily. They use Elastic as their SIM tool. I'm able to take the numbers that they provide and correlate events.

Netsurion also integrates the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Every alert includes a reference to the MITRE number that you can research yourself. I have experience with the MITRE framework, so this is valuable to me. The company did not previously have an understanding of MITRE, so it's essential to me as the security person responsible. This framework has definitely helped us identify threats that we might have missed otherwise. With the MITRE ATT&CK number, I can research in the right direction.

Netsurion's threat detection and response aren't quite mature. I would expect a little more. Instead of an Excel spreadsheet with a log output, I would rather have a web portal that I could log into and see the event live. In all fairness, they may have that, but they have not provided that to us. They send me an Excel spreadsheet, and I have to aggregate the data manually to find out what I want to look at. It would be better to have a web portal where the data is already aggregated, and I can see where the hotspots are. They could do something like Arctic Wolf, which has a web portal or page we can log into.

I have been using Netsurion since approximately June of 2020.

Stability has been okay. We've only had one instance where specific endpoints were not reporting in. During the discovery, we found that devices were pointed to the wrong collector on the Netsurion side, and they fixed that.

With Netsurion, we're covering more than 5,000 endpoints without any real difficulties, and I think we could grow even further with that, so I don't have any concerns with scalability. However, I don't know how far they can go.

I would give Netsurion support a nine out of 10. Their technical support has been outstanding. There have been some challenges on the administrative side getting the phone tree updated. That's an area where they need a little bit of work. But I have no complaints on the technical support side. They've been accommodating. Their SOC is also excellent. They're working on a mature model, and I think they're going to raise the bar. We also have five other managed service providers that the SOC needs to work with across different time zones. Everybody just needed to get on the same page and align the timing. After that, it went fine.

Positive

I joined the company while they were in the middle of deploying Netsurion, and I actually led the last phase of implementation, which was getting the agents installed through the endpoint. In my opinion, it was pretty straightforward, and the deployment took about 90 days. The only issue was getting their agent to work on some of the Apple products. The developers had to go back and tweak the agent to get it running on these systems. Netsurion's SOC helped walk us through the onboarding process. Without their support, we would've probably been extremely frustrated and unhappy. 

I would rate Netsurion eight out of 10. While there is room for improvement and maturity, I have no complaints about their services. To anyone thinking about adopting Netsurion, I would advise them to research and get references. You should also do a cost-benefit analysis of a managed solution. Doing this work in-house is extremely expensive compared to offshoring it to someone already established who can do the work you need. 

If someone is concerned about Netsurion's SOC being outside the United States, I would say that this hasn't been a problem for us, given the compliance spectrum we're working with. Some companies may have another view of that, but I work with that team and trust them. They meet all my expectations. I'm pretty satisfied with their service and how it was managed during implementation.

We use it for real-time alerts for things like domain admins being added. And we have the managed services provide weekly reports for us for VPN logins, after hours logins and several other similar alerts. 

And of course, at any time I can do individual investigations and searches on interesting traffic that might be reported to me by Netsurion or that we find on our own.

The solution saves me at least half an FTE, some 20 hours a week. If I didn't have the managed services, I would have to have another half an FTE just to do the work that they do for us.

Netsurion has assisted our server administration team as well. If they're having software problems or access problems or the like, they have the ability, with all the logs now centralized in one place, to go to one place and do those searches, rather than to go individually, server by server by server, and try to figure it out. 

It's also tied into our enterprise firewall, which is Palo Alto. It really helps them in their troubleshooting time if they're having an issue. 

There are 3 aspects that Netsurion is very helpful to our organization.  One side is the information security side where it helps us quickly investigate an incident including false-positives. A second aspect is operational efficiency.  It would really take a lot of time to try to figure it out server by server but with Netsurion they can go to one place which has all those server logs. The third aspect is log archives. Once it makes it to Netsurion, they can keep local log storage space pretty low and don't have to burn a lot disk space on the local servers.

I also feel that Netsurion has better integration. Almost any product could integrate with just about anything else, given enough time and resources. But that's part of the managed services that we contract with Netsurion. We have integrations into Sophos (for antivirus), Office 365 (for email) and for our enterprise firewall (Palo Alto), and our Cisco networking equipment. So we've got all the critical infrastructure pieces integrated and all of those were integrations out-of-the-box-that I probably could have figured out if I had enough time. But I tell them what I'm trying to do and either they have a white paper which gives me one, two, three steps to do it, or they actually take over. I give them a service account. They take over, they do it, we do some testing and we go live with it.

Everything we have is a real-time feed. We don't have anything that is just batch and then it reads it in later. Especially on those real-time alerts that I mentioned, I know about each of those literally within minutes after it happens, because it's a real-time feed. The alert fires and sends me an email or a text, whichever I have set up.

We're also very impressed with Netsurion SIEMphonic. That's what they've renamed their SIEM tool. We use it quite a bit now. They've got something called potential insider threats that we look daily. Those are things like account creations and the like. A SIEM tool doesn't necessarily know, just because an account is created, whether it should have been created or if somebody created it to try to hide their tracks. Also, seeing things like logs being cleared on servers has been very helpful to us. We would have no other good way to get visibility into those types of things. An extension of that is the alerts that we talked about. It's really been really invaluable for us to get insight into our environment. There'd be no other way for us to really get that without either SIEMphonic or one of its competitors.

Really, all of the features are valuable. Probably the most valuable are the real-time alerts and the weekly reports. They would like to send me the reports daily, but because I'm a one-person shop, I just don't have the time to pour through them. Those weekly reports really give me a view of the landscape and of things that might have slipped through the cracks.

The real-time alerting for things such as people getting dropped into a VPN group or the domain admin group — things like that which really shouldn't happen without proper change management, but we all know the reality, that they do from time to time — gives me real-time visibility into what's going on.

I do like, with version 9, that they have what they call Elasticsearch which is very quick, although that's only available for the last seven days' worth of data. It used to be that, if I wanted to do a search from three days ago, it might take me 10 to 15 minutes because it had to actually unzip some archive files. So I really like that feature. It's almost instantaneous for anything within the last seven days. I can go back as far as I have archived, which for us is a set of six months. It all depends on how much you want to store. We store one semester's worth of data. That real-time, very quick access is very helpful for our workflow and the ability to investigate things.

Also with version 9, the overall UI is much better. It's more like Splunk, which is one of their competitors. It has more of that kind of look and feel. You literally drag and drop different fields and elements that you want in your reporting. And with that Elasticsearch, where it's almost instantaneous, it's so much more helpful. Their old query tool was okay, but it had the old look and feel. You picked the field you need and you chose an operator like "equals," etc. This new look and feel really is drag-and-drop. It's so much more modern and very useful. It makes it very efficient if you're looking for something.

With version 9 there are so many areas where they changed the look and feel and it is so much easier. I really don't have anything that is a pain point or that I have to work around or that I would like to be a little better or easier.

With version 8, there are quite a few things. The query tool was one of the big ones, and the query speed was one of the big ones, but they've made some great strides between versions 8 and 9.

There were also issues in version 8 around the ability to get the data back out. It's one thing to collect data, but it's a whole other thing to be able to present it or run it in a timely manner. The old tool, depending on how far back I was looking, might even time out and I would have to run it again. 

We don't have any of those issues with version 9, as long as we're staying within that seven-day window. You get outside the seven-day window and it still performs the same sort of way. And it's not Netsurion or SIEMphonic's fault; it's just the way they store the data and have to be able to open the data back up. But the look and feel of the query tool is still exactly the same as it was. It's just a matter of whether you are looking at that real-time, very quick access, or you are looking at more of an archive-type.

I've been using Netsurion for about four years.

The stability has been really great.

On the older version — and this might have even been with version 7 — we had one or two instances where we had a problem logging in with our Active Directory account. We never really got a lot of details, but I can tell you that in less than 15 minutes they had it corrected. They have VPN capability as part of the managed services to be able to get in anytime they want. That VPN capability has two-factor authentication on it. We opened a ticket with them, told them what was going on, and they came in via VPN and corrected the situation.

We did have this issue twice, about nine months apart. But we have not had that problem in version 8 or 9. I don't know if it was something within the server configuration or something else. Other than that, we've never had any stability problems. 

The query timeouts, again, were just due to the sheer volume of data that we were trying to extract out of the thing. It was something we were able to work around. We could do a couple of extractions and bring them back together. It wasn't anything that was a big pain for us. It was a little bit of a learning curve and understanding.

In the early days of it we were really trying to get everything. But they were really great and said, "Well, that's great, but after you get everything, then you've got to pare it down anyway. So why don't you just build your query in a way that is smart enough to get only what you really want to begin with. So when you do get your extract, it's ready to work on." That was part of a learning curve for us and their suggestion really helped out a lot.

We haven't had any big problem with scalability.

When I got here, we were keeping a year's worth of data. The reason we're now only keeping six months instead of a year is our own backup speeds and/or how much disk space it's taking up. We talked to our CIO and several senior leaders. Everyone was comfortable, as long as we could go back and investigate within the same semester. We felt that reducing from a year to six months was acceptable. That also fixed our backup times which were taking so long and how much total disk it was taking up. It had zero to do with the product. It was strictly a matter that storing so much data was taking that much space and that long to back up.

Today, in our organization, it's used as needed. We may have five security incidents a month. The server admins use it for operational needs once a month or every other month. So we don't have super-heavy use here. Most of my investigations come out of those weekly reports or things that come up within the environment in real-time. There's not a tremendous need to be able to use it more often, because of the real-time alerting and those timely, weekly reports. A lot of those were custom reports that we asked them to build for us. We really get visibility right into what we want to see all the time. So we're able to address situations very quickly and not have to hunt around and figure things out.

Their technical support is really good. We've got a dedicated service manager.

The only thing — and it's not a problem, but I do like to mention it — is because they are in a different time zone, it's not that they won't respond, but it depends on how severe the ticket is that I open. If it's anything much past noon or 1:00 p.m., I know because of the time difference that it's going to be the next day before they get back to me, unless it's something that's really hot.

They do have 24/7 coverage, but unless it's something that's really down or a real issue, if it can wait till the next day, you won't necessarily be able to get somebody on the phone that afternoon. The great thing is, I start at 7:00 a.m. Central anyway, so there is overlap for five hours of my time and that's been sufficient.

They have U.S. sales, but not necessarily U.S. support, but that's okay. It hasn't been a problem.

It's not hard to escalate when necessary. If I send a second ticket or ask for some kind of update, that dedicated service manager responds pretty quickly. Most of the time, he'll actually be calling me and seeing what else they can do. They've been really great about turnaround speed and communication.

Netsurion's SOC team is who I report my issues to if I want to open a ticket. It's part of the managed services but it's not the only piece of that service.

When I got here, the CISO before me was retiring, and he was about 75 percent of the way through the implementation. I did about the last 25 percent of the agents. So I can't really speak to the setup.

But I can speak to upgrades, and those have gone seamlessly. That is part of the managed services that we contract with them. They do all the upgrades for us and make sure they perform correctly and make sure all the agent endpoints upgrade correctly. And if they don't upgrade correctly, they have to take whatever actions are necessary.

But I don't see why the initial setup wouldn't have been fairly straightforward, because of everything else I've seen in the tool. They seem to have really good documentation and they definitely have really good support staff, if I've got any kind of questions or problems at all.

The time an upgrade takes depends on if it's a major or a minor. If it's a minor upgrade, like a 0.1-type of upgrade, those usually take place overnight. Their headquarters are in Europe, so by the time I get into work at 7:00 a.m. Central, the smaller ones will often be done. Otherwise, they'll give us the outage window, and it depends. The 8.0 to 9.0 was almost like a forklift. It was almost like a whole new product. That one took six to eight hours.

But the great thing, the way their product is designed, is if the endpoints can't deliver their logs, they will just keep on collecting them locally. As soon as the server comes back online, they deliver them. I never lose anything. It's just I didn't have the ability to query during the upgrade period. That's another thing that's wonderful. It's not like I have some little moment in time that I sure hope something hasn't happened, because I don't have visibility. I do have visibility. It's just a matter of whether it is actually in the query tool yet or not.

When I first got here, we had some problems pushing out some updates and we never did really resolve it. It was something within our environment. They don't have that problem in other customers' environments. But they came up with a workaround. They're responsible for doing those, and it's been flawless.

We didn't have a competing product. This solution was just slowly pushed out to the various things that we wanted to collect data from. Initially, all of our on-prem servers had agents installed, including various versions of Windows, Unix, and Linux-type hosts, as well as to our networking equipment and our firewall. Some of those things collect syslogs, while the Windows boxes, for example, have a real agent on them.

The process was that the console was stood up and we slowly we went after our prioritized endpoints. Things like our domain controllers were first. We slowly moved down the priority list until we got to the low-value assets. Those were the ones that I implemented. So the critical components were already in place when I got here.

We feel that we're getting a real ROI. Between having the managed services and having the product on-premise, we feel like we're almost getting the managed services for free. They've given us a very good price.

Based on industry standards, it's saving me at least $25,000 to $30,000 a year.

If you look at competing products, Netsurion is less than 50 percent more expensive, and I pick up all those managed services. I pick up half an FTE without having to pay benefits.

I don't know the reasons why they put this in right away, because we were in a three-year contract — but at the end of that three years the price was going up. I don't know that we had done the math on it before, and we thought, "Whoa, wait a minute."

So I actually did look at AlienVault, which was a good competitor technically, but I could never find anybody who could give me any decent price to help with that managed service. So either I was going to have to pay a lot more, and sometimes upwards of double what I'm paying Netsurion, or I was going to have to hire an FTE to do it. There's no way that that would work out financially. When they heard that we were shopping other products, we negotiated with them and they came back and agreed to put a cap on the price. We've been thrilled with that. It's worked out really well.

Compared to others, Netsurion also has even more services. We have bi-monthly calls, reviews of what happened in the last 2 months, including things that might still be outstanding. They've reported things to us and we'll say, "Hey, we need an update on this." Or, "Are we closing this issue?" They bring those things up every other month. There are a lot more things that we could license if we could afford it. We would love to license all of our workstations. It's not that they're trying to price-gouge, it's just the size of the environment. And you have to determine what other tools, besides a SIEMphonic-type tool, you want. We've been pretty happy with what we've been able to deliver.

One thing that differentiates Netsurion is that they have the total package, or as much as you want. They can run the thing for you, as they do for us. They can offer all kinds of different services beyond just the SIEMphonic services. They're also a much more robust company and one that offers a lot more than somebody who's competing for just any single item that they offer.

When we were negotiating the price, we had bought more licenses than we really needed for our servers. But you can slice and dice and change things up. Even within the managed services, they can run the weekly reports for you or not. They can do the upgrades for you or not. They can do the bi-monthly calls or not. There are all kinds of different things they can do. So we right-sized those services and "trued-up" our licenses to what we really needed, with a little bit extra for growth. We came to a good agreement. It was a bit of a win for them. We gave up a few things that we didn't really need anyway and we were able to maintain our level of service that we had had and had come to expect.

My advice is to get your PO out and make a purchase. I have referred several other companies. I'm involved in several security organizations and it really is one of these diamonds in the rough. I know they have US sales but I think they're a lot stronger over in Europe. I think they're a little-known, hidden secret in the U.S. I know they're in the industry review reports, but I don't think they get the press and the prestige that they should, because they have a really excellent product.

Of course, certain government organizations can't do business with support overseas; there can be limitations. But I'm definitely an evangelist for them. We really like their product and plan to keep it for a long time, provided, pricing-wise, it doesn't get out of hand. But I think we've reached a good agreement that we can all live with. We definitely feel like we're getting value for it. We have no problem writing the check every year.

This is the first time I've really worked, on a regular basis, with an overseas-support vendor. The biggest thing was getting our support hours lined up. I don't want to sound like I'm dissing them, that if we were in a world of hurt and had something that really had to be taken care of that they wouldn't respond to that. But we had to adjust our workflows knowing that, if we really need to get them on the phone, our morning is the best time to do that.

Other than that, the convenience of it, being able to think of how else we can use it and what other kinds of data we could send to Netsurion to help us out, has been instructive. For example, we have a mail product called Proofpoint that actually front ends our email and pulls out spam emails and those sorts of things. We were able to send the over the logs from that and look for any emails that were going to more than a hundred recipients. And Netsurion could give us real-time alerts and that would often tell us if an account was compromised. So there are unique ways like that to think about using it. What are some of the data of things we're trying to track down that we could send over to Netsurion and have them alert us in real-time so we don't have to run a rapport or figure out, three days later, that something went on? We can find out right in the heat of the battle what we need to do.

Netsurion's dashboard is probably good. I don't log into the console every day and I don't use it operationally, in the way some people would if they didn't have those managed services. So dashboard-wise, I don't use it as much. I do use their intrusions worldwide map from time-to-time, but beyond that, because I don't get into the console on a regular basis, it's not as useful to me. But I feel like the console would be very powerful with the widgets they can add to it. They've demoed it for me but it's just not the way my workflow is.

I usually view Netsurion on just a single, 23-inch Windows screen. I don't have any real-time thing running all the time. I strictly use it on a desktop.

In terms of deployment and maintenance of the solution, we don't have anybody additional here. There was a CISO that I replaced and everything else was from the managed service side. We do have one system engineer here who maintains the box, the virtual server that it runs on. But that is a part-time responsibility. He really hasn't had to get involved since I've been here. So there has really been no additional staff. It was just an additional tool that was put into the environment and one that is a tremendous asset for us. There are four individuals besides me who use it and they're all in the server admin group.

Version 9 was a tremendous step forward for them. I don't know how long they developed that one, but they really took the right direction with the product. 

Overall, we're really thrilled with them. If I didn't have the managed services — and it wouldn't be the product's fault — I wouldn't be as thrilled with them. But that service really takes a lot off my plate and frees me up to be able to do the other things I need to do in the organization.

EventTracker analyzes all of the different types of security events, it both aggregates and correlates. They send us a daily report of things like servers that aren't responding that normally respond and any kind of events that they see from the day before. If there is a serious perceived security event, they will call. I have two folks at InfoSec, so they will call directly and say, "Hey, we're seeing something here." Then between the two of them, they'll try and identify whether it is a true event or not, and then monthly, we sit down with them on a call where we talk about what's going on and if there are opportunities for improvement.

If there was an event that we felt they shouldn't have escalated to us then we'll let them know and we'll talk about how it could have been avoided or vice versa or if there was an event that we didn't get escalated but it should have been. We don't get a lot of those, mostly it's about, "Hey, we're adding this new device, we want to make sure it's on the list, so it's getting monitored", and things like that.

EventTracker enables us to keep on top of our work. We're a hospital, so we're 24/7. We don't have enough staff to do that, so they're able to monitor things off-hours, and then even during hours I get two people from InfoSec. They can't be sitting there staring at a screen all the time, they have to go out and do other things and attend meetings, etc. and so they're able to rely on the tool to correlate and then notify them either via pager or phone call if something comes up that is deemed to be important enough to be notified. That's huge for us because we don't have the budget from a staffing standpoint to have people on-site 24/7.

Back in the day, I used to work for Intel and we had a whole room full of people who just sat there and stared at the screen for events. It was in their data center group. We don't have that kind of staff. The only people half staring at a screen all day long are the call center, and they're the ones who take tickets and talk to end-users but they don't have the time to sit there and monitor the event logs and all of the other things. That's the value the tool gives us. I can have people doing real work and then things that need to be escalated are escalated. It saves us roughly two full-time employees. It cuts my team in half. 

EventTracker also helps us with compliance mandates. The tool helps us document that we're following best practice, that we're identifying issues and tracking them, and that we have logs of what issues were identified. That allows us to be able to show a lot of the documentation that we are really doing best practice. I just don't physically have enough team members to do that. This allows me to be able to provide that 24/7.

It's not just a tool, it's a service. The secret sauce is not the tool. I could buy a tool from a dozen vendors. I have a tool to be able to aggregate and correlate all of these events and send something to a screen. But if I still have to have somebody sitting there staring at a screen all day long, that's valuable but not as valuable as someone that has a team, that is an essential SOC, that is aware of what's going on in the world and is saying "I'm seeing this in seven places, including El Centro, let's get ahold of El Centro so they can start taking action on it."

There's nobody that's dedicated to internal incident management. I have two information security folks and they do everything from internal incident management to designing new implementations, to reviews of existing annual information, and security audits. They do all of that, but they don't sit there all day long, staring at a screen, looking at incidents, and trying to figure out what to do. That's the value that we get out of it. That's the extra value.

Monitoring our environment and reporting out different events is important. They perform a suite of services. They monitor all of our servers, all of our key infrastructure, like our DNS, our switches, all that stuff. They aggregate and correlate that quarterly. They'll tell us if we're getting a lot of login failures and something is going on or if something's weird.

I like the dashboard. Our security folks look at it all the time. They have it running, they have a big screen monitor in one of their offices and it's up all the time.

I don't use the UI very much but from what I've been told by the security team, it's very easy to use. Compared to other products, the team found it pretty easy to use. We've got the dashboards published on a large screen TV so they can look at it all the time, and then they typically have it on their desk. It is also available on smartphones.

We import log data into EventTracker. It feeds the overall picture of giving us a good quality view of what's going on in our environment.

Communication is always something that can be improved, but I feel that any time we've had a communication issue, it's quickly addressed when we bring those up at the monthly meetings. Usually, it's an individual that wasn't clear in the communication, it's not the process per se. You always have to be able to segregate if the process didn't work or an individual either didn't say the right thing or my people didn't understand what they were being told. So far, I have not understood or heard of any issues that were more process or tool-related, it's individual-related. 

The industry is changing. The landscape is changing all the time and they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping up with that. That's a challenge in information security. That's a target that doesn't just move. It moves from room to room, to room, not just a few inches, one way or the other. You're constantly changing. You're chasing a moving target that's really moving. It boils it down to here's what we think is going on versus our people. If all they did was keep track of what was going on in the industry, that's all they'd do because I only have two people.

I have been using EventTracker since I have been at my company for the past year but it's been at my company for several years. 

It is as stable as a rock. I have not heard of a single outage on it.

We haven't scaled it out to anything other than what we had. They've done a pretty good job of implementing it. Since I've been here, we've had a virtual server primarily here and there, but we have not done a lot of scaling out. There hasn't been a discussion about what limitations there would be.

It monitors all of our infrastructure, all of our servers. It's being very extensively used. As we grow those, we're getting ready to open a new building early next year, all of the equipment that goes into that building will be added to it.

We fully implemented it so I don't know that there's a lot other than organic growth that would need to be done.

My InfoSec team talks to support occasionally. There have been a few cases where they saw something they didn't quite understand, so they would call and ask for information, but it's been few and far between. I have not heard of any issues with support. I heard that their experience with them has been good. 

At a previous company, we used a different tool. It was a much more encompassing tool that does a bunch of different event monitoring, correlation, and aggregation. It was a management suite that did things like backups as well. I know when we implemented it at Intel, it was atrocious. The problem was the process. We had tens of thousands of servers and we implemented the tool and we turned everything on. Events scrolled by the screen so fast, you couldn't even see them. We had to say, "Well, wait a minute. Let's dial this back a little bit." They also didn't do a good job of aggregating or correlating. 

The main difference between that tool and EventTracker is the ease of use. That tool was all CLI based. Everything was command-line based. The syntax that you had to use with that CLI was very challenging and very specific. If you thought you were doing the right thing but something did work and it wouldn't warn you that you didn't do it right.

I have not been told that there were any issues when it was implemented. We have not done any major upgrades since I've been here. We've done incremental patch-type things but I don't know of any issues.

I did hear it was relatively labor-intensive, but that's because of all of the processes around the communication, like what gets communicated and what doesn't. That's to be expected anytime you're doing a lot of workflow work, that takes time.

There's daily maintenance in that they're responding to events or they're working on the tool. There is very little done as far as trying to make changes to the tool itself. Our information security team does respond to events. It's a chunk of their time. We don't have to spend a lot of time at all tweaking the tool. I wouldn't say we spend even an hour a day.

I have two people in InfoSc and a couple of people in my network team that reviews it. My help desk people will review it but they don't really use it per se. They'll see events and that's it. Most of the time that really goes to the information security team.

Our ROI is $160,000 a year before overhead, then adding in the overhead of 30 to 40% with benefits and everything else, it's easily over $200,000 a year.

They've been very fair. I think that we've had to push back a little bit here and there on pricing. 

The biggest lesson I have learned is that the outsourcing of this service has a dramatic impact on the organization. We can't just keep throwing bodies at it internally, we have to leverage somebody else's knowledge.

Some people don't trust outsourcing. I'm not a big outsourcing guy. But I really don't treat them as an outsource, I treat them more as a partner. You're going to have to do this one way or the other, or are you going to get nailed at some point. That's just the way it is. If you're not following these things, you're going to get nailed. If you trust them and you realize that they're doing things that you should be doing or are doing, you're going to save a lot of money out. It's going to be cost-effective for you. It won't just save money, it will be cost-effective.

I would rate EventTracker a ten out of ten. 

Having dealt with a lot of vendors and their sales, they are probably one of the more low-keyed. They're not out there constantly trying to sell me stuff. I don't know if it's because we have everything so there's nothing left to sell or not, but they've been very easy to deal with. Their leadership and their sales organization have been very easy to deal with.

It's a system incident and event management platform. The typical use cases that go along with that are alerting and syslog aggregation.

Their run-and-watch service (now renamed SIEMphonic) has saved from having to hire at least one FTE. In addition, having an expert set of eyes on things and their assistance with rules has been a huge time saver. They've been a really good partner.

We are logging everything from Windows client workstations through our server stack, through important, critical web and cloud pieces, like Office 365 logs and web server logs. The latter would include IIS and Apache. All of that information is being streamed directly into, and assimilated by, the EventTracker product. It seems to be doing the job quite well. Having that visibility into the data is useful. Their interface is simple enough for us to be able to use but advanced enough that if we wanted to do some more advanced queries — which some of their competitors admittedly do a little better out-of-the-box — it hits the wheelhouse perfectly.

We're signed up for their weekly observations, so if they find something big they're going to notify us immediately. But having a management-level synopsis once a week has allowed us to not only replace the one FTE, but also streamline our prioritization of work, based off that data, as well.

Other than the log aggregation and alerting, their reports modules have come a long way. But for the most part, we stay right in the wheelhouse of the product to use it to the fullest extent.

The previous version, version 8, had a somewhat antiquated UI. The new version 9 is much easier to use and brings it into the current realm of development. It's very easy, very sleek, and designed relatively well. The version 8 to version 9 upgrade was complete night-and-day. It's significantly improved, and they're putting resources into it to make sure that they continue to stay up to date.

I like EventTracker's dashboard. I see it every time I log in because it's the first thing you get to. We have our own widgets that we use. For the sake of transparency, there are a few widgets that we look at there and then we move out from there. We're into the product looking more at the log information at that point. Among the particularly helpful widgets, the not-reporting widget is a big one. The number-of-logs-processed is also a good one. We call that log volume. They're helpful, but we try to dig in a little deeper, off the dashboard, more often than not.

In terms of advanced queries, I wouldn't say EventTracker is lagging behind its peers. The latter just make it easier to get to them. EventTracker is designed more for a small to medium type business, which is where we fit. With a competitive tool like Splunk or LogRhythm, you're not going to get what you get with these guys out-of-the-box. With EventTracker, you're going to have to build all that yourself from scratch. You're going to have to learn that markup language to do so.

I want to stress: We're very happy with not having to deal with that out-of-the-gate. If we need to, we can always call support and they can assist us in writing those more advanced queries. The functionality exists to do advanced queries, they're just not right in your face like they are in a competitive product. But for us, that's what we want.

There's always room for improvement in terms of performance and alerting options. It would be great if they had a client for phones by which they could push a notification to us, as opposed to via email. But those are all things that they'll grow into over time.

We've been using EventTracker for just a smidge over three years.

It has been extremely stable. Very rarely do we even realize that it's still running, and that's good.

We did have a few concerns with the scalability in the beginning. Our initial concerns were about scaling it and, if we blew it out, were we going to run into performance issues with their agent piece using too many resources on the client or running out of space on the server? But those concerns proved to be unfounded. We have 700 or 800 endpoints streaming data into it without any noticeable performance or any other issues.

We're using it almost to its full extent at this point. We're in that 90 percent range. We currently don't have any plans to move away from it. We're utilizing the features that pertain to us. Anytime that there's a patch or release, we look at the new features to see if they're applicable for us.

The EventTracker team itself has been great. We can call them for pretty much anything related to their product. They will offer suggestions, advice, and best practices on ways to do things. It's like having another team member here at our disposal, working with their product. I believe that is their standard tech support.

We're paying for the run-and-watch (SIEMphonic) so we're getting an extra set of eyes on things, but when we call in, their support is top-notch. I would give their support team a 10 out of 10. That is a given. Of all the products and vendors that we've used, I've never had a more positive experience with a support team than with EventTracker's support team.

We did not have a previous solution. We do annual audits, and the lack of a SIEM showed up in one of our audits as a piece that we needed to start investigating, four or five years ago. We knew that issue was coming. We were too busy dealing with some other things, but when it showed up in the audit, we pushed it up the priority food-chain. We weren't really having any issues by not having a SIEM, but having all the logs in one place sure makes troubleshooting a whole lot easier. if there was an Achilles heel, that was it.

We were looking for an easy-to-manage SIEM that provided the functionality that we needed. Since we're a relatively small IT staff, the part that really made EventTracker stand out to us was the run-and-watch service (SIEMphonic), where they are an active partner, reviewing the data that we get, so we don't miss anything. They're acting as a backstop to us.

The initial setup was completely painless. They gave us a spec sheet for the on-premise server. We built a VM that matched that spec, and they then installed their software and got it up and running. We could be as involved or as uninvolved as we wanted to be; that was our choice. When it came to deploying the client pieces, they worked with us to identify which machine should get it and when. They took care of the pushing of that information out. When we started getting the data in, and it came time to start tweaking the rules, they took the lead on that as well. It really, truly was a painless process.

The deployment took less than a week. We had an analyst at that time who was running point on it. I wasn't even involved. I didn't need to be involved in it at that level. One of our entry-level analysts was able to work with them to get everything caught up.

I and one analyst are involved in the day-to-day maintenance of the application. Our entire IT staff, nine people, uses it for log review and incident correlation. We try to put the information out there for the rest of our team members to use.

We have been able to save at least one full FTE. The amount we would have to pay that FTE, including benefits, is way more than what we're paying EventTracker for the annual maintenance. It had a positive return on investment almost immediately for us.

Our cost is significantly less than what it would have been for one of the competitor's products, and that includes the run-and-watch service (SIEMphonic). You can go with one-, two-, or three-year agreements. We pay annually for maintenance on the product.

When we acquired EventTracker, we went through an assessment process, reviewing five or six different manufacturers of SIEMs. The frontrunners were the typical players: Splunk and LogRhythm. There were a couple of freeware options out there, but what really set EventTracker apart was their SIEMphonic. That was the big differentiator. We were able to get much more value for our money, and it met all the requirements that we had set out when we started the research.

There weren't really major differences between EventTracker and the other players. Ultimately, SIEMs do the same things. They collect logs, they index those logs, and they make them searchable. There's not really a difference on the surface.

The biggest lesson really isn't an EventTracker lesson, it's more of a SIEM lesson. And that lesson is: It's a lot of data. When you have a lot of data, it's going to take a while to study and learn that data, so you can react appropriately. Not all data is actionable.

Be prepared for the data. Be prepared to know what you didn't know before. And be prepared to weed out the noise from the actual data. That's where EventTracker's SIEMphonic becomes very helpful. My advice would be, if you're going to go with EventTracker, to go with the SIEMphonic service and leverage their support team to get your knowledge up to speed. So far, our experience with their support has been top-notch.

In terms of how we view EventTracker, we're typically just in a browser, so it's on whatever our standard is. I've got a couple of 20-inch monitors on my desk. It's sleek enough that it will work on a normal 15-inch laptop screen too. I have not looked at it on mobile yet, given the fact that it's an on-premise service. If I'm in the building, getting VPN'ed in across my phone is a little tough. But that would be the next iteration of the product, if we would decide to push up towards the cloud instead of being on-prem. We would definitely be looking for some sort of a mobile or a tablet-based mobile interface.

We have not integrated EventTracker with other products. Our service-desk tool is a tool called Samanage, which was recently acquired by SolarWinds and has been renamed Solar Winds Service Desk. We have not integrated anything with that since SolarWinds acquired it, because we wanted to see what SolarWinds was going to do with it. Integrating it into EventTracker is on the list. We'll do it if it makes sense.

I never rate anything a 10 out of 10, because nothing is ever perfect. But this solution would be at the upper end of that range. This partnership with EventTracker has been one of our better ones.

We use it for logging all of our Active Directory activities, including authentication, alterations, and modifications to the AD controls and privileges. We use it for events coming off of both the servers and the desktops. And we also roll in the logs from our various security controls and devices, such as our antivirus tools, backup service, firewalls, the IPS, etc. Those are all rolled back into the EventTracker system. The goal is to eventually start taking advantage of the ability of EventTracker to correlate activity and alert on something that looks a bit unusual that we should then pay attention to.

We get a daily report that they've built, which summarizes all of the activity across all of those areas, on a daily basis for us. The types of log data we import into it include firewalls, server event logs, user workstation event logs, all of the Active Directory activity and authentications, and all of our antivirus logs and our patching service logs.

It's in the cloud. We use their console and we take advantage of their storage. We have them manage our logs and our archivals. 

The result of the reports on activity and the archiving for research has been that the operational teams are more consistent in the usage of standard practice which, from an efficiency perspective, has removed the need for the information security team to investigate issues that are out-of-norm activities. We are no longer doing an internal incident three or four times a week. We may do three or four in a month. That saved us significantly on the incident investigation side. We have pulled back 10 hours a week, on average, just from the security team. I would contend that it's probably also saved time that I'm not able to measure from the operations team because now they're not remediating things that we're pushing to them, and the user community is getting a more consistent experience from the support teams as a result.

There's this downstream value that I don't think people really think of when they look at products like this: What is the cause and the effect that it has on operations? In our case, it was to improve the efficiency and the consistency of the operations which, in turn, resulted in the user community getting a better experience. It's really hard to measure the user community improving its view and opinion of the IT support teams.

The report, each day, of the activities that have happened and the ability to archive and go back and research have been extremely advantageous for us. Examples would be a user having either inappropriately touched a file, or an administrator of the infrastructure altering rights or privileges for a user outside of an approved change-control or approved ticket. We have found that, over time, we've been able to mature the discipline of our operational teams by having the ability to see activity that might have occurred outside of standard practice.

In terms of the log data importing, our data went in very easily. That was one of the things that was appealing to us because the product set we use here for antivirus, single sign-on, the authentication services, and the patching services were all in the supported-product suite. So adding them in was simply getting them pointed over there and getting through the change-control windows.

There are a couple of widgets that I use. One is titled "A Possible Compromise" or "Potential Compromise." I use that because it is generally giving me feedback on the login velocity. I can see people who have authenticated to a system but, geographically, have authenticated to another system, and it's not possible to have done that within the time window that those authentications occurred. I find that it's generally a result of them authenticating to their mobile phones, because you don't necessarily egress the carrier's network from the cell tower you're associated to. In our case, we're in Boston. If you happen to be on an AT&T phone, you actually egress either out of Wisconsin or out of New Jersey. So if you log into your laptop and then you pull up email on your phone, it looks like you logged in from one of those two locations as well. We can dismiss those because we're getting used to what that looks like. 

As a result of that, we have picked up two or three folks who have shared passwords, usually with their administrators. They're traveling, they log in from someplace like Japan or Germany, and their admin happens to log in to help take care of an expense report. We tell them, "You have to stop that." We've picked up a few of those types of events. These are the kinds of things that we look forward to the product giving us more and more of as our usage of it matures.

I like the UI, overall. I like the main page and there are aspects of the search page that I like. When you bring it up, on the left-hand side of the page, as you look at the events, the ability to simply hit and click the plus/minus to pull events in and out of the overall view is well done and is very effective from a threat-hunting and an analysis perspective. I like the detail it shows. It gives some hints.

Occasionally, I'll use EventTracker on my phone because I got a phone call or an alert, but generally, it's on my large panel displays. All of the team has the same setup: multiple, large displays driving off of a laptop.

I tend to like more flexible and detail-structured interfaces. As an example, I don't like to manage my firewalls through the graphical interface. I like to use the command line because it's more granular and it lets me do things a little more quickly. EventTracker has done a nice job in providing both that graphical dashboard and Elasticsearch capabilities. As far as the direct command line goes, I would like there to be a little bit better help in that space. But the fact that they've got both in place is a bonus for the product. As I've learned more about how to do Elasticsearch, it's been beneficial. It's just taking a long time to educate.

I like the dashboard. Where there is an opportunity for improvement is in the interface used for performing the searches. You have to understand Elasticsearch search too well for the security team to be able to take really full advantage of that part of the product. It's not as intuitive as I would like it to be for new staff coming in. The general query capability is a little bit challenging.

Once I expand an event I can usually cut and paste out of there into the Elasticsearch side of it to get a broader view. But it's a multi-step process. I'd would like to see them add something that lets me right-click and immediately search to it, instead of having to walk through a couple of windows. When you're doing research on events, that kind of stuff adds up in your day. It's two or three clicks, but when you're driving through a bunch of analyses, that can start to add up quickly. When it's an event that you've got going on and you need to find out what's truly happening, time is of the essence. Anything that can shorten that would be beneficial.

We've been using it for just under a year.

The only stability issue we've run across would be the log forwarding off of the devices occasionally hanging up. I don't know if that's the EventTracker agent or the server itself, because there are a lot of applications running on those servers. But the console itself, I don't think it's ever been down, other than his patch which we just experienced.

We've done searches going back in the archives all the way to February when we first started, and it surprised me as far as the performance goes. We're not enormous. We're taking in about 3 million events a day. We're about 3,000 employees, worldwide. I don't know that I can give a good analysis on scaling.

It's meeting our needs really well from a scale perspective. We haven't seen a performance issue associated with the volumes we're running with, and we're almost fully deployed. Of the 300 servers, there are only about 10 now that don't have it. All of the 2,500 end-stations have it. It's taking all of that. We're 90 percent where we want it to be with the log sources and it hasn't changed its performance or behavior at all. It has scaled very well so far for us.

Our plans to increase usage are only as we grow. The company has growth plans associated with it, and as new staff comes on and the machines get provisioned, it continues to increase the systems that are feeding to it. We don't have any plans at this point to be putting in any other log sources, other than those we've already identified. I'm thinking of either homegrown applications or unique applications that might generate log files. We don't have anything on the roadmap today for that.

The support team was really good. They've got a very good support organization. Everybody we worked with on the phone, as we were doing the initial setup, and even as we've done different support calls or requests for help, has done a lot of work for us, which is terrific as a company. We'll need to figure something out or we'll need help to investigate a problem. We'll put a ticket in and they'll call us right back. They'll help run queries for us, they'll run reports for us for a specific incident. They're a very responsive support team, and that's their standard tech support.

It's a "wow." It's nice to see a company that does things the way they used to be done. I think it's because they feel they've got a good product. The support team is terrific. I've been doing this a long time and it's one of the better support organizations I've run across in the last 15 years.

We did not have a solution in place prior to EventTracker. Prior to this, in a company I had been at just before I got here, we used IBM's QRadar and, although we did look at that product here, I found that EventTracker was more appropriate for us.

I don't think that QRadar offered the same robust integration opportunities with logs and it did not offer the same correlation capabilities that EventTracker does. Also, we get a much better licensing structure and pricing structure. It's a much better value for the dollar with this product.

The initial setup was very straightforward. They stood it up, we started pointing log sources to it, and away it went.

They built the infrastructure, the receiving side of things, within a week. We were up and shipping logs within two weeks of the contract being signed.

In our particular case, and it's not a product issue but an operational issue, it took us until June or July of this year to get the logs rolled out or captured from the systems, after we started using it in February. The effective time window is that we've probably only had it for about three months. That was not because of the product. It took us that long to get the logs forwarded over to them.

The reason it took us so long was that we were, at the time, a pre-stage pharma. We didn't have product on the market yet. Just as we were bringing EventTracker into production here, we got approval for our first medication, which changed the nature of our operations from a research community to a fully controlled FDA manufacturing firm, as well. Change-control became a much stricter event. We missed the window to be able to push this out quickly, but it's nice to be commercial.

In terms of our deployment strategy, we had built a timeline or a set of change-controls that went through those several months to start rolling out. At the time we were doing this, we were getting to roll out Windows 10. So one of the first things we did was to build the logging into the core golden image. As Windows 10 boxes rolled out, they automatically started logging. We rolled out doing upgrades from Windows 2008 Servers. We did the same thing and put that into the image. On Active Directory it was pretty straightforward. The servers that were part of production, as far as manufacturing goes, those had to go in very specific windows based on production protocols. 

Overall, we built a project plan out such that every week and every month, from a production perspective, we would have windows where we could start to deploy. That's why it took so long.

We did it internally. It's very simple. There was no need for a third-party or assistance. It was a really easy deploy.

The value of a SIEM comes when you are able to detect something and avoid a problem. It is part of that larger "insurance policy"-type function. You never see a return on investment on an insurance policy until it comes time to use it. But we get value from it every day. Do I think that the investment in the product is giving us value for the dollars we're spending? Absolutely.

I look at it this way: If I need a truck to do my job every day, and my job is to haul two-by-fours back and forth between two job sites, do I need the Cadillac pickup truck or do I need the truck with the roll-up windows? They both do the job and they both do it really well, but the value is in the one that has the roll-up windows. It's doing what it's supposed to do. It's doing it well and it lets me retain dollars for other purposes. EventTracker is exactly that. It's giving me all of the features and functions that we need to do our jobs, and at a price point that's incredibly attractive. It allows me to save money and put money into other services to help reduce risk.

It's a simple product. It's a lot easier to implement and deploy than the other SIEMs I've used throughout my career. The advice would be that using it is a good decision. There's no reason to shy away from the product.

From an event-alert perspective, we haven't used them for that purpose yet. That's largely because the current security services we have in place from our vendors, CrowdStrike in particular, provide us a managed event system from the AV side. They proactively manage our antivirus that's on all of our machines and they also proactively remediate the machines. So we haven't felt the need, yet, to take part in EventTracker's alerting of detected cross-events. That will come in this upcoming calendar year. Our program here is only two years old. The security program itself was only in existence for about nine months before we started to engage with EventTracker, and deployment was earlier this year. We're still really in deployment mode.

We haven't integrated EventTracker with any other solutions. We use ServiceNow but we have not made any effort to integrate it. Our roadmap for ServiceNow is to do exactly that and take advantage of that integration capability and have it issue either alert tickets or work requests into ServiceNow for us, so that we don't have to do those manual steps. We are probably a year away from that.

There are two others besides me using it in our organization. They're both security analysts. There really isn't any maintenance. We've occasionally had servers that stopped talking for whatever reason but a reboot took care of that. Generally, what we're finding is it's due to an application memory leak on that server. But it's just working. There is no effort there.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. The ease of deployment, the support that we receive from them, the dashboard console which I find to be very helpful, are all part of that rating. I would like to see some more assistance in the way that searches are built, but as I've learned how to search, it's getting easier and easier. Overall, it's a well-priced and functionally appropriate SIEM.

We are using it to centralize all of our logs and have alerting on security issues. 

We primarily import Windows systems and Windows Server logs (2012 and 2016). We also import Cisco ASA logs, then Cisco router and switch logs. The import works well. 

We send the Snort IDS alerts to EventTracker, e.g., high level ones like Ransomware and data leak type alerts, we are sending the Snort alerts to EventTracker. For things like ransomware, data leaks, and data exfiltration, we have higher incident reports created, so then it also gets sent to our email and phone. As an example, this Saturday night around four o'clock, we were alerted to an incident from EventTracker. They got a Snort alert about a data leakage or data exfiltration. It was a false positive, and that is good. But, this is just one way we use EventTracker.

It is fairly easy to use. I am mainly just a one man shop. I look at EventTracker about once a day as far as different incidents and stuff goes. I don't have enough time to be tweaking all types of different things. It is a fairly easy to use as far as the UI goes.

If I were to look at logs manually, there's no way I could do that. As an example, they are 48 million logs processed a day. There is no way I could look at all 48 million of those. So, it gives me a good structure to be able to look at the different incidents which are created and do different searches.

The solution's dashboard is okay. The one thing that we ran into are issues when we upgraded to the newer version. It uses Elasticsearch for the different dashboard entries. So, we were running on spinning disks, and Elasticsearch didn't work that well. A number of the different dashboards, like my dashboard or different things like that, pull from Elasticsearch. Since Elasticsearch really wasn't working, we were having some issues with that, but we just migrated. We just got a new fan, which is all-flash. Last week, the server was migrated from spinning disks to the new flash. Now, we have moved from hard drives to SSDs, and Elasticsearch is working a lot faster.

EventTracker's UI is okay. There are some issues that I have ran into. Some stuff doesn't display on different browsers, which you think would. You think you are missing something, and you actually are. If you use a different browser at work, it works differently. That is sort of frustrating. The big thing is they have a newer version or something out other than a new update to version 9. I don't know if they're on version 9.1 or 10 (or whatever). We weren't going to update until we could try to get the Elasticsearch capability (which we now have) and migrate over to the new SAN thing. 

There are a couple things that we had to tweak. One of the other things is we are getting DNS and DHCP logs from servers, which we thought required a different Microsoft hotfix, but it didn't. EventTracker's documentation wasn't current. So, it took a little while to get the DNS and DHCP logging figured out. Once we finally got it figured out, we got those set.

The searching capability has room for improvement. I know they are working on it. They have Microsoft SQL, then Elasticsearch, and it's hard to determine when I am searching what exactly it's searching through, as there is the Elasticsearch archive thing, RAID and the Microsoft SQL searching, and some like cache search things. So, there are about three different searches, and sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to figure out what information I am actually getting.

Users need to be on SSDs in order for Elasticsearch to work well.

We have been using EventTracker for about five or six years now.

I use it on a desktop machine with a wide screen, like 20-inch monitor.

It's okay for what it does. They're trying to add more different capabilities. One thing that I will be interested in, when and if we upgrade to a new version, would be the different types of alerts offered. They do have some different type of prebuilt alerts. The big thing is it's hard to know what things EventTracker may not be alerting on. They do have the behavior correlation part, but when I looked at that, it was using Elasticsearch. Since our Elasticsearch wasn't working that well, this was sort of problematic as there are a bunch of different false positives and stuff.

We sort of knew there would be issues when we did the upgrade because of Elasticsearch and our spinning disks. The searching isn't as easy as it could be, as far as the three different search things that you can do. 

This is same with the different dashboards, as related to Elasticsearch. If we were to implement a brand new version and didn't have the hardware already, we would say, "Okay, we'll wait until we get the SSDs." But, we sort of earmarked a server. The hardware was on the old EventTracker. So, when we did the upgrade, we knew it was going to be an issue, but we didn't know how big of an issue it was going to be.

I know it's been working well for all the different log sources and stuff that we've been throwing at it. The big thing is we just have it on one big virtualized box. So, we haven't really had any instance or need to scale it beyond that.

I'm mainly the only user. My boss will occasionally use it when I'm out of the office, or something like that, but it's either going to be him or me.

We have it pretty much on all of our servers, firewalls, and routers. The big thing is we have a 500 license count. So, we have a number of different other switches and stuff which would be nice to be able to get logs and stuff from. At the same time, we are getting close to hitting up our 500 license count. Therefore, we're trying to figure out where we need to go as far as what systems are a must-have and what systems are a nice-to-have type of thing.

I find EventTracker support to be quite helpful. They have been quite responsive whenever I've had any issues. For the most part, they have been good to work with. There have been a couple times where there have been some issues that have taken a bit of time to try to get resolved and figured out. However, that is sort of par for the course for different products.

Before EventTracker, we did use another solution. I think it was a Symantec SIEM, but they discontinued it. So, we were looking for a different solution. 

The initial setup was several years ago, so I don't remember too much about it. The one thing that I do remember is there was like a database account that needed to be created, and there was some back and forth on that aspect. So, it took a little while to set up and get going.

Initially, we got it up and running, then we were going to deploy the agents on some noncritical servers to make sure that the EventTracker agent on the servers worked properly with collecting logs. 

In the security space, it's hard to quantify your return on investment. So, I don't. We spend about $40,000 a year and so. It's hard to say if the SIEM saved that much money.

When we first got the EventTracker product, we were using SIEM Simplified. At the time they didn't call it that, but it was more of a service thing. So, there was a bit more hand-holding and getting stuff set up, along with failure reports, that they did during the first one to two years. Then, we decided that the the additional money to have someone do these daily reports wasn't terribly useful, so we discontinued that service.

Licensing is interesting. By doing it by device, in some aspects, that can work to your advantage, and in some aspects, it can't. 

There are different licensing models. Back in the day, it used to be events per second and trying to figure out the number of events per second during the year that all of your devices are generating. If you didn't necessarily have a solution in place to begin with, this was a little frustrating. You might add another device and all of a sudden your events per second shoot up quite a bit. With a number of system-based licenses, it's been good. The big thing is is when you get up on that license account, do you continue to add additional licenses or start removing some systems that may be not as critical as others? Like, do we need to be getting logs from different Windows test servers out there? Ideally, yes. But it all depends on the pricing.

EventTracker's subscription-based model is interesting as far as yearly license type stuff. It's nice because you know what it's going to be next year. We haven't really looked at any other solutions. The pricing at the time compared to the other solutions was a lot less. A couple of years ago, we actually looked at Splunk. The amount in Splunk's licensing model is based on 20 gigs a day, or something like that. Based on our number of logs and stuff that we were already generating, the costs would be substantially more for the amount of logs that we would be getting.

We looked at a handful of different solutions out there. When we were looking at SIEM solutions out there, we were looking to replace Symantec. We were looking at Arctic Wolf, EiQ Networks, Secureworks, and Trustwave.

The primary reason we went with EventTracker and the SIEM Simplified service was the CIO wanted something that was a 24/7 monitoring type of thing. That's why we went with that service. But, when we found out at the time it really wasn't 24/7, and we wanted 24/7 monitoring from more of a SOC/NOC type of thing. The EventTracker support said, "We do have that." However, that wasn't necessarily the case. It was primarily an eight to five type of thing. Supposedly, in the last couple of years, they have changed it, and it is more of a SOC/NOC type of thing. 

This was one of the reasons: We were looking for a hybrid approach. Basically a SIEM that we could have on-premise where we could have someone else monitor when I was not in the office. EventTracker was able to create the different alerts and stuff like that. So, when I'm not in the office, I get alerts generated. However, we wanted some more active monitoring type stuff.

I would rate the product as a seven (out of 10). 

We don't use the dashboard widgets, but we are planning on it.

We were struggling at the event level, like a lot of people do, in terms of centralized event management and notifications. We just did not have a single pane of glass where we could see events, potential issues, all on a fine thread of a timeline to compare across our enterprise. We needed to know: Is there anything else going on at the same time?

We use it extensively. Every product that we have on our network is tied into it. That's been huge for us. The thought process was, "If we're going to put it in place, we want every end-point out there to be cycling through logs or have syslogs pulled into EventTracker. Otherwise, it just didn't make sense. We wanted to have eyes on every device out there.

It's come in tremendously handy. We've had small incidents crop up that we've been able to isolate immediately or dig further into because of this. Without that "full-glass" look at everything we've got going on in our environment at a particular time, we would be chasing our tail a little bit: "What's happening here? Do I need to go look here? Do I need to go look there?" The ability to pull those logs in from not only all of our desktops, all of our servers, all of our appliances, but from anything else that could be logging an event, has been tremendous for us.

It has limited the time that I've had to spend combing through any device and syslogs. For example, firewalls: I'd be looking through events to try to find out if anything looks abnormal. EventTracker not only does centralized tracking, but it does a fair amount of behavioral analysis as well. It tells us: "Hey, here are events we haven't seen before." It even calls to my attention processes that are new, including unsigned processes that we need to be aware of in our environment. We also utilize their Snort plugin on the front-end. It indicates traffic that's coming in that we might want to be aware of.

We tend to start blacklisting and block-listing a tremendous amount of external IPs based upon things that the solution sees on the outside. Those could just be events hitting our firewall, but unless I'm sitting there watching my firewall on a continuous basis, I'm probably going to miss a lot of them. EventTracker is collecting that and pulling it all into a quick and easy notification. On a daily basis, I get that report to rehash: "Did you see these things? Are these acceptable? Here's behavior that we haven't seen before from this particular user." It makes me aware of things so that I can validate. It gives me a good check and balance on what we have going on in the environment and what they're seeing through a collection of event logs.

Because we've been using it for so long in our environment, I've pushed my daily duties onto other things. I've moved into other areas since I don't have to constantly monitor this equipment or the logs or check back on things. It's probably cut down 50 percent of my workload, in terms of tracking and watching and trying to play a little bit of triage after the fact. It's giving me heads-up notifications immediately. Then, as we hash back through things, either on a daily or monthly basis, we're looking at what it's finding and what we are missing. Are there things that are still cropping up that haven't been taken care of that maybe slipped through the cracks? It's not only cut down a ton of my time but even our staff time which used to be spent watching and maintaining logs on various products.

The solution is on-prem and we also utilize them for fairly full, managed services. They do tend to babysit it quite a bit. We get daily reports that they piece together for us which walk through everything that they're finding and seeing. And we sit together in a monthly service call to walk through what they found over the course of the month, just to compare notes. We backtrack and check to make sure that nothing stood out and that we didn't miss anything or to hear if they've got any concerns or questions. They're putting in the time on a daily basis for us on that. 

Another valuable feature is that we've tied it into pretty much everything that we have. We've got it tied into our Office 365 and it's helping us monitor even the spam garbage there, the consistencies or the abnormalities on the spam. We've got it tied into our firewalls and into just about every appliance we have as a front-line or an in-between, including VPN and the authentication that is coming through there. It's also tied into anything that's cloud-based. We might tie into IIS logs, our antivirus logs. It's huge that it gives us that single dashboard overview of events happening, all at one time. It's been, tremendous for us.

I really appreciate the fact that the dashboard breaks everything down into a pretty easy view for me. I can pass it along, not only my boss, but to senior management, if needed. I can show them what activity is being monitored, what types of incidents there are and the type of risk, if there is one. It shows what changes are happening to privileged user accounts, access and identity, what's cropping up. It shows application activity and whether we've got system resources that aren't online and being found anymore. It's a pretty simple, easy, quick hit and there are the supporting logs behind it. If I need to drill down further, I can do that quickly. It's very effective.

I just want to know what's going on on the end-points. If anything gets flagged, if anything's out of order, chances are pretty good we're going to get it flagged on a couple of systems, whether it's a desktop for a firewall or an outbound request. It might get flagged on our AV, but at least I'm seeing it across all of those systems at a given time. So I really appreciate having that single location to look for any event that might be something which warrants a little bit more work.

I don't play around too much with the dashboard widgets, the stuff that's built-in. I get a daily report and, based on that, if I need to, I'll dig into it. So I don't customize things too much. I go back through things on a monthly basis as well. The dashboard is an easy enough layout and I've gotten used to using it or digging down deeper so I don't really change much in there.

In terms of log importing, I've never really had any problems with it. Everything that's a syslog is a pretty easy tie-in and pull-through. Anything else that's agent-based, like a desktop, we've had very few problems with. Microsoft's Direct Access, their direct-access, always-on VPN product was a little bit of a tough one that we had to work through to get those to pull across. But overall, the agents seem to be pretty stable, pretty efficient. They're pulling through everything that we need at this point. Anytime we've pulled in, whether it's an antivirus product - we've gone through a couple of them - various appliances, even Office 365, it has been very well-versed on all the major brands out there. If we want to pull those in or pull in the syslogs or pull in those events, we've never had an issue.

They haven't had to fixed much, but we have come back to them with requests for very specialized reporting. Something that's not canned. We might be looking at a particular functional area where we want to track specific data or specific login times. If I were to put in the time it be easy to do or it might take me a little while. But these guys can roll it back to me so quickly that I don't think twice about throwing them at them and asking for a report or a particular search. Probably the biggest thing is just: Can I search for this and what's the best way to do it? If I'm looking for two events versus a singular event, I just throw it back at them. They're the experts on it.

Right now I simply can't think of anything that we're lacking. I don't have much to throw back at them at this point. 

That could change as everybody's continuing to move towards a cloud product or with the cloud products themselves, all the services which we're slowly moving toward on the cloud. We're an Office 365 tenant right now, but I can see that over the next three to five years that's going to continue to increase. I'm excited to see how they can continue to structure their product to help us take advantage of the viewing, the monitoring, and the tracking of those products. Until we get to that point, I just don't know whether they've got everything we need, or if there will be things we will need to ask for that we simply didn't require in the past.

The stability has been very good. 

The only time we might have had downtime was based on our requirements where we were moving to new hardware. That doesn't happen much now because we're virtualized. But we tend to archive a lot of the data so we've moved that backend data store a couple of times. They'll either walk us through it, or they'll just take care of it if we don't have time for it.

In fact, later this afternoon we're doing exactly that. We're moving off of an older SAN to a newer SAN. We'll disconnect the old SAN, validate that all the data is flowing the way it should be in the searches and that the search capability against the archive database is still valid. Overall, it's really pretty simple.

We're small. I'm assuming that the scalability would be no problem given all the other feature sets. When we've brought things on board, we've never had an issue. I don't know how large this scales or of any limitations to it. The backend data might be just what you have available. I've never been too concerned with it because we don't scale up really large. We're pretty stable as far as the number of devices goes, internally for us. I don't see that really changing much.

Most of the devices or products that we've talked to folks out there about have syslogs of some sort that we can point back. That's what we plan to do. I don't even know where that's going to go at this point, but I know that as we move into the cloud space, but I want to continue to tie that into EventTracker. I want to make sure I've got eyes on everything that we're communicating with.

The support group is tremendous about asking me if there is anything else I want, is there anything more they can do and, and I'm left a little bit speechless. I've asked for various reports or can we have something else tracked individually. That's usually a pretty quick turnaround. Their support has been very good. We've got a great relationship. They do a great job of checking back to make sure there's nothing we're missing.

I'll email their main group. I have some individual contacts and I'll reach out to them occasionally, if I need to. Typically, I try and go through their main security operations center. I get the daily email from them, and that's who I would reply back to.

If I've got a request, for example, if we're shuffling around some backend databases, something we've got to move off of a backend SAN to a new SAN, I'll just reach out to them. "Hey, we're looking to do this." Response time from them is pretty quick. We have had emails back and forth within 15 to 20 minutes.

They're very easy to get ahold of. Their security center might be maybe in a different time zone, but I've never had a problem, here in the Central Standard Time zone. Anytime I've reached out to them, I've always gotten a response pretty quickly.

We did not have a previous SIEM. That was a very big push for us. We realized how little we had in the way of eyes on all of our products, unless we did a manual, individual triage. And even then, it was pretty limited. We knew we had a huge blind spot by not putting in a SIEM. It's been phenomenal for some of the small incidents that we've had crop up. It's been fantastic.

The setup was actually quite easy as are the upgrades and the patches that we go through. The initial setup was a pretty simple walkthrough on their part. We bundled that in as part of the product when we purchased it. The agreement was that they'd do the setup themselves but we wanted a walkthrough as well so that we had some knowledge here. We didn't want them to just set it up and do a hand-over-the-keys deal. So we stepped through it together, which really means I did a lot of watching as they were doing a lot of the setup. 

We walked through it through a WebEx. I had the server side set up on our side. At that point it was just a matter of them leading: "We're going to go here. Where's your data storage? Tie that in, install." 

Out-of-the-box it was pretty straightforward and easy to use. We started pulling in all the clients as we pushed out the agents to the desktops; that was pretty easy. It was non-intrusive to our users, which is a big deal. We didn't want it to intrude on anybody. In fact, when we push out agent updates to desktops - it doesn't happen that often, maybe once or twice a year - those agent updates are seamless. Nobody's aware that that has even taken place. 

If you want to do it, they'll certainly help you through it. If you want them to do it, they'll allow you to just watch what their process is in case you want to do it the next time.

Our company has about 225 end-users. We obviously have more devices than that, but not more than about double that. In terms of deployment, it was just me involved from our side. 

We had things up and running within half a day, when we started doing a little bit of discovery and collecting. After a couple of days of letting it run through the system and doing discovery we found, "Those are the pieces that we've missed. Yeah, we're going to add this or that in." Now, we tend to roll through one-third or one-fourth of our desktops on an annual basis. We'll do the discovery - the agent installs pull those in. It requires very limited staff time on our part. Our helpdesk now installs the agent as they roll out a desktop, which is pretty easy. We pull it in, I validate. There's not a lot to it.

It has its value, especially when I can say that it's taken over what I was spending about 50 percent of my time on. Not only has it eliminated the need for me to spend time there, but I can put that time to use elsewhere. It's absolutely well worth it.

I'm not really the money guy or the budget guy, so I couldn't tell you from a dollars and cents standpoint, but return on investment just for my time alone over the last five years has been tremendous. I no longer spend that daily time - I don't want to say "wasted time" - but it used to take me a tremendous amount of time to sit there and try and play catch up on logs, looking for events and trying to track things on my own. That's been massive. That's been tremendous, not only for me but for the company. It's been well worth the money so I can put my time somewhere else.

I don't know if the pricing is by the seat but we're paying about $20,000 to 25,000 a year. On top of that, we pay for the managed support services. That runs us about another $35,000 or $40,000 a year.

At the time, EventTracker was one of the few that did a bit of that behavioral analysis. There was another one, the name escapes me right now. But it was the only other product that I felt was in the same quadrant, as far as feature sets and the behavioral analysis go. We did not evaluate very many.

They are a fantastic team. I would stack them up against anybody. If anybody asks us what we're using for a SIEM, I'd say that this is what we're using. I highly recommend them.

Stack it up against some of the other products out there. At the very least, know what you're looking for. Or, if you don't, throw it back at EventTracker and say, "We're looking to do this, can your product do it?" Let them know what you're looking to gain from this.

We started out in the same boat: "Well, why would we use you guys versus somebody else?" We had a defined requirement, that we wanted to have centralized event and incident management, and that's exactly what we got.

You need to find out if it's going to match all of the various appliances and the OS you have. Is it going to be able to pull in the syslogs? What type of products do you have in your environment? Are you pulling in Cisco devices? Whatever your firewalls are, make sure that they're matching up. I had no doubt in my mind that they were going to match up to everything in our environment, right upfront, as we gave them the list and we did that self-discovery. I think that's part of it was the workbook process. What are your devices? How many are there? What are you using for mail? What are you using for backend storage? What do you have for databases? What are the products on your network? Make sure it matches up.

I have no doubt that they'll match up well with everything out there but make sure that whatever is on your network that you want to monitor, that those specific vendors and those devices match what they can track and log events against.

Every month, when we do an assessment they ask what more they can do. Until something crops up that leaves us a little bit blind or unsure, I really don't know what they're not giving us at this point. We haven't started looking at any other products to fill any gap. I don't have a laundry list of anything I'm waiting for them to come back with, whether it's a fix or a feature.

I'll do a lot of event searches myself, more out of curiosity than anything. I might chase something down if we get a flag or notification and look for what else is taking place around that event, to get a clear picture of why it was flagged. Was this something that we brought into the environment? Were we installing something at the same time that something was flagged? What was going on? So I tend to go into the event searches a lot and the managed devices, looking for non-reportings. Those are probably my two biggest hits.

When it went from version 8 to 9, the UI changed up a little bit, so it took a little bit of getting used to. They did provide not only some on-call support to walk through things as I was asking them questions: "Nope, that's here," or, "Give this a try." They also had some pretty easy tutorials to walk through. I've done that a couple of times just to refresh myself as far as where things are. But, like I said, because we tend to lean on them for a lot of the managed side, I don't dig into it as much as I used to when we first got started with it. It's been huge just to have them a phone call away or at arm's length to say, "Can you guys take a look at this, or do this, or verify this for me?"

Typically it's just on my desktop at work. If I'm taking a look at the dashboard, I might pull up user devices - what's not reporting in. That's a biggie for us, especially as we roll out new devices and we're getting agents out on those devices. I want to make sure that they're being pulled in correctly and that I'm seeing logs. I may take a look through some of the threats, but again, their support does such a great job of combing through all the threats and kicking out any notifications to me that I don't spend a lot of time in there.

In terms of integrating it, we haven't tied EventTracker back into anybody else. At this stage, we're tying everybody into EventTracker. As we start to move into more of the cloud space, there may be some of those cloud-authority services that this may tie into. We haven't gotten to that point yet.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using it is that I think we'd take a huge step backward if we ended up losing EventTracker; whether it's EventTracker or a SIEM product of that caliber. We're part of critical infrastructure and the threats against that infrastructure have increased a tremendous amount over the last five to seven years, whether it's on the network side or the OT side.

Having the eyes and ears to be able to manage and monitor those types of events against us, in our industry, is massive. Being under a constant threat, like everybody else out there, we want to know what we have, what's in our system; we want to know where the abnormalities are. We want to see the events on a daily basis. You have to track them. You have to be proactive. You have to take some action on those things on a daily basis. Having this in place gives us the ability to see what's going on, on a daily basis, on all of our systems across the enterprise. That's massive to me.

I would absolutely rate EventTracker a ten out of ten. I love it.

We use it for Windows event logs, disk space, and other alerts.

It gives us a heads-up about the disk space and any errors in any event logs that we have to look at. There are times where that saves us time.

The most valuable feature is that we get the events: the alerts about disk space and the security reports that we get once a day, including user lockouts and the like. The reports are fine the way they are.

The dashboard is also fine. We haven't configured the dashboard widgets; we just basically go with the default that was there. The dashboard helps by organizing things for us.

Overall, the UI is very helpful. It's user-friendly and relatively intuitive.

I would like to see the dashboard come up more quickly.

I've been using EventTracker ( /products/eventtracker-reviews ) for about ten years.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Overall, it's very straightforward.