Netsurion Reviews

We are using it for audit compliance. Because when we have audits, we are required have a central event log storage location. If we need to do a search for user lockouts, we can go, search, and find locations where they have been locked out, then keep track of those events, historically.

It was purchased so we would be in compliance. That is our main reason, and it works very well.

The product satisfies our compliance, and thus, all of our auditors. All of the data that we use and store for all security events is required by our auditors to be kept in a central storage location.

EventTracker provides a great place to do our searches for certain types of events. We can go there, run the search engine, and it runs extremely fast, especially compared to the version that we previously used. E.g., instead of connecting to each individual domain controller to search events, we can go to one location.

We can search all event logs and domain controller security events.

The dashboard is laid out very well. I handle all the group policy compliance settings, and I get to play the bad guy who locks everybody down.

The UI is fairly good. I have a laptop that I use to connect remotely. I use the simple console, which is sitting at work, and connect to it directly.

The biggest problem is that we have too many domain controllers. So, we have to keep all the clients and main system updated with the latest versions along with making sure all the firewalls are open.

It is very stable. The product has been very smooth to work with recently. I am extremely happy with the way that it is right now.

We have had issues with it in the older versions (7.2). Because of our number of events that we generate, it used to stall and take a long time to do searches. Once we upgraded to 8.2, it pretty much resolved those issues. It was around 2015 when we upgraded.

I have not seen any issues with it scaling. 

We have close to 40 users in our organization: security administration, help desk, and sysadmins.

Usually whenever we call the technical support, it's a big issue. I've not had any problems with them. They have been very responsive.

For the compliance, this is probably one of the first product that we got for our Windows side.

EventTracker has increased the productivity in our organization.

The upfront costs have increased, and we have been locked into this contract. The cost of changing over from it is way too high.

Going forward, we have to get more licenses for our domain controllers.

We are always evaluating new tools. We decided on Netsurion because of its UI and ease of use. My team agrees that the solution is reliable and easy to use.

Get the preferred support. This is for the guy who uses and maintains the back-end of the system. Because if you don't have your firewall configurations configured correctly, you will need to have that support.

All of our domain controller event logs are consolidated and stored on the server. Right now, we are sitting at 101 domain controllers, which is way too many. However, this was one of the main reasons why we purchased it, and it is performing well. The product version that we are on right now is much faster than the version that we were previously on.

We use it to monitor our firewall logs for all of our locations, all of our network logs, and alerts. We also monitor any new users added to the network or who are locked out, any new installs or uninstalls of applications on servers. And we have reports generated for any types of processes or hashes that have been run on computers or servers.

It gives us a real idea of our network environment, VPN access, alerts and more. We are able to identify where we're getting scanned externally from potentially malicious IP addresses. We can react to those a lot quicker than we could previously.

EventTracker has increased productivity and saved us time, absolutely. We would have to hire a full-time person to review logs if we didn't have EventTracker. I get daily and weekly reports that I review within an hour or two, each day, versus having to go look at logs on each machine. It would take me three or four times as long to review all those logs if they weren't all in the same dashboard report or alert.

The network alert is the most valuable feature. That way, we in the IT department are aware of user lockout and invalid password attempts way before a user ever even calls in. We can resolve the issue a whole lot quicker than waiting for the user to call us and figure out that they're locked out of the network or need some assistance with their password or the like.

The system's UI is pretty good, intuitive, and user-friendly.

EventTracker SIEMphonic has been a good add-on piece because doing all the logs can be time-consuming. Having a nice, weekly summary report, and the supplemental logs with them, in the event that you need to dive in any further, is helpful. Having somebody else reviewing those logs as well, on their team, is very helpful and beneficial to us.

There are some issues with searches taking a long period of time, but they assured me that they have implemented a new search function that's available in version 9, but which requires a solid-state hard drive. So we have upgraded to the solid state hard drive, but we are waiting for them to migrate over to the new drive, and then we'll see if our search results improve. Depending on how many logs you have it could take a long time to return the results if you're looking back prior to the last 30 days for, say, auditing purposes.

In other areas, it meets or exceeds our expectations.

It's really stable. It's pretty low-maintenance, once you get it set up, as long as the server that it's hosted on is up. We haven't really had any issues with a system problem with EventTracker since we implemented it.

It's definitely scalable. You can get all the way down to endpoints. They support multiple devices, applications, different firewalls, desktop, laptop. You have the ability to add in those logs. We have chosen not to do that at this time because we're mainly concerned about our servers and our domain, and it captures a lot of those logs. We have some offices that don't have a domain. For them, we just get their firewall logs because we are not too concerned about their individual workstation logs.

They are very responsive. They're monitoring stuff as well, with that SIEMphonic piece. They're monitoring your logs and if there's anything you have deemed critical, they're making you aware of it, to make sure that you're aware of it. They do a really good job of following up and trying to do as much as they can to assist you in any way possible.

We did not have a previous solution. They had already purchased this product before I came into the organization. There are a couple systems out there where people have reached out to me throughout the years and said, "Will you do a demo or evaluate our system?" But in my opinion, there's nothing that really stands out that would make me want to leave EventTracker. 

Even cost-wise, if somebody is cheaper - and I don't believe that they are - it's not significant enough to make that change and go through that whole design and implementation process again, just to save a little bit of money. We are familiar with EventTracker and we're getting the good service that we expect. We really don't have any desire to go with any other vendor at this time.

The initial setup is complex. It really depends on what alerts and reports you're looking at and what you want to filter it down to. It really depends on how much data you're looking at capturing and how to get that configured, working with their team on getting that configured for you. It was a long process from start to finish.

Now that it's in place, there are hardly ever any issues or any hiccups with it. But the initial setup can be a little time-consuming. You have to make sure you have adequate time if you're going to implement SIEM or an event-log correlation system.

Our deployment took a good 60 to 90 days from start to finish, working through all the reports and filtering it down to what we wanted. That included our firewall logs and deploying it on all the machines.

We really didn't have an implementation strategy at that point. We were just trying to get it implemented as quickly as possible on our domain server. Then we expanded it to all of our servers inside our network and then all of our firewalls.

They provided assistance and they do with that SIEMphonic piece. We purchased training from them and then worked with them directly on what we wanted configured and how to configure it. They did most of the heavy lifting of actually configuring the reports and all the alerts. If you want filtering you can ask them, or you have the ability to go in there yourself. I personally don't have a lot of time and resources to do that, so using their staff and the resources has been very beneficial.

Overall, they are very professional and good to work with. Some of their trainers were difficult to understand, as there was a language barrier. Some other staff from outside of the US, some of their training people, the technicians who provided training, were very difficult to understand. Others were not hard to understand. It was a case-by-case issue. But we did have some issues with trying to understand them during the training. We expressed our concerns and, of course, they addressed that. It was a process we worked through.

We have absolutely seen a return on our investment in EventTracker.

The solution is fairly expensive, but in my experience, all of the SIEM applications that I've evaluated or looked at cost about the same. It's just what a system like that costs.

I've looked at AlienVault. That's the only one that I can recall looking at extensively. But cost-wise it really wasn't worth it to us to switch to that system. It might have had a few more features, but EventTracker has done really well on constantly adding features and changing their UI and adding dashboards and getting more data on there that you want. I have no reason to make a switch.

If it's your first SIEM event-correlation system, be prepared for a long process. That's not just because it's EventTracker. That seems like that's what that process takes. Again, it really depends on what data you want to capture and how much data you want to capture and how you want to review that data. That configuration process can be very time-consuming.

We're on EventTracker 8, but we're getting ready to upgrade to the most recent version of nine, but we have not upgraded yet.

I don't typically use the dashboard widgets. I have everything configured in daily, weekly, and monthly reports. We have real-time alerts configured as well. So I'm not really utilizing the dashboard widgets. I know it has a lot of features and options but I manage the system from the reports and real-time alerts. In terms of the screens we use to view the solution, we mostly use the Excel reports that are generated daily and weekly. I access them, as well as the real-time alerts, from all devices. You can view them and see the details from any type of device. But I'm looking at the alerts through my email client on whatever device I'm on.

We have logs coming from our firewall configured to auto import log data, but we are not manually importing any log data.

Currently there are only two users in EventTracker: myself, as the information security officer and another gentleman here at the bank who is the backup information security officer. He functions more as a backup, but he's never had to step into that role and use the system. He received the training, but I handle the whole system. I'm the only one deploying and maintaining the system.

We have internal staff resources for internal incident management but we do not use the EventTracker SOC team. We handle the incidents internally, leveraging the reports and alerts.

We don't have any plans to increase usage, unless we add one or two offices as we do naturally in our mortgage division.

The difficulty with the language barrier at times with their training and technical support staff is a problem. That's why I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

We're getting some daily reports out of it for different systems regarding passwords expiring, accounts locked out, and a number of events in different categories. We're probably not using it to its fullest potential.

We import log data into the solution from Windows Servers and switch-logs from the Cisco switches. Those are the main things that we feed into the system. We don't have any Linux or any other external systems that we feed into it.

We use those standard reports every day and monitor them. It does save us some time from having to go out manually and pull that information together. With the daily reports that we get, we can easily scan through them and find any anomalies that are occurring. If a system suddenly starts getting thousands of more errors than it did previously, we know we need to look at something on that system.

The solution has also saved us time due to the fact that it's doing the consolidation of the log files for us. It probably saves us three hours a day.

The most important feature is keeping track of when accounts are created and deleted, when permission groups are changed, and memberships are changed in groups; and overall, how many errors are occurring on the various systems that we're monitoring.

The ability to import log data into the solution is very good. It consolidates that information and stores it in a compact manner. It doesn't use a huge amount of disk space to store the history of the logs but still gives us the ability to pull various reports as we need them.

I'd like to see improvement in the ease of generating reports. It seems fairly cumbersome whenever you decide to start tracking new categories of events. It seems a little kludgy when trying to generate those reports. Other than that it's fine.

It's very stable. We put it in place and have ignored it except, for pulling the reports.

In our environment, it works perfectly fine.

I've used the technical support a couple times. I've had very good results. In generating those reports, they were able to provide the methods in order to collect the information we needed to collect.

I don't know exact numbers on ROI, but in my mind it saves us a lot of time. I have six or seven reports that I can peruse through each day, quickly and efficiently, instead of having to go out and collect that data manually.

Licensing is very easy. Our CIO takes care of the billing, but in terms of price point, he hasn't complained, so it must be good.

Go through some training to know the ins and outs of the application. It has changed quite a bit in the seven years I've worked with it, and it would be a good idea to do some more training to learn all the new features and to make sure you can utilize all the capabilities.

The UI is okay. As I said, we're probably underutilizing the product compared to what we should be using it for. We don't view the information from it on screens. We more go off of the reports that we get daily out of the system.

In our company there are only three people using the system. We're all IT managers. We're only monitoring about 30 systems and we don't have plans to increase usage. Total time for deployment and maintenance would be a part-time IT manager, ten hours a year. In terms of internal staff resources for internal incident management, it's the same three IT specialists.

 I would give the solution an eight out of ten. I'm not giving it a ten because of a lack of understanding of the system and some of the kludginess in the generating of reports.

The primary use case is SIEM vulnerability and IDS.

It is protecting us from cyber threats.

We get a lot of information security audits from our larger clients. I wanted to be able to have intrusion detection and prevention, vulnerability scanning, and SIEM because those are always the questions, "Do you maintain your logs? Do you look at them? How do you take proactive action?" EventTracker managed service gives me the right answers for all those questions and has saved me time when answering these questions.

The SIEMs and managed service are its most valuable features. We get a weekly report from them which provides a culmination of them combing through millions of events which are triggered across our network every day and minute. Their information security experts basically boil that down to a report which I get emailed once a week. It identifies potential threats and the remediation that I should take to be able to quell those threats.

I don't have a CISO and don't have the budget to bring a CISO in. Therefore, it basically allows me to outsource the information security officer to EventTracker and have them perform that role for the company.

With the dashboards, I can very quickly see if there are any pending threats or anything that I should take action against. It has a very easy to use interface. Instead of having to go run reports and digging through millions of entries of data, I can have a couple of key metrics brought right up to me through the dashboard and be able to review that information, then either send it on to my networking team to address something or have comfort that we're in a good footing security-wise.

The solution's UI is very good now. It went through a transition phase from four years ago to today. With each iteration, we started on version 6 or 7, then we went to 8, and now we're on 9. Each one has been a large improvement for user usability and the user interface. It is more modern and easier to use. We usually view it on Internet Explorer or Chrome. I use my laptop to view it and find it a comfortable view.

I rely on them to tell me what features should be rolled out and come out. They are always introducing me to new threats and other thing that we need to be looking out for. They say, "By the way, we're looking for these now on the weekly report for you." They are the ones that I just outsourced this to.

The deployment of the agents could be a bit easier. We always seem to have a bit of a challenge with that. A lot of times the agents either don't deploy or they quit responding, then we have to go and redeploy them. That gets frustrating.

It has been very stable for me. I can't say that I have ever known it to be down in the last four years unless we were rebooting it ourselves to do maintenance, like caching on the server.

Version 9 was a tremendous upgrade for the dashboard. The performance of the new version with the Elasticsearch edition is a real improvement. Previously, running reports would take a long time, and now reports are very easy to slice and dice, then look through the data and dashboards. The dashboards are very helpful if I want to add a new widget. I can email the control center, then they will just add it to my dashboard for me.

It has accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish. If anything, I'm downsizing servers by moving it to the cloud. So, I'm not really adding more to what it needs to manage.

A network engineer and I are the two users for this solution. It is currently deployed across all of our desktops, servers, and VMs. I don't have any expectations to expand it, except for if I hire a new employee and put a new desktop in, but I doubt we are going to be putting new servers in.

We are getting on average 1.6 to 1.7 millions events a day.

The technical support is very good and responsive. If I send an email to them, I always get a response within an hour. I don't generally have any emergencies happen. When we've had an emergency situation, they've also been really good to jump on and help remediate the situation. For example, we had a virus that was detected, and they were the ones that identified it early on during their review of the SIEM. They were there to help us through the remediation, getting it blocked, and blocking any exfiltration that the virus was trying to do. Afterwards, during the post-mortem and giving me documentation on what they had seen, how we'd reacted to it so that I can put together a post-mortem for the executive team, they participated in that. Overall, they have a really strong support team.

We did not use another solution prior to EventTracker.

The initial setup was straightforward because they did it. We just had to give them a virtual machine that met their specs, then they installed the software and got it all configured for us. So, it was pretty easy and only took a network engineer from our company.

It did not take more than a couple days to get everything installed, running, tuned, etc. We installed the software first, then we installed the agents second.

We have a network engineer doing the maintenance for it.

Netsurion did the installation. We did not work with a third-party consultant.

I haven't measured the ROI. We don't do normal budgets, as we are not that big of a company. We are mid-sized.

The pricing and licensing seem very reasonable. The managed service part of it feels like it gives me the equivalent of a full-time engineer for a lot less money. So, I feel it's a good value.

I was doing a cursory review of different things by doing a web search, like a Google search, and looking at different options. I came across Netsurion, who are local to us, and I knew the VP of Sales, and I always like to work with people who I have a relationship with.

The solution has been everything that I've asked for from a service standpoint, software standpoint, and support. I have no complaints.

My advice would be to engage them to do the installation. The managed service is great value which saves you a full-time employee on your staff by being able to outsource it to EventTracker to review all the logs and cull through the data to make recommendations and identify threats, then how to remediate them. They provide it to you in your weekly or daily report, depending on how frequently you want to have them do it, which is based on your compliance. If you have compliance requirements for HIPAA, PCI, etc., it is a great benefit to help an organization meet their compliance requirements.

We have internal staff resources for internal incident management. We leverage the EventTracker SOC team. When we detected the virus, we kept in contact with the EventTracker SOC team and sent them emails, and they would call me and say that they see it on this server or that desktop, and we'd go and take it off of the network and clean it. Then, we would put it back on and they'd watch to see if they saw any traffic that was not supposed to be coming from that server. For the whole remediation process, they were sort of part of the team.

Data is all configured to automatically go in. We deployed their agents, and those agents just send the log data directly to the SIEM. We don't manually upload anything.

We did not integrate it with any other solutions.