Datadog vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers.

Incentivized

Solarwinds SEM is great for generating reports for investigation purposes. Once you set up the connectors you can walk away and the product runs without needing maintenance. It was however pretty difficult to create the reports and alerts when now starting out and it can be very intimidating for new users.

Incentivized

• Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
• Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
• Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
• DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
• Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.

Incentivized

• SolarWinds easily provides the much needed visibily into changes in an Active Directory (AD) environment. Email alerting can be configured to alert a team if an account is locked out, disabled by another users, or if users and/or computers accounts are created.
• SolarWinds allowed a searchable audit feature. Microsoft Windows can be configured to log many different parts of a system, but search those logs can be difficult. SEM allows you to search for specific users or events.

Incentivized

• Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
• I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
• I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame

Incentivized

• Compared to other SIEMs, there are features that are missing. Machine learning, automatic event correlation, ability to correlate multiple sources together.
• The UI is clunky, and the *New* event log analyzer page felt really disjointed from the rest of the product.
• In my experience, the dashboards were almost unusable. They persisted across login per device, and even then they sometimes would reset and go back to the ''Getting Started'' look.

Incentivized

It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM

Incentivized

Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.

Incentivized

It is very good - but you get what you pay for. The intent is not for a Fortune 500 that needs more "heavy lifting" with SolarWinds Security Event Manager & for whom the price tag is not (much of) a consideration.

Incentivized

The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.

Incentivized

The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material.

Incentivized

I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way.

Incentivized

The compare well against the others - the pricing models for all but Splunk (free version) are based on EPS/TB consumed... the problem they pose is guesstimating the price tag per month. SolarWinds Security Event Manager gets around that.

Incentivized

• Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
• Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
• Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.

Incentivized

• It saves a lot of time when we had issues trying to figure out where the user account lockout was coming from.
• With it being an affordable SIEM, we are able to have the ability to do the actions associated with a SIEM and the advantages of not “breaking the bank account”.

Incentivized