We performed a comparison between Arista NDR and Cisco Secure Network Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly."
"Arista NDR's scalability is very good, making it easy to add more hardware components. You can order additional hardware and integrate it by stacking it with the existing setup. This feature cannot be seen in other NDR tools."
"Other solutions will say, "Hey, this device is doing something weird." But they don't aggregate that data point with other data points. With Awake you have what's called a "fact pattern." For example, if there's a smart toaster on the third floor that is beaconing out to an IP address in North Korea, sure that's bizarre. But if that toaster was made in North Korea it's not bizarre. Taking those two data points together, and automating something using machine-learning is something that no other solution is doing right now."
"When I create a workbench query in Awake to do threat hunting, it's much easier to query. You get a dictionary popup immediately when you try to type a new query. It says, "You want to search for a device?" Then you type in "D-E," and it gives you a list of commands, like device, data set behavior, etc. That gives you the ability to build your own query."
"The most valuable portion is that they offer a threat-hunting service. Using their platform, and all of the data that they're collecting, they actually help us be proactive by having really expert folks that have insight, not just into our accounts, but into other accounts as well. They can be proactive and say, 'Well, we saw this incident at some other customer. We ran that same kind of analysis for you and we didn't see that type of activity in your network.'"
"We appreciate the value of the AML (structured query language). We receive security intel feeds for a specific type of malware or ransomware. AML queries looking for the activity is applied in almost real-time. Ultimately, this determines if the activity was not observed on the network."
"The interface itself is clean and easy to use, yet customizable. I like that I can create my own dashboards fairly easily so that I can see what is important to me. Also, the query language is pretty easy to use. I haven't needed to use it a ton, but as I need to go in and do different queries based on their requests, it has been fairly simple to use."
"This solution help us monitor devices used on our network by insiders, contractors, partners, or suppliers. Its correlation and identification of specific endpoints is very good, especially since we have a large, virtualized environment. It discerns this fairly well. Some of the issues that we have had with other tools is we sometimes are not able to tell the difference between users on some of those virtualized instances."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Network Analytics is the Threat Intelligence integration."
"Cisco Stealthwatch has reduced the amount of time to detect an immediate threat."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is data hoarding because it catches threats on a frequent basis that we had no idea of."
"The beginning of any security investigation starts with net flow data."
"It's a dependable product that is able to pinpoint where we have vulnerabilities if they occur."
"The most valuable feature is NetFlow. The beginning of any security investigation starts with NetFlow data."
"The most valuable feature about this solution is that it gives me insight of my network."
"The most valuable features provided by this solution are visibility and information."
"I would like to see a bit more in terms of encrypted traffic. With the advent of programs that live off the land, a smart attacker is going to leverage encryption to execute their operation. So I would like to see improvements there, where possible. Currently, we're not going to be decrypting encrypted traffic. What other approaches could be used?"
"I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this."
"There's room for improvement with some of the definitions, because I don't have time and I'm not a Tier 4 analyst. I believe that is something they're working towards."
"I enjoy the query language, but it could be a bit more user-friendly, especially for new users who come across it... They should push it more into a natural language style as opposed to a query language."
"While the appliance is very good, and I think they're working on it, it would probably help if they integrated the management team cases into the appliance so that everything we are working on with them would be accessible on our platform, on the dashboard, on the portal. Right now, Awake is just an additional team that uses the appliance that we use and then we communicate with them directly. Communication isn't through the portal."
"One concern I do have with Awake is that, ideally, it should be able identify high-risk users and devices and entities. However, we don't have confidence in their entity resolution, and we've provided this feedback to Awake. My understanding is that this is where some of the AI/ML is, and it hasn't been reliable in correctly identifying which device an activity is associated with. We have also encountered issues where it has merged two devices into one entity profile when they shouldn't be merged. The entity resolution is the weakest point of Awake so far."
"When I looked at the competitors, such as Darktrace, they all have prettier interfaces. If Awake could make it a little more user-friendly, that would go a long way."
"Awake Security needs to move to a 24/7 support model in the MNDR space. Once they do that, it will make them even better."
"It hasn't really improved our direct detection rate but it has definitely reduced our incident response time as we wouldn't have been able to detect threats or immediate risks without this solution."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"There could be better integration on the programming side, which uses Python. StealthWatch could provide a template for Python to manage the switches. For example, it would be nice if StealthWatch bounced a port automatically it detected something anomalous."
"Initially, I felt Cisco Secure Network Analytics lacked integration with Splunk."
"I would like to see more expansion in artificial intelligence and machine learning features."
"The configuration of the solution was quite complex."
"We've run into some issues with the configuration."
"Complexity on integration is not so straightforward and you really need an expert to help build it out."
More Cisco Secure Network Analytics Pricing and Cost Advice →
Arista NDR is ranked 8th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 14 reviews while Cisco Secure Network Analytics is ranked 4th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 57 reviews. Arista NDR is rated 9.0, while Cisco Secure Network Analytics is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Arista NDR writes "Gives us network layer visibility into things that may not be covered by other monitoring tools, such as shadow IT". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Network Analytics writes "Increased the visibility of what is happening in our network". Arista NDR is most compared with Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, Vectra AI, Trend Micro Deep Discovery, Darktrace and ExtraHop Reveal(x), whereas Cisco Secure Network Analytics is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, ThousandEyes, Vectra AI and Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline. See our Arista NDR vs. Cisco Secure Network Analytics report.
See our list of best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors and best Network Detection and Response (NDR) vendors.
We monitor all Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
