Cisco Secure Network Analytics Reviews

We use StealthWatch for telemetry on the cybersecurity side. It's also used for CCTV, IoT, and all the other stuff that isn't connected to the network. There is a cloud version of StealthWatch, but we use the on-prem solution.

StealthWatch lets me see the ports running in and out and the country. It has excellent reporting, telemetry, and artificial intelligence features. With the telemetry, I can set thresholds to detect sudden changes and the alarms go through the PLC parts. I can see all the ports running on that trunk.

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.

We've been using StealthWatch for almost two years. We were the first ones to adopt it in the Philippines.

StealthWatch is a stable product. I haven't seen a technology that could match it aside from the Chinese brand Huawei. Cisco is a US brand, so I haven't seen some of these products outside of this market. 

Who knows? Tomorrow, some company may build a newer, more stable solution, more stable one, but Cisco Stealthwatch has the most stable services today.

The scalability is limited only by the license type. It's not a problem as long as you purchase enough licenses and the necessary services. We have 300 users.

We have a service agreement with Cisco, but we haven't had that many problems with StealthWatch except for a few bugs in newly released versions. Those bugs were a bottleneck for about a year and a half, but we stabilized it about three or four months ago.

We switched to StealthWatch for the orchestration features. 

Setting up StealthWatch is straightforward, but you may need some specialists to integrate it with software solutions like pxGrid, DNAC, and ISE. It took us about two weeks to deploy StealthWatch, but that includes the staffing limitations due to pandemic protocols. In total, it took two months to integrate Cisco ISE, DNAC, and all our other services.

The deployment includes about five engineers—six including me.

We used some integrators, including a consultant from Cisco.

We have a three-year contract with Cisco, including 24/7 online support. There are no additional costs. 

I rate StealthWatch eight out of 10 overall, but I would rate it six for engineers because this is a relatively new technology with a steep learning curve for in-house and third-party engineers.

Whether StealthWatch is a suitable solution depends on the use case and industry, but I recommend it for a company that wants solid telemetry on their end. 

If you're just segregating and creating a sensor firewall on the switch side, you'll save money going with Cisco instead of buying a lot of firewalls to to provide segregation. It's better to use Cisco to centrally manage everything.

We use Stealthwatch primarily to secure customers' endpoint devices, in order to provide more visibility into their security vectors. We determine where they are getting attacked, if they are getting attacked, how to prevent it, how to fight it, etc. We are really trying to take the fight to the administrator and be a little more proactive, as opposed to being so reactive with security events.

The network visibility feature opens up a whole new pane of glass that didn't exist before, so when you talk about being able to look into your network and understand what's there for security events, impostering, and everything that Stealthwatch can bring to the table, there's nothing else that a typical customer's going to have installed today that will give them any of that information.

Stealthwatch has definitely increased our threat detection rate. I would say on average probably close to 100%. Especially in the market that we play in, which is largely commercial, a lot of customers are just getting into this, so they literally had nothing and now they have a lot.

It has also reduced our incident response time and the time it takes us to detect and remediate threats, at times by months. In addition, Stealthwatch has helped us reduce false positives.

Stealthwatch helps us save time, money, and administrative work. If you talk about a simple security event that a customer has to react to if they don't have the visibility you don't find out about it until something even worse happens. For example, somebody worked to get into your financial systems and they were somehow siphoning money out, not only did they get in and you didn't detect that, but now money is disappearing out of your account. So the ability to detect that threat immediately and remediate it is the true value of that reliance.

The most valuable part is that Stealthwatch is part of a portfolio of security devices from Cisco, so while some of the competition may have other products that could be better or provide a better administrative experience, they don't have the breadth that Cisco does. Cisco literally can touch every single end point, every single ingress and egress point in the network. Nobody else has that.

Stealthwatch has analytics and threat protection capabilities up there with the industry best. It's a super powerful database on the backend, basically giving you access to all the latest and greatest threat detection events that are out there, and they're constantly being updated and monitored, so that's probably the best part about having something like that.

I don't have a specific feature request, but my big push with Cisco has always been to make it easier for the administrators to use it. If you look at other products that they've been really successful within software space like Meraki, it's because a customer can jump right in and use it on day one and feel like they're accomplishing something with it. They don't have to have a Ph.D. Anything that we can do to make the customer experience better makes it easier for them to use it, which is what we want, and it also makes it easier for us to sell it.

Obviously usability, but given the space that it plays in, any way that we can continue to increase the security vector coverage is always going to be a net gain for a product like that.

Stealthwatch seems to be rock solid.

We haven't had any issues with scalability yet.

I would give the technical support seven out of ten. When it first came out, the big problem was Cisco obviously didn't have a giant technical team behind it, but that's true of any new product. Over time it has steadily gotten better, so they can solve most problems in a reasonable amount of time at this point.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd call it a six out of ten. Do you need seasoned engineers to put it in? Yes. Do you need a rocket scientist? No.

We definitely have gotten an ROI. Look at incidents in the security space when customers are hit with malware or anything like that. These are incidents that cost thousands of dollars or potentially millions of dollars, so the first incident that you prevent, it probably just paid for itself.

The solution's time to value is one of those things that depends on what the customer has in their environment. If they have relatively little security strengthening in their environment, this is something that brings near immediate full value of the product directly to the customer's hands. Obviously, if it's part of a bigger support portfolio that the customer has, it just depends on what they already have or don't have in that environment.

The market that we play in there's a lot of value very often because sometimes this is the first product that they're investing in.

Everybody should have something in this case, because end users are always going to get you in a little bit of trouble. You have people that are executing social engineering attacks, and this will help prevent some of that from entering your network and your environment.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that everybody is a target, and everybody will be a target, unfortunately.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten, largely because the usability, that day to day stuff is a little bit clunky, while other products out there are better. It's not like there is some unicorn vision in my brain, but rather I've seen other products that customers say, “I really wish it was as easy as this other product.”

We use Stealthwatch mainly for security.

Stealthwatch has greatly improved our network visibility, in terms of bandwidth, malware, and PCI violations.

It has increased our threat detection rate, by around 100%. Stealthwatch has also reduced the time to detect and remediate threats, as well as saves us time. We're using it for bandwidth detection, so that's helped. In addition, we use the solution's encrypted traffic analytics and cognitive analytics.

The single most valuable feature we get out of Stealthwatch is visibility. Also, analytics and threat protection capabilities are good, so far.

I would like to see some improvement when it comes to reporting.

The stability of the solution is fair.

Stealthwatch has a good level of scalability.

I would consider their technical support as "fair."

We were using SolarWinds and we are still using SolarWinds, so we use both.

The initial setup was complex, especially as it came to configurations.

We used an integrator for deployment. We had a pretty good experience with them.

The licensing costs are outrageous, but Stealthwatch has a good time to value.

You've got to know what you're looking for. Tuning is really key. Have a plan before you implement on what you're going to use it for.

I would rate Stealthwatch as seven out of ten. It's easy to use.

Our primary use for this solution is to help protect against threats on our network.

This solution has helped to save us against threats, and issues. Regarding threats, we have been able to go out and mitigate some of them.

Ironically, if we consider it from the standpoint of “searching for an issue”, while it does save us time, it also provides us with more threats and issues that we would not be able to see without the product. In this regard, it also increases the work. With more threats being detected, it takes longer to examine them.

In terms of detection rate improvement, we have a lot more visibility than we’ve had in the past.

It has reduced the amount of time it takes to detect and remediate threats. It has also reduced false positives.

The most valuable feature is having visibility into the data segments throughout our network.

Using the encrypted traffic analysis has given us more intelligence on the data that we're seeing, and provides us with even greater visibility. We can now see stuff that we haven't been able to see.

There is an encrypted analytics feature that gives us visibility into some of the encrypted traffic.

I would like to see more expansion in artificial intelligence and machine learning features.

There does not seem to be much available in terms of training for the product. We use several training institutions, and this solution is not on any of their lists.

There are no stability issues with the product.

I think that the solution is very scalable. I believe that if we had to expand, we can easily add port collectors to our environment across the enterprise, and use the same management system to view the data.

We have not yet had to scale the solution.

Only five of our engineers have been in contact with technical support. Because I don't work with the product day to day, I don't have any feedback.

We did not have a solution like Stealthwatch. We heard about the product and the value it was able to give to companies regarding threats, and we thought it would be the right solution for us.

Installing the solution is straightforward, although the tuning can be complex. In our case, we didn't have any pre-training or the skills required before deploying it. So, tuning was a little complex.

We deployed the product with the assistance of our Cisco account engineers. We have a great engineering team assigned to our account.

We pay for support costs on a yearly basis.

We evaluated Darktrace after the fact. The Cisco Stealthwatch solution tied in well with our other Cisco products, so we decided that this was the way to go, for now.

This is a very good tool, although it is just one piece of our security. We have other security tools that we use to help detect threats.

The amount of information that this product gives us for detecting threats is very valuable, and we don't have another product like this in our environment. Threats can take down a company, so this is something that we like, and need.

All companies should have a solution like this. Firewalls and IPS systems, along with other security tools are valuable, but they do not have the particular functionality of this one.

My advice for anybody implementing this solution is to get training on it before their deployment.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution primarily for IDS/IPS.

It's a dependable product that is able to pinpoint where we have vulnerabilities if they occur.

Being able to look at the Layer 7 application and get information about intrusion attempts is the most valuable feature for us. 

The GUI could use some improvement. Being able to find features more easily would be a  great improvement if it was simplified.

We used to have an older version of the firmware and we were always having problems with it. Now, they have really good firmware. They came up with some new revision to the code, and so it's a lot more stable.

We haven't scaled it out more than what our initial scale was. I am only just imagining adding more sensors. When we configured it initially, we really didn't have a fundamental knowledge of exactly what to do with our network and the infrastructure. So we kind of had to let it sit there for about a month or two to learn — or get used to — the network and the product.

I haven't personally had the opportunity to use technical support, but my staff has. As far as I know, it is good. We have the Smart Net total care. We can get a TAM (Technical Account Manager), and so we can escalate straight through to a tier-two or tier-three person. So we get somebody immediately.

We just immediately went with Stealthwatch and did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was pretty complex because of the size of our environment. The product itself is complex. We had to have an advanced working knowledge of networks already before deploying the solution.

We did not use a vendor team for the deployment.

We did evaluate another product called WhiteHat Security. The decision eventually came down to sticking with the system of the products. We wanted to kind of keep our products all in one family.

I would give the solution an eight out of ten. Any detraction is just because of how complex it is. Of course, you can deploy a solution in many different ways. You have to decide what you want to cover. You have choices to monitor your egress or your ingress if you want to look for vulnerabilities and remediations within your in-house network or your DMZ network. Whichever thing you want to do, you have to understand the possibilities of the equipment's ability to meet your needs so that you can scale it when you are ready. 

We went and bought what we needed to for a small deployment — like a POC — and we just kind of wanted to keep it that way just to get something in. And then we'd scale it out later. After, you can go in and raise your thresholds. There's a lot of stuff that's in the box. To really finely tune it to work to your benefit, you have to kind of let it digest. I think initially we were a bit too aggressive and we started creating stuff. We started getting a lot of noise — a lot of emails coming in. When that happened it wasn't time to fool around anymore.

From a security perspective, we are watching for behind the scenes data exfiltration, or tubulous, or malicious network traffic, that our other tools may not be detecting at a basic network layer.

We are also using it for performance issues in trying to figure out if a site is experiencing issues with slowness. Also, we try to determine things like whether we are exceeding the bandwidth of the link or whether there is a bottleneck or something that's not negotiating correctly on the network.

Also, we use it for TAP to try and do inline network traffic analysis from a security perspective or from a performance perspective as well.

It has definitely helped us improve our mean time to resolution on network issues.

From a security perspective, I think they've been good as far as giving us knowledge.

I wouldn't say it's really transformed what we do. It's just another tool that gives us the information we need or helps alarms for us. But it only alarms on a handful of things. I think there are six or eight alerts that we've deemed critical.

Beyond that, it's just mostly the performance where I think it helps out. But that's like any NetFlow performance tool. Having insight into what's going across your network is critical for any huge network to function correctly.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ability to do TAPs because we have a distributed network.

The ability to set up one tool to stream that data over to us has been helpful because that way, we don't have to have other infrastructure and be really close to where the activity is. 

The security features have been good for helping create some correlation. For example, when you tap in, what else happens from the network perspective. 

Otherwise, just the general network performance monitoring is probably the number one thing that gets used. If we're having slowness issues then it can tell us what the bandwidth and usage are. We can find things like what is using up all the bandwidth and then find out how can we break that apart or route that differently, through a different WAN connection or internet connection.

An issue that we are having is that people have tools to do a security analysis of network traffic and people have tools that do NetFlow analysis, but typically the security tools do the NetFlow as well. We need the security piece and there are many good NetFlow tools out there, but they don't have that. I feel like they didn't segregate the product classes enough.

When you're doing research, you are looking for network traffic analysis, not NetFlow tools or network performance monitoring. This is the type of thing that I have been running into. You have to search for something that sounds very much like the other things, but it's not.

Many of these tools require extensive on-premises hardware to run. It is for their own performance and to support their own tools, including machine learning. It's as though you have to buy this hardware stack, and I feel that contributes to the price. This is versus having my collected data and then feeding it up into the cloud. I feel like a lot of monitoring tools or a lot of analysis tools are going that route. I don't think that StealthWatch is there, yet. It isn't good when you get to the point where you need to buy a huge stack of hardware. Instead, I just pay a license for how much data I send to the cloud. It is maintained there and that way, year after year I don't have to buy new hardware when it goes end-of-life.

The company has been using Cisco Stealthwatch for a couple of years, but I have only been with the company for less than one year.

I have not been made aware of any stability issues with the tool. 

My understanding is that it has been easy to scale, although I was not around for it. We have not had astronomical growth, but it sounds like it runs stable and there haven't been any performance issues with it.

We have 10 to 20 threat prevention engineers and network engineers of various levels who use it.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

I have not used another similar solution in the past. I think the only thing that would even come close was using Azure Advanced Threat Analytics, but that only really analyzes network traffic coming to the domain. It checks, for example, if there is sketchy network traffic hitting your domain controllers.

In my previous jobs, I used network performance tools, but nothing that was the same as StealthWatch where it combines that performance and security analysis together.

This is an expensive product. We have quit paying for support because we don't want to have to upgrade it and keep paying for it.

I looked at the capabilities of SolarWinds NetFlow and realized that it can't replace our Cisco StealthWatch.

We are using the previous version.

Our situation was that it was really expensive to keep up maintenance and the hardware was about to go end of life, which meant that we had to purchase a new hardware stack. Also, we were trying to get out of the data center business, so keeping StealthWatch is not really an option.

It doesn't fit where our company wants to go, but at the same time, it's one of three products out there that actually does what it does. Otherwise, you have to start linking NetFlow into the UEBA space.

My advice for anybody who is considering StealthWatch is that if you're going to maintain an on-prem network, I think it's a good solution. That is if you want to feed the bill and have something that is top of the line. But if you have a cloud journey underway and you're trying to downsize your data centers, it's going to add a big hardware footprint. This is just something to consider.

Overall, this is a good product but it would be better if it were cheaper and it fit our future plans better. Everybody had been happy with it, and the major reasons we're getting away from it are the footprint and the costs.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Using Cisco Secure Network Analytics has revolutionized our network security. The integration with SRTIntel provides unparalleled visibility, going beyond imagination. SNA, along with the SMA feature, offers detailed insights and call relations, enabling effective threat detection and response. The combination with endpoint protection gives us precise control over traffic, ensuring a robust defense against cyber threats.

The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Network Analytics is the Threat Intelligence integration.

Initially, I felt Cisco Secure Network Analytics lacked integration with Splunk. However, with Cisco's recent acquisition of Splunk, it seems this gap will be addressed. If this integration happens quickly, it could complete the circle, making the platform more robust and offering a comprehensive solution for our network security.

I would rate the stability as a seven out of ten.

I would rate the scalability as a seven out of ten. It is most suitable for enterprise businesses.

I have had some issues with the tech support for Cisco Secure Network Analytics in Southeast Asia. They don't seem very familiar with the product, so we usually contact teams in Australia or Europe for help. Thankfully, the support from those regions has helped sort out our technical problems. Overall, I would rate the support as an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of Cisco Secure Network Analytics was quite straightforward and user-friendly. The graphical interface makes it easy for anyone familiar with traffic management to handle the setup without much hassle. Explaining the concept to customers is a breeze, and they quickly grasp the key features. I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as a nine out of ten. The deployment typically takes a relatively short amount of time, from five to six hours.

I would rate Cisco SNA as a nine out of ten in terms of costliness.

I would recommend Cisco Secure Network Analytics to others. Overall, I would rate it as a nine out of ten.

Our primary use is to monitor our network, especially our remote branches.

Stealthwatch has decreased our troubleshooting steps and also cut down on the amount of time it takes us to resolve an issue.

We're able to map out our environment using Stealthwatch and we can see where our data is going, throughout our network.

Stealthwatch reduced our incident response rate, as well as the amount of time it takes to detect and remediate threats by about 25%.

This solution saves us time, money, and administrative work.

The most valuable feature we got out of Stealthwatch is to be able to, while troubleshooting, go deep into one of our interfaces and verify what the bandwidth is and if there's any activity there that's causing problems.

In terms of their analytics, we use the stats that we get from the tool itself to see that we're using a high utilization of the tool. As far as troubleshooting, it helps us to analyze some of the effects that our customers are seeing.

The overall visibility into the actual device itself would be helpful. I don't just want support-specific data, but also to be able to see information such as CPU and other internal components or usage of the devices.

The solution's very stable. Even through the upgrades after Cisco's acquisition, it has proved to be very stable.

It scales very well.

We haven't had to use it much. When we have, it's been similar to most Cisco technical support, which is very knowledgeable and helpful.

We previously used SolarWinds. The version of SolarWinds that we were using didn't give us the visibility that we needed, so we switched to Stealthwatch.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have seen a return on investment, from the fact that we now take less time to resolve an issue because we have Stealthwatch. We can capture some data in real time, or we can actually go back in the history base if we have to, to see where the issues may have started, and we also have baselines.

Their time to value is very good. We've upgraded and we just relicensed, so this is definitely a product that we use.

The yearly licensing cost is about $50,000.

We evaluated SolarWinds, WhatsUp Gold, and a couple of others that I can't think of right now.

My biggest lesson learned was how easy it is to use and to what extent it decreased our troubleshooting time. My advice is to buy Stealthwatch.

I would probably rate this as a nine out of ten. It gives us most of what we need. The one thing that's missing is probably being able to view a little deeper into the devices themselves, not just the port but the actual health of the devices.