EventSentry

The company our IT department is working for, is a small to mid size company (~550 users).
Our team consists of two system engineers, which makes it challenging to always keep track of changes and events on our Windows servers.

We invested some time in searching for a suitable SIEM product for Microsoft Windows eventlog consolidation and event notification.
After we found other solutions to be either overkill/pushy or overpriced, we decided to evaluate EventSentry.

The installation was straight forward and intuitive.
It came with several pre-configured Windows event log packages to filter out unrelevant event log noise and to give you a quick clue about how the system works:

Define...
..which event log / source to monitor
..the IDs you are interested in
..actions to take if the event occurs

Besides this important process of constantly monitoring the Windows event logs of all our Windows servers we soon found out that theres more for us:
- Monitor changes to important system files and directories
- Monitor MS Active Directory
- Monitor software installation and changes
- Consolidate custom log files like for Microsoft Exchange
- and so much more

To be honest, it took some time and testing until we had EventSentry configured to track all the relevant edges of our infrastructure.
But during that time it was always a pleasure to work with the not-buggy and intuitive GUI.

Also, we learned to love the Webinterface (WebReports) which displays all kind of status information and lets us search and filter through all the event logs and software products we use.

After 2-3 months EventSentry totally became a part of our daily work life, running stable and reliable.
This product is a valuable addition for our security roadmap, as it gives us the possibility to verify its effectiveness and automate counter measures.

And theres still a lot to discover and utilize (we currently only monitor Microsoft Windows systems).

Notable is also the customer support and documentation. Communication was always easy and directly.
A bug I reported was quickly fixed and even a feature request I sent in has been implemented within a very short time.

The documentation is comprehensive and useful.

Trialing the software was easy and seamlessly without notable impact on our servers, so you should defenetly give this a try!

Did a WebEx with my supervisor to demo EventSentry and show how I’m using it here in our East Coast office. Whenever my boss asked a question, I could display info and immediately provide an answer with just a few mouse clicks. Simple, fast, and on-point. He was very impressed.

Installation of upgrades has been smooth and easy. I don't worry that an upgrade will cause loss of my event log data.

Excellent documentation of EventSentry installation procedures, use of features, and troubleshooing methods.

My company is starting to purchase more licenses and expand use of EventSentry to more of our systems. It's exactly what we need for event log consolidation, auditing, and system management.

I've worked in SMBs and Enterprise IT for over 10 years and have yet to find a monitoring solution that compares with EventSentry in the areas of event management, perfmon reporting, alert capability, and ease of use. On top of all of these qualities, the support staff is outstanding and the cost/value ratio is heavily stacked in the clients favor.
PROS
- Comprehensive and Customizable Event Management
- At a previous company I was tasked with finding an SIEM solution and so investigated and or demoed all of the top Gartner-recommended solutions. While many of these solutions were powerful , their TCO was likewise significant, and they were overkill for the operational monitoring we needed. The EventSentry solution was a breath of fresh air with its comprehensive event collection that did not parse events like most SIEMS, but gave us all events in their original glory in REAL-TIME unlike many of the other guys.
- Ease of Setup
- Within just a couple of hours and minimal help I had a good handle on the management interface and was gathering events and perfmon counters for multiple servers. The GUI is intuitive and well-designed so its easy to pick up and the built in filters and collection settings are robust and well-thought out to eliminate much of the noise in Event Logs.
- Simplicity of Searching old events
- This is another huge win for EventSentry. This product has a clear and understandable interface that allows for searching by multiple variables, or simple full text queries. Not only is it easy, but it is fast and is a resource for real-time troubleshooting of production issues.
- Beautiful Web Interface
- While the built-in perfmon graphs in Windows are useful, they leave a lot to be desired on the user-friendly and understandability front. Enter EventSentry with its beautiful charts that are content-rich and customizable. Add to this the ability to compare the same perfmon graphs across multiple systems with the ease of a click and drill down to a second or zoom out to months and you have yourself a thoroughbred that both the business leaders and IT can love.
- Let me be clear in saying I can't say enough good things about this product. My advice is to stop reading my comments and get the trial!

This product and the team that supports it are the REAL DEAL. I could not recommend any product more highly and encourage you to try this product and prove it for yourself!

What a Fantastic product!!!! The installation and configuration was far more intuitive and even quicker than the previous version that we tried. Configuring how and when to send emails (and even shutting them off completely) was just in-your-face simple, and the amount of time it took us to go from download to getting value was significantly less than we had been expecting for a product of this magnitude. I am, frankly, astonished that your team has been able to make such strides in a little more than a year's time.

I did, unsurprisingly, need to reach out to the support desk for a little help, which was both smooth and very pleasant this time around. The issue was a complete oversight on my part, but very quickly diagnosed and resolved. The technician could also tell that I had just finished the installation process, and was happy to poke around at a few of the other default settings to make sure I wouldn't have any other issues, and he answered any and all of my questions while on the phone.