IBM Security QRadar Suite Software: SIEM & SOAR

I use IBM Security QRadar  to collect logs, analyze them, and share details. When I began investigating incidents and working with the SOC team, I was using IBM Security QRadar .

IBM Security QRadar has been a game-changer for our SOC at Kantar. It pulls everything together—logs from endpoints, networks, you name it—letting us spot threats faster and cut down response times by about 40% on stuff like phishing alerts and endpoint issues across our 6,000 machines.

IBM Security QRadar offers a wide range of powerful features. During phishing-related investigations, it greatly assists from an analyst’s investigation point of view. A core capability of IBM Security QRadar is visibility — it collects and normalizes logs and network flow events from multiple tools. It can ingest logs from almost any source. Its advanced, modular architecture supports real-time log collection from diverse systems, making it well-suited for environments using platforms such as CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender, Trend Micro, and Symantec.

These features are highly beneficial in our environment because, from a security perspective, proper log collection and management are crucial. QRadar streamlines SOC operations by automating alert triggers and providing unified visibility across multiple environments, which enhances our team’s ability to handle phishing and EDR alerts effectively. The shift handover capability is another valuable feature of IBM Security QRadar. Real-time log normalization and its advanced analytics engine help reduce high-risk alerts and false positives by up to 50%.

From an analyst’s perspective, threat hunting and groundwork during rotational shifts, combined with SOAR  playbook automation, enable efficient endpoint isolation and quarantine actions. IBM Security QRadar also features a custom rules engine that allows analysts to create dynamic rules using AQL, targeting niche threats such as suspicious domains, all without vendor lock-in. Unlike rigid EDR policies, its petabyte-scale indexing efficiently handles massive event-per-second (EPS) volumes without performance degradation, making it ideal for expanding enterprise environments compared to lighter SIEM  solutions.

IBM Security QRadar needs improvement in several areas. It should be better integrated with AI, as L1 analysts often deal with noisy rules that require constant fine-tuning. Smarter, out-of-the-box analytics — comparable to CrowdStrike’s low false-positive performance — would significantly enhance efficiency. Additionally, a more intuitive and customizable dashboard would provide better visibility, making it easier to identify available options and streamline operations.

The QRadar mobile app also requires upgrades, as it currently lags behind with limited incident (offense) visibility and lacks push alerts for high-severity events. This becomes challenging during shift rotations. Adding an option for bulk offense closure with multi-select capabilities and predefined reason templates would save time, as manual tagging is currently cumbersome. These improvements are essential for optimizing the overall analyst experience.

I have used IBM Security QRadar for more than two years.

QRadar scales like a champ for our setup—handles petabyte-scale data

Good

Yeah, before QRadar, we were piecing things together with a mix of Microsoft Defender for logs from endpoints and some basic syslog forwarding from Trend Micro Deep Security , but it wasn't a full SIEM —just siloed tools that made correlation a nightmare.

complex

consultant

I can say that almost 35% of time is reduced, specifically 30 to 35% time reduction.

We looked at Splunk and Azure Sentinel  as main alternatives before landing on QRadar—Splunk for its search power and Sentinel  since we're heavy on Azure .

I recommend IBM Security QRadar because it is a trusted IBM product that many organizations and financial institutions use for its strong visibility and analytical capabilities. I have had a great experience working with IBM Security QRadar. From what I know, most SOC professionals agree that once you gain experience with QRadar, adapting to any other SIEM tool becomes much easier. Overall, I would rate my experience with IBM Security QRadar highly due to its robust features and wide industry adoption.

My main use case for IBM Security QRadar is building a SOC with IBM Security QRadar as a SIEM.

I use IBM Security QRadar in my SOC operations as an information security management, security and event management tool, to correlate events and build use cases for incident response.

My main use case helps us to deep dive into the logs and correlate events from many other products like firewalls, endpoints, and also a lot of products.

The best features IBM Security QRadar offers include vulnerability management, a powerful integration, and being a stable product. The vulnerability management feature helps to build an asset library for our organization, and with integrations, we can integrate this vulnerability with other ticketing systems to discover new vulnerabilities and build a patch management for it.

IBM Security QRadar has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to get offenses and threats into our organization, helping me to discover the real threats attacking our organization. The real threats that IBM Security QRadar helps us with are provided as offenses, real offenses with real examples that allow us to discover new offenses and assist in closing these offenses.

IBM Security QRadar can be improved; perhaps IBM support needs improvement in fast response and also the team response.

I have been using IBM Security QRadar for about nine years.

IBM Security QRadar is stable.

IBM Security QRadar's scalability is great; you can have a new collector to deploy if you have increased EPS per second.

Customer support for IBM Security QRadar needs improvement.

I have not used a different solution before IBM Security QRadar; this is my first use.

I have seen a return on investment; I can share that it includes time saved, money saved, and fewer employees needed.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is great compared to the other vendor.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing IBM Security QRadar.

IBM Security QRadar is stable and has great support.

I advise others looking into using IBM Security QRadar that it is really helpful for building a SOC and to get a deep dive into your real threats at the earliest time. I have given this product a review rating of 10.

The use cases are daily monitoring, asset management, asset monitoring, asset health status monitoring, and alert monitoring. That is the current use case of what SIEM  is being used for.

The query search and log fetching are really helpful in IBM Security QRadar  when compared to other tools.

Compared to ArcSight, Splunk, or any other SIEM  tools where you need their processing language such as structured query language, SPL, and in Sentinel  there is KQL query languages, IBM Security QRadar  doesn't require reliance on query languages. There are filters which you can use directly and apply to get the data you want fairly easily.

It's still very manual and doesn't work on its own. It's still in an early stage and not on par where we can consider it a really successful detection system. The accuracy is not there.

The UI could be better when compared to Sentinels where we can use flags and tagging. It could be much more user-friendly. IBM Security QRadar has all features and is fully competitive with other SIEM tools, but when it comes to user-friendliness, a new user takes time to get used to it. More intuitive, user-friendly interfaces and more helpful documentation would be beneficial.

The query searching and data fetching could be faster. In large to very large organizations with around 5,000 or 6,000 assets or beyond, even with proper configurations and RAM and hardware backing up, the query is fairly slow.

I have been using it for almost nine months.

The solution is extremely stable because it's on cloud. On cloud, you don't see any disconnections or instability. Any solution that is on cloud works really stably.

I am both a customer and we provide service to that.

I never needed to reach out to support because most of the expertise was already available.

I have used ArcSight and parallelly we are using Sentinel . I have also used Wazuh  and Splunk.

There are analytical workspaces where we create automatic ticket creations and automatic email notifications.

I have worked on technologies including Qualys, Group-IB, and QRadar. I have experience with CrowdStrike EDR and Bitdefender. On the EDR front, I have worked on CrowdStrike and Bitdefender. For SIEMs, I work with IBM Security QRadar and Sentinel. For vulnerability assessments, I work with Qualys.

There are no observable benefits on ROI process-wise, workability-wise, or usability-wise.

We chose IBM Security QRadar because we were moving to cloud. Previously it was an on-prem solution. Compared to Splunk and Sentinel, it's much more cost-effective.

IBM Security QRadar is capable of handling much of the market requirements. It's comparable to any other SIEM tool without standing out significantly.

It's fairly open for custom integrations, but it depends on what type of logs we are receiving and what kind of parsing we are getting done. The integrations are totally based on the skill sets if third-party or custom integrations are required.

When it comes to log management, it's fairly easy to manage and the log rotate is really good compared to any standard SIEM tool. It just gets the work done.

I rate IBM Security QRadar an 8 out of 10.