Based on our experience with these solutions and other users’ experiences shared in review platforms, I’ve picked the top incident response tools that help SOCs automate and customize the process of finding security breaches. I’ve evaluated each product’s categories, market presence, features, and pros/cons to help you make an informed decision.
SIEM, SOAR
SIEM
SOAR
SOAR
Observability platform
Observability platform
Observability platform
Endpoint protection platform
Incident management
Incident response
Market presence
| Vendor | Average rating | # of employees | Open source |
|---|---|---|---|
| ManageEngine Log360 | 4.5 based on 22 reviews | 387 | ❌ |
| IBM Security QRadar SIEM | 4.3 based on 491 reviews | 314,781 | ❌ |
| KnowBe4 PhishER | 4.5 based on reviews 857 | 1,934 | ❌ |
| Tines | 4.8 based on 189 reviews | 344 | ❌ Free edition available. |
| Datadog | 4.4 based on 775 reviews | 7,401 | ❌ |
| Dynatrace | 4.4 based on 1,494 reviews | 5,018 | ❌ |
| IBM Instana | 4.4 based on reviews 761 | 314,781 | ❌ |
| Cynet – All-in-One Cybersecurity Platform | 4.7 based on 154 reviews | 257 | ❌ |
| Splunk On-Call | 4.4 based on reviews 107 | 9,229 | ❌ |
| TheHive | 4.2 based on 17 reviews | 11 | ✅ |
Insights come from users’ experiences shared in Capterra , Gartner , G2, and TrustRadius.
Feature comparison
| Vendor | SIEM | SOAR | UEBA | EDR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ManageEngine Log360 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| IBM Security QRadar SIEM | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
| KnowBe4 PhishER | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Tines | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Datadog | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Dynatrace | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
| IBM Instana | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Cynet – All-in-One Cybersecurity Platform | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Splunk On-Call | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| TheHive | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Vendors with:
- SIEM — security information and event management collect and correlate data from network devices, endpoints, and logs. For more: SIEM tools.
- SOAR — security orchestration, automation, and response provide a collection of services and solutions that make incident response more effective and manageable at scale. For more: SOAR software.
- UEBA — user entity and behavioral analytics employ machine learning to detect unusual and potentially harmful user and device activity. For more: UEBA tools.
- EDR: Endpoint detection & response can collect and correlate endpoint activity to detect, analyze, and respond to security threats. For more: EDR tools.
To be classified as an incident response software, a software product should:
- Monitor for deviations in an IT network
- Send alerts of unusual behaviors and malware
- Automate or assist users through the remediation of security incidents
- Collect and store incident data for reporting and analysis
See the distinct features and capabilities of the best incident response tools:
ManageEngine Log360
ManageEngine Log360 is an SIEM platform with over 1,000 pre-configured alert criteria for several security use cases. With alerts classified into three severity levels (Attention, Trouble, and Critical), you may prioritize and address the threat accordingly.
Key features:
- Rule-based event correlation engine: Log360’s real-time event correlation engine allows you to find attack trends by correlating log data from various sources (750+). The product includes over 30 predefined correlation criteria for detecting common cyber attacks, such as brute-force attacks or ransomware operations.
- UEBA: Log360’s UEBA module creates a baseline of typical behavior and analyzes records from numerous sources for any variations from expected behavior.
- MITRE ATT&CK framework: Log360 can help your security team detect indicators of compromise with:
- Signature-based attack detection.
- Threat visualizer based on MITRE alerts.
- Lateral movement detection for event time, ID, source, and severity.
- Threat intelligence: With Log 360 your SOCs can use threat intelligence for
- Collecting and correlating STIX/TAXII-based threat feeds, such as Hail A TAXII and AlienVault OTX, or your custom threat feeds.
- Getting real-time alerts when traffic from and to banned IP addresses
- Analyzing data from known suppliers like FireEye, Symantec, and Malwarebytes.
- Ticketing tool integrations: Jira Service Desk, Zendesk, ServiceNow, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Kayako, BMC Remedy Service Desk, and more.
Pros
- ManageEngine integrations: Users say ADAudit Plus and EventLog Analyzer integrations provide extensive information about Active Directory changes by collecting log data from multiple sources.
- Integration with Windows: Users appreciate how well Log360 integrates with the Windows environment.
- Extensive reporting: Users find the tool beneficial for compliance reporting into network activities.
- Custom drag-to-create regex: The solution’s ability to build custom drag-to-create regex fields is highly valued
Cons
- False positives: A common issue noted is the high number of false positives
- Reporting limitations: There are mentions of reporting capabilities needing improvement, which some users think do not match competitors like Splunk or LogRhythm.
- Initial setup complexity: While implementation is generally viewed positively, some users found the initial setup phase to be cumbersome,
IBM Security QRadar SIEM
IBM Security QRadar SIEM aims to collect and analyze event logs from several sources, to offer visibility into their IT infrastructures.
IBM QRadar SIEM can ingest event log data while supporting over 450 device support modules (DSM) and with more than 700 supported integrations and partner extensions including:
Source: IBM
Pros
- Decent for syslogs: Reviewers say the solution can effectively handle syslog data and perform essential parsing and rule functions.
- High on-premises performance: Users who have deployed it on-premises report satisfactory performance.
- Scalability: The product is noted for its ability to scale and handle complex environments.
Cons
- Limited data collection and analysis: Some users say IBM Security QRadar SIEM’s incident response methodologies are only suitable for structured data collected from app/system logging.
- Lacking alerts and monitoring: SOC analysts say IBM QRadar SIEM’s central log management is quite successful, but the integration of data and capacity to make data actionable is lacking Noting that alerting and monitoring do not have all of the features and customization required to be an actual SIEM.
- CLI dependence: Advanced features often require command-line interface usage
- High costs: The cost of scaling can be high.
- Limited integrations and threat intelligence: Some find QRadar’s integration with threat intelligence lacking and not as reliable as other tools.
- Customer support: Their support (offshore) can be inefficient.
KnowBe4 PhishER
KnowBe4 PhishER is a web-based platform that allows organizations to monitor and respond to user-reported potentially malicious emails. PhishER integrates with third-party analysis tools such as VirusTotal and Syslog.
Key features:
- Identify threats: PhishER gathers and categorizes emails according to criteria and tags, then analyzes them to calculate confidence levels. This assists in detecting trends that indicate a phishing effort.
- Prioritize emails: PhishER automatically prioritizes emails based on their time, ID, or severity levels.
- Block risky emails: PhishER’s Blocklist functionality enables companies to construct a custom list of blocklist items to prevent phishing emails from reaching users’ inboxes.
- Quarantine threats: PhishER’s Global PhishRIP feature quarantines detected threats across all user mailboxes.
Pros
- VirusTotal integration: The integration with VirusTotal is beneficial for assessing whether an attachment is safe.
- Link reputation analysis: Evaluating link reputation is useful for identifying potentially harmful links, helping to prevent phishing attacks.
- Harmful email detection: The platform is effective in identifying and pulling harmful emails.
Cons
- Restrictive selection rules: The rules for deleting phishing emails are overly restrictive, requiring multiple criteria that make it difficult to delete emails from a single suspicious address.
- Inconsistent email detection: The rules do not always catch all phishing emails, requiring multiple runs of queries to identify threats. This can lead to missed emails.
- Manual remediation: Users may need to manually address phishing emails sometimes.
Tines
Tines is an incident response tool designed to automate and integrate business processes without coding or scripting. Tines provides cases that allow the team to collaborate on events, investigations, and handling anomalies to build a strong incident response strategy.
Examples of incident management workflows:
- Summarize incident data and submit to a case:
- Format a case template with Markdown syntax (e.g. HTML).
- Summarize what happened in a case and move it to a page.
- Create a chronology of events as a visualization and add it to a case.
- Use Tines to normalize alerts from several sources: If the evaluated threat level is high, a Case will be generated in Tines for tracking.
Pros
- Ease of use: The drag-and-drop interface is appreciated by users, simplifying the creation of automated workflows without extensive coding knowledge.
- Playbooks: Tines’ ability to develop and debug stories (playbooks) is appreciated.
- Workflow automation capabilities: Tines is highlighted for its effective automation features across security operations and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) tasks.
Cons
- Need for more comprehensive scripting: Users expect a more detailed integrated development environment (IDE) for script editing, with features like autocomplete and better error handling.
- Documentation gaps: A few users noted documentation is lacking, particularly for features related to the Python scripting toolkit.
- User interface navigation challenges: Some users find the UI difficult to navigate when creating workflow automation with playbooks.
Datadog
Datadog is a cloud monitoring, security, and analytics tool for developers, IT operations teams, and security engineers. Datadog is used by cloud-native organizations that require visibility into their development, and operations environments.
The SaaS platform integrates and automates:
- infrastructure monitoring
- application performance monitoring
- log management
Pros
- Integration options: The platform provides extensive integrations for cloud services such as AWS and Kubernetes.
- Reporting: Reviewers value the extensive monitoring capabilities, including synthetic tests, logging, and application performance monitoring.
- User-friendly dashboards: Users appreciate the intuitive dashboard interface.
Cons
- Complexity for new users: Several reviewers mention that the platform can be overwhelming for newcomers due to niche terms like APM (application performance monitoring) and RUM (real user monitoring).
- Unclear pricing models: Some find the pricing structure unclear, particularly regarding custom metrics. Unpredictable costs associated with scaling (e.g., deploying agents on new hosts) are not clearly defined.
- Slow updates for new features: There are comments about the slow implementation of AWS updates and user-requested features.
- Complex integrations with key enterprise applications: Users think it is difficult to integrate Datadog with key enterprise applications, even where documentation and setup are available.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace is an observability & APM tool designed to collect application performance metrics and extend its capability to monitor at an instance level. David, its AI tool, can analyze data in various environments, including the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid.
Key features:
- Application performance monitoring (APM) tracks application performance indicators, identifies bottlenecks, and offers code-level insights for Java, .NET, Node.js, and PHP.
- Infrastructure monitoring tracks servers, networks, and other infrastructure components.
- Real user monitoring (RUM) provides insights into how real users engage with their apps.
- Synthetic monitoring replicates user interactions to ensure application availability and performance.
- Cloud monitoring: evaluates the health of cloud-based IT infrastructures.
Pros
- AI-powered David tool: The Davis AI feature offers automated root cause analysis.
- Initial setup: The setup/configuration procedure is minimal
- Monitoring: The ability to view logs and issues on clusters is appreciated.
- API development: Useful for API development because you can connect local files/repos and utilize ‘Rookout breakpoints’ to debug your API.
Cons
- Ineffective data point tracking: Users say Dynatrace has a less useful infrastructure than DataDog. The note Dynatrace loses data points and causes variations with Amazon CloudWatch.
- False alerts: Users occasionally experience false alerts.
- High cost: Users report that the costs can escalate quickly, especially with extensive monitoring needs.
IBM Instana
IBM Instana is an observability platform that enables you to evaluate and troubleshoot microservices and containerized systems. It supports automated application performance monitoring, end-user experience monitoring, root cause analysis, and anomaly detection.
Instana monitors 200+ technologies, including cloud and infrastructure, tracing, alerting and notifications, CI/CD, logging, and metrics.
Source: IBM
Key features:
- Automated discovery and monitoring of:
- Physical components: Hosts or machines, containers, clusters
- Logical components: Services, endpoints, application perspectives or applications
- Business components: Business process (e.g. a “buying” trace for capturing data in e-commerce, followed by an order trace in ER),
- Logging: With logging, Instana collects application and service logs automatically and correlates them with metrics, and traces.
- Pipeline feedback
- Root cause analysis: Investigate the quality of service issues of your applications including:
- Issues
- Incidents
- Changes
Pros
- Root cause analysis: Users appreciate the platform’s ability to perform in-depth root cause analysis, helping to identify the exact cause of incidents.
- High-quality customer support: Users report positive experiences with responsive customer support.
- Custom filtering: Users can effectively filter errors and alerts by specific parameters.
Cons
- Learning curve: While many find it easy to use, some users indicate a learning curve exists for those unfamiliar with APM tools.
- Need for tutorials: Several users have suggested that more tutorials or documentation would help ease the learning process for beginners.
- Annual pricing model: Users have noted that the annual pricing model requires careful planning for scaling.
Cynet – All-in-One Cybersecurity Platform
The Cynet security platform is a unified solution for several breach protections. Cynet aims to provide visibility into four areas: endpoints, users, network & files.
The platform combines endpoint protection and EDR/XDR, network analytics, user behavior analytics, SOAR, CSPM, and vulnerability management. The platform also offers a free 14-day trial.
Once installed, users can handle vulnerabilities and compliance issues. This includes:
- OS Updates
- Out-of-date apps
- Validation of security policies
- Unauthorized apps
- Out-of-date apps
Using numerous layers, Cynet may block the execution of risky processes in runtime.
- Threat intelligence – to gain insights with over 30 live feeds of Indicators of Compromise.
- Known malware – to avoid malware execution, identify known signatures.
- Machine learning – based Next-Generation Antivirus (NGAV) – to identify harmful properties by examining files before execution with independent machine learning.
- Memory access control – to secure crucial memory locations so that only legitimate processes can have access.
- Behavioral analysis – to discover and terminate malicious behavior by monitoring the incident response process at runtime.
Pros
- Effective EDR/XDR: Users highlight the strength of Cynet’s EDR/XDR features, with some saying the EDR is superior to other antivirus products. It provides strong behavioral analysis to detect and prevent malware.
- Efficient support: Users say they received Quick responses from the CyOps team.
- SIEM integration: Integrations into existing SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems are smooth.
- Visibility and threat mitigation: Users note that Cynet provides excellent visibility into threats for detailed forensic analysis.
- Broad coverage: Cynet is appreciated for offering broad protection, including ransomware prevention, threat monitoring, and incident response.
Cons
- High resource usage: Some users report that Cynet can consume significant system resources (e.g., “high memory utilization), particularly when scanning large networks.
- Cost: The platform is considered more expensive than some competitors.
- Performance issues: A few users have experienced slowdowns or performance lags. (e.g., “Performance slowdowns,” “Slower scans on large networks”).
- Limited third-party integration: While Cynet integrates well with many systems, some users find that third-party integrations can be time-consuming or challenging.
Splunk On-Call
Splunk On-Call is an incident management tool with automated scheduling and intelligent routing capabilities. It expands the alerting and messaging capabilities of all Splunk products. This allows you to use your team’s existing contact, organizing, and escalation policies for Splunk alerts.
Splunk On-Call serves as a central point for information flow during the incident lifecycle. This helps security teams resolve events faster, reducing the impact of downtime.
Pros
- Custom API solutions: Working with the API is intuitive, and it offers numerous interfaces with default tools such as Zendesk.
- Ease of use: Easy to process tickets in both the mobile app and Web page
- Android mobile app: The Android app is appreciated for its usability.
Cons
- On-call calendar: Customers indicate the on-call calendaring is lacking, and you can’t make by-hour, or by-day schedules.
- Single sign-on support: Analysts express that single sign-on (SSO) support can be improved.
- Slack integration: Users expect smoother Slack integration.
TheHive
TheHive is an open-source security incident management software. With TheHive you can synchronize it with one or more Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP) instances to initiate investigations based on events.
You can also export the results of an investigation as an MISP event to assist your colleagues in detecting and responding to assaults you have encountered. Furthermore, when TheHive is used in conjunction with other observable analysis tools, security analysts can quickly examine tens, if not hundreds, of observables.
Pros
- Workflow customization: Reviewers say TheHive’s open-source nature is adaptable to their workflow needs.
- Incident management: Several users appreciated the tool’s ability to customize workflow to remediate security incidents.
- Integrations: Ease of integration with security information event management systems (SIEM), and external malware information providers (MISPs).
Cons
- Cortec integrations: Some users found it challenging to integrate TheHive with Cortex.
- Lacking KPI dashboards: The product lacks default dashboards to monitor the performance and execution of the team.
- Slow product updates: Users raise their concerns about slow product updates.
Incident response and OODA Loop
The OODA Loop is a decision-making paradigm divided into four stages: observation (O), orientation (O), decision (D), and action (A). This sequential method assists organizations in making effective incident response decisions by cycling through these stages.
- Observe: Provides visibility into network traffic, operating systems, apps, and other elements that can assist build a baseline for the environment and offer real-time event data.
- Orient: Includes detailed contextual information and intelligence on existing threats and the types of attacks they are carrying out.
- Decide: Refers to both real-time and forensic (after the event) information about threats that can assist security teams in making informed decisions on how to respond.
- Act: Consists of actions to take to address the threats, and reduce their risk and impact on the business.
How to use OODA Loop in your incident response plan?
Organizations require solutions that enable automated visibility and control to maintain network resilience. This applies to preventative methods like MFA and granular access controls (e.g. RBAC), and reactive measures such as monitoring, and alerting.
Multiple tools can help with reaction efforts across the OODA cycle. Most tools are classified into one of the following categories:
See each step of the OODA loop and how technology fits into it:
Observe
This phase of the OODA loop necessitates using tools to establish a baseline, define normal behavior, and identify anomalies. Given what’s involved, this category includes a significant number of tools:
Orient
The Orient step of the OODA cycle uses tools to provide context and information on the severity of security occurrences. See the following tools that can assist the orient phase:
Decide
During the Decide step, important company decisions are taken, such as whether or not to engage in response activities. This step refers back to the previous two processes – observing and orienting – to ensure teams have all of the knowledge they need to make informed decisions.
Act
This is the process in which teams use an incident response and security tools to implement decisions made during the “decide phase”. The tools utilized here include the following:
What is incident response?
Incident response refers to an organization’s procedures and technologies for identifying and responding to cyber threats, security breaches, or cyberattacks. A formal incident response plan allows cybersecurity teams to mitigate or prevent damage.
Ideally, an organization establishes incident response methods and technology in a formal incident response plan (IRP) that outlines how various cyberattacks should be discovered and handled.
What are security incidents?
A security incident, or security event, is any digital or physical intrusion that compromises the security, reliability, or accessibility of an organization’s information systems or sensitive data.
Security incidents can range from deliberate cyberattacks by hackers or unauthorized users to unintentional breaches of IT security policy. Some of the most typical incidents:
Incident response tools automate and provide guidelines to remediate the process of addressing security breaches. Companies use these tools to monitor networks, infrastructure, and endpoints to detect intrusions.
Incident management tools can remedy issues that develop after attackers have evaded firewalls and other security systems. They alert SOCs of unauthorized access to apps and devices and detect several different types of malware.
Incident response systems function similarly to security information and event management (SIEM) tools, however, SIEM products provide broader IT visibility and analysis options.
