What are SIEM tools?

Businesses rely on their IT infrastructures to support nearly every aspect of their operations. At the same time, security threats ranging from cyberattacks to malicious user activity can put network security and data integrity at risk. For comprehensive protection, businesses are turning to Security and Information Event Management (SIEM) tools, software programs to help monitor log activity—and flag suspicious incidents—throughout an IT environment.

SIEM is essentially a combination of two practices:

1. Security Information Management (SIM) involves collecting, normalizing, and analyzing log data from different sources across your network, including firewalls, servers, and anti-malware software. This data offers a real-time view of events and activity. A SIM tool may include the ability to automate responses to potential issues.


2. Security Event Management (SEM) involves leveraging specific types of event data for real-time threat analysis, visualization, and incident response. It can also include threat intelligence features to flag activities like suspicious authentications or logins based on up-to-date lists of known bad actors.

As a combination of these types of security tools, a SIEM tool is designed to streamline and automate key tasks related to both SIM and SEM by delivering monitoring and collecting security log data from sources to provide an overview of possible network threats that would be nearly impossible to detect when using separate, basic tools or with manual efforts. However, SIEM doesn’t replace the need for other security tools but gathers information from them in the form of log and event data to enable you to analyze and correlate data to improve your understanding of the activities happening across systems.

When researching SIEM, you may come across information about unified security management or unified threat management (UTM) solutions. While UTM solutions deal with original data or create data with sensors, SIEMs aggregate and manage log data from other devices—which can include UTMs. So, while UTM tools provide some similar capabilities as SIEMS, they can also introduce a single point of failure for your network.

The functions and power of SIEM tools can vary depending on the vendor but often share the same basic capabilities, including log data management, compliance reporting, threat detection and intelligence, alerts, and a dashboard to enable you to interface with multiple security protocols. While SIEM software has been used for over a decade, new SIEM security tools are likely to incorporate more security monitoring and automation features, like automated responses to resolve security issues when configured thresholds are met and more sophisticated forms of security analytics to better support the ability to provide comprehensive insights into a company’s overall security posture.

Why are SIEM tools important?

SIEM solutions are important to business security because they provide a comprehensive overview of an organization’s cybersecurity and help protect the integrity of IT systems by safeguarding any sensitive and personal data they handle. 

Without SIEM solutions, organizations may struggle to learn from past security events or collect the right data to correlate past events with new suspicious activity. By providing both real-time and historical insight into security events, SIEM tools can help organizations gain visibility into and protect against:

External threats. Antivirus and firewall packages aren’t enough to protect against attacks. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, and security technology must include additional oversight to identify infrastructural weak points and adapt to changing threats coming from outside a network.

Internal threats. For organizations of any size, it can be difficult to distinguish security threats from legitimate activity. For instance, organizations often struggle to determine if a failed login is an unwarranted attempt to access a server or simply a user attempting to remember a password.

Other SIEM tool features are important when it comes to monitoring, analyzing, and improving the security of your infrastructure, which includes customizable alerting to flag potential security issues in real-time and rapid responses designed to automatically shut down suspicious activity. Additionally, SIEM tools are important when supporting forensic investigations and demonstrating compliance with various IT regulatory frameworks by generating reports to offer insights into both previous and current system activity.

SIEM tool requirements

Not all SIEM tools are created equal. For professional-grade protection, a SIEM tool should include the following capabilities: 

• Infrastructure visibility. SIEM tools should offer a single, unified view—a one-stop shop—for all event logs generated across a network infrastructure. This can increase your productivity, as you no longer need to hunt down where every event log resides.


• Alert to activity. Protect sensitive data from unauthorized attacks. A SIEM solution should let you monitor and be alerted to registry, file, and folder activity to detect suspicious and malicious behavior.


• Event log correlation. As your SIEM tool collects and centralizes logs from across firewalls, servers, IDS, and more, it should quickly and automatically transform the data from these logs into insights. Integrated threat detection capabilities allow you to do more than just observe the log entries generated by cyberattacks. Event log correlation can reveal threat patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed, especially multi-vector attacks carried out against multiple network assets.


• Automated responses. It’s essential to shut down security threats quickly. Your SIEM tool should streamline the process of responding to potential threats by sending alerts and taking automatic actions. A SIEM tool may be able to block IPs, change privileges, disable accounts, block USB devices, kill applications, and more.


• Compliance reports. Having customized templates included in the SIEM tool for HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, ISO, NCUA, FISMA, FERPA, GLBA, NERC CIP, GPG13, DISA STIG, and more can help you demonstrate your company is in compliance with industry regulations. Get the views you need, when you need them—since all network infrastructure event logs are passed to a central SIEM dashboard, IT professionals can more easily create a report encompassing the relevant security incidents.


• USB protection. USBs are common in the workplace but can pose an outsized threat to IT systems. Your SIEM tool should give you valuable insight into USB device and file activity while enforcing USB policies.


• Log forwarding. Choose a SIEM tool to aggregate and analyze logs from across your IT infrastructure and forward raw event log data to external applications for additional analysis.

How SIEM tools work

SIEM tools work by collecting logs, analyzing log data for threats, and reporting findings. Today’s SIEM tools offer a set of sophisticated functions for ensuring information security, with some of the most important functions being:

Logging: SIEM monitoring tools collect log data from various system components. Common log sources include network servers, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and antivirus software.

Since data from different sources may exist in different formats, this log data should be centralized and normalized within the SIEM tool to give admins a clear overview of their infrastructure. SIEM software normalizing log data helps ensure data files from various sources can be compared according to predefined or custom security metrics, making it easier to probe the data for insight into current or past security events. 

Threat analysis: SIEM security tools can separate aggregated log data into different categories, compare it against a database of known threats, and even compare it with previous data to put it in historical context. SIEM tools help detect patterns of malicious activity by using statistical analysis, helping you determine whether suspicious activity is benign or likely to pose a threat in real time. This system-wide correlation can offer insight into a variety of threats—including patterns analysts could easily miss—and allows you to take faster action to address the issue.

By leveraging historical context or intelligence from a threat intelligence database, SIEM software can enable you to make tailored changes to your network infrastructure and check for similar threat patterns in the future. This improved security oversight means you can change your security initiatives to keep up with evolving threats.

Response: By comparing log data from different places, SIEM software is built to detect potential security problems like malware or other malicious activity at a much faster pace. Quicker detection leads to a quicker response, which means you can head off issues before they cause serious damage. Alerting is a key SIEM capability, as you can configure built-in or custom alerts to immediately flag certain issues when they occur. 

With the introduction of automation and deep learning technologies, SIEM solutions can also automate tool-driven action. Some SIEM software offers rule-based functions to automatically stop a threat before it causes further damage such as the SIEM tool automatically stopping a process, blocking user access, or even detaching a USB device.

Reporting: Effective SIEM tools also provide information to help demonstrate compliance. SIEM software can offer custom and pre-built templates to make it easy to demonstrate security compliance with industry regulations.

Additionally, you should be able to export SIEM reporting data into other programs or share it with data analysts who can give feedback and gain further insight into how to improve a company’s overall security posture.

How to choose SIEM software

As organizations increasingly recognize the importance of cybersecurity, the market for SIEM tools continues to grow. While SIEM solutions can be more resource-intensive than basic security tools, they also offer a much more comprehensive overview of a company’s IT security.

When choosing a SIEM solution, consider your company’s priorities. Every business will have its own reasons for choosing a SIEM tool and selecting the best one for your use case will depend on factors like your organization’s size, your infrastructure type, and relevant compliance regulations. As you look for a SIEM monitoring tool, consider the following questions:

• What’s your budget for a SIEM tool? The costs of not protecting your system can be high.


• How much data are you trying to manage? Ensure your selection can handle your typical data stream.


• Will the tool enhance your log management and collection? Look for a comprehensive tool to help provide insights and make analysis easier, not just a surface-level monitoring solution.


• Is the tool compatible with your device vendors and data types? You likely use a range of products across your IT infrastructure, and you want to ensure you can track risks across as much of it as possible.


• Is the dashboard user-friendly? Look for intuitive and customizable features. The platform should offer in-depth details, but not at the expense of usability.


• Does the threat response workflow offer management features for both real-time and historical security events? It’s important to be able to drill down on past events so you can analyze and learn from what happened.


• Will the tool help you achieve compliance for the regulatory frameworks most important to your organization? Even if you haven’t considered compliance before, a SIEM security tool gives you a chance to get started on the right foot.


• Does the tool support your threat management workflow with fast and automatic response capabilities? This includes built-in responses like shutting down suspicious user activity and security alerts, which are critical for giving admins real-time visibility.

What is SolarWinds Sercurity Event Manager (SEM)?

It isn’t always easy to get a complete, real-time view of your organization’s security posture. You may have firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and other security tools in place, but how you approach collecting and using the data they generate can make a significant difference. You need a SIEM product to streamline your defense strategy. That means choosing a tool with instant overviews of log events across your system, rapid incident response in the form of alerts and automated actions, and the ability to perform drill-down, compliance-ready analyses of both current and past threats.

At SolarWinds, we believe it’s possible to improve security and compliance with an easy-to-use, affordable SIEM tool—SolarWinds^® Security Event Manager (SEM). If you’re looking for a tool including all these capabilities, consider SolarWinds SEM. By offering all these critical features and more, SEM is built to deliver the effective SIEM protection businesses need.

What makes SEM SIEM tools different

Detect suspicious activity. Identify threats faster with event-time detection of suspicious activity.

Mitigate security threats. Conduct security event investigations and forensics with SolarWinds SIEM software to facilitate threat mitigation.

Achieve industry and regulatory compliance readiness. Demonstrate compliance with audit-proven reporting for standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, and DISA STIG.

Maintain continuous security. Improve security measures with SEM, a hardened virtual appliance with encryption capabilities for data in transit and at rest, USB device monitoring, SSO/smart card integration, and more.

Effective Security and Information Event Management (SIEM) starts with gaining comprehensive visibility across your IT infrastructure. If you’re looking for a SIEM solution, download a fully functional, 30-day trial today to see if SolarWinds Security Event Manager is the best SIEM software for your needs.