StealthAUDIT Platform

"StealhAUDIT is the best product there is for monitoring AD and file systems"

Comments: Absolutely love it. It has helped me remediate authentication issues and file governance. Very easy to install and initially set up.

Pros: Very granular data collection and monitoring. Really love how easy it is to use once the queries are st up.

Cons: Queries are sometimes a bit complicated to set up. Software as a whole requires a huge amount of VM resources.

"StealthAUDIT is not perfect, but it's pretty darn good for the price"

Comments: We have really enjoyed having StealthAUDIT at Answer Financial. The product is regularly being updated and expanded, the support has been perfect, and the company is really good about communication (both in telling us what they are working on and taking feedback from their users).

Pros: The built in reports, scanning functionalities, ability to do custom scripting, and the modularity are all major features that make StealthAUDIT appealing.

Cons: Though it can scan and report on a lot of different types of systems, it is very limited in what can be imported into the access audit side of the software for owner approvals.

"Adequate in a field full of inadequacy"

Comments: The experience is more user friendly than Varonis and less user friendly than Netwrix. Regardless, I see no point in buying audit software that is not accurate.

Pros: StealthAudit was the only product we tested that was 100% accurate on file activity and could retain the audit data. (Methodology: create 100 files. Access the 100 files. Edit the 100 files. Delete the 100 files. Verify that creation, reads, edits, and deletions were all logged. We did this test with both text files and MS Word files as the way Office edits files is weird.) Another well-known product only logged 40% of the file activity, even after spending *weeks* with support and sales engineers to fix the issue. At one point, an engineer blamed Windows for not logging the data, and refused to look at the event log with me where I could see that Windows was logging 100% of the file activity. Whatever you buy, please verify that it works reliably before you buy it.

Cons: Perhaps this has changed since we installed it, but the activity tracking console requires Silverlight to run, forcing me in IE rather than a current browser. It's also slow. It has crashed twice without any notification, causing me to lose all metadata between the time it crashed and the time I caught the crashes. I now know to constantly monitor the system to minimize audit data loss. This is why I describe it "adequate" rather than exceptional even when it was the only tested software that fulfilled its mission.

"StealthAUDIT vs Competitors"

Pros: StealthAUDIT works plain and simple. It is quick responding, the AIC has everything that we need, easy to deploy and update, no fat client for our users all web based.
We did an extensive POC/POV with StealthAUDIT and we were surprised the amount of data StealthAUDIT found over Varonis DatAdvantage using the same credentials and the same permissions as what Varonis was using. We scanned 5 NetApp filers and we ended up finding over 60 million more folders on those filers over Varonis. When we scanned all of production we found over 1 billion more folders than what Varonis had found. That is a huge risk that we didn't even know we had.

Cons: The reporting function is very non user friendly unless if you know how to leverage SQL queries. I know they have ability to leverage Tableau but not everyone has that option. This is the one item where we actually had to decide if making the switch from Varonis to StealthAUDIT was a good idea or not. In the end we made the switch and we have become more proficient in report writing but we still need a reporting tool that is more user friendly.

"Great to understand Active Directory and Filesystem environments and know where sensitive data is"

Comments: We implemented StealthAUDIT for data governance and management of unstructured data in shared folders. We have been able to identify open shares/folders and restrict access appropriately. We are able to monitor activity on file shares. The process is helping to identify data stewards and holding them responsible for the data they own. We know where sensitive data resides and then delete it if no longer needed or we can ensure access is restricted.

Pros: StealthAUDIT provides a lot of information about our Active Directory and Filesystem via numerous reports that give you an overall picture, recent changes, and situations that may need to be investigated and remediated. Finding sensitive data works well, although it does take some tweaking of criteria to reduce false positives. The system was fairly easy to set up with a dedicated technical implementation team that was responsive to questions and issues. The support team is very responsive.

Cons: It took some time to get a handle on the scheduling of processing for our needs. Some of the jobs can run quite long and you need to be aware of contention between jobs as things can get backed up or cause SQL database logs to grow quickly. While there is a lot of documentation available, sometimes it is a challenge to find the information you need. More comprehensive initial training could be helpful to get new admins going quickly.