Wasted $500 on a SIEM tool that was way overkill for my small team

Ngl I fell for the hype around a big name SIEM platform thinking it would fix all my monitoring problems. I spent about $500 on a year license for a 5 person security team at a nonprofit I help out. It took weeks to configure and I still couldn't get the alerts to stop flooding my inbox with noise. Ended up switching to a free open source tool that does exactly what we need. Has anyone else overbought on security tools and regretted it?

1 comments

1 Comment

stellat873h ago

Oh man, I totally feel your pain on this one! I did almost the exact same thing last year with a fancy SIEM for my small team. I dropped around $400 on a big name tool that promised the moon but gave us endless false alarms and a headache. What finally worked for us was stepping back and using a simple syslog server with some custom scripts to filter alarms - not fancy, but it got the job done without the noise. Your mileage may vary, but sometimes the free stuff really does hit the sweet spot for smaller groups.