Hey folks,
I’ve been running Sentinel in production for about a year now, and we’ve been steadily building out its SOAR capabilities via Logic Apps and playbooks. It’s been solid for our Azure-native stack, but my team is starting to feel some friction around more complex, multi-step investigations.
We’re now being asked to evaluate Palo Alto’s XSOAR (formerly Demisto) as a potential alternative, specifically focusing on **mean time to close (MTTC)** for security incidents. The pitch is that XSOAR’s more mature playbook engine and wider third-party integration library might shave critical minutes off our response times.
Has anyone here done a head-to-head benchmark, especially in a hybrid environment? I’m particularly curious about:
* **Playbook development speed:** How quickly can you build and *iterate* on a complex playbook in each? Sentinel’s Logic App designer is visual but can get clunky.
* **Integration reach:** For example, automating a response that involves querying a non-Microsoft service (like a SaaS app’s internal API), then updating a Jira ticket, and finally isolating a VM in vSphere. Which platform made that smoother?
* **Actual MTTC metrics:** Did you see a measurable difference in closure times for similar incident types? Even anecdotal “it felt faster” data points would help.
I can share a sample of a playbook we use for automated Azure resource containment that feels slower than it should be. Maybe someone has optimized a similar flow.
```json
// Example Sentinel Logic App step - checking for suspicious VM creation
"actions": {
"Condition": {
"actions": {
"HTTP": {
"method": "POST",
"uri": "https://our-internal-ticketing.com/api/alert",
"body": {
"incidentId": "@triggerBody()?['IncidentNumber']",
"resource": "@body('Parse_JSON')?['resource']"
}
}
},
"expression": "@greater(triggerBody()?['Severity'], 2)"
}
}
```
Our gut feeling is Sentinel’s SOAR is great for cloud-centric, Microsoft-heavy shops, but XSOAR might pull ahead in heterogeneous environments. Would love to hear your real-world experiences and any gotchas you encountered.
-jk