We're evaluating EDR replacements for a 100-person company that's now fully remote. Our current solution is a resource hog and can't handle the volume of off-network endpoints without crippling VPN performance. The "next-gen" marketing is getting old.
I need specifics from teams who have rolled out an EDR under these conditions, specifically SentinelOne.
* What's the real-world agent overhead on a standard corporate laptop? We can't have another 15% CPU tax.
* How does threat investigation/hunting actually work when your SOC isn't sitting in a central office? Are the console and workflows built for a distributed reality, or is it just a pretty dashboard?
* Be brutal about the pricing. I see the list price. What did you actually pay per endpoint on a 12-month term for 100-150 seats? What SKU did you need (Core vs. Complete vs. Vigilance)? Did you have to bundle it with a firewall or other vendor crap to get a decent deal?
Forget the sales demo. Tell me about the first 90 days: deployment headaches, false positives that shut down a department, and whether the promised "autonomous" response actually works or if you're just getting more alerts to ignore.
Your cloud bill is 30% too high
I've been running SentinelOne for a similar sized, fully remote team for about 18 months now. Your specific questions are the right ones.
On resource use, we see a typical 2-5% CPU baseline on standard Dell Latitudes, spiking briefly during scans. It's not a resource hog, but the real win is it doesn't rely on constant VPN connectivity for definition updates, which solved our biggest pain point. For a distributed SOC, the console is genuinely built for it; the deep visibility timelines let you reconstruct an attack chain from any location without needing on-network forensics tools. That part works as advertised.
Pricing is where you need to push. Forget list. For 120 endpoints on a 12-month Complete SKU, we paid just under $60 per endpoint. We didn't bundle with anything, but we had a competing quote from CrowdStrike in hand. The first 90 days had a learning curve - we had to tune the policies for our specific SaaS apps to avoid auto-contain on certain benign behaviors. The "autonomous" response does work, sometimes too well, so you absolutely must test your policies in Observe mode first. It's not a set-and-forget rollout.
Stay curious, stay critical.
That's a solid data point on pricing, thanks. The policy tuning you mentioned is something I haven't seen discussed much. When you had to adjust for SaaS apps, were those mostly auth-related behaviors that looked like lateral movement, or something else?
I'm curious if the console's remote investigation tools felt as intuitive once you got past that initial 90-day learning curve, or if your team still needs to dig through documentation for certain tasks.
Great question. We're about 60 days into a SentinelOne rollout for our remote team, so I can speak to those first 90 days.
The agent overhead has been fine, like 3-4% on our MacBooks. The deployment was the rough part. We had a handful of machines where the agent just wouldn't install silently via our RMM, had to get creative. And "autonomous" response is real, maybe too real - it quarantined a whole line-of-business app because of a weird script update. Took us half a day to unwind that false positive and tweak the policy.
Pricing wise, we got the Complete SKU for around $65 per endpoint at 110 seats. Didn't bundle anything. The console is good for remote hunting, but I'm still getting lost in the depth of it sometimes. How long did it take your team to feel proficient with the investigation workflows?
Your deployment woes aren't a fluke. Silent install failures with RMM tools are more common than vendors let on. It's often a permissions or pathing issue they didn't account for in their docs.
On the console proficiency, don't expect a sudden click. It took our team a solid six months before they stopped calling each other to ask where the specific telemetry was buried. The depth is a double edged sword, it's powerful but the UI doesn't always guide you. You'll get lost less, but you'll still get lost.
That false positive you had is the classic SentinelOne experience. The 'autonomous' bit means you're constantly tuning out your own business. Wait until it decides your custom deployment script is a threat.
Anecdotes aren't data.