EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) Selection and SIEM Integration Recommendations for SMEs

Last year, while helping a medical device company in Shunyi with an MLPS (China’s Multi-Level Protection Scheme) reassessment, we discovered that its international EDR product would cost RMB 280,000 annually to renew after the trial. The owner asked whether it was worth the investment. I suggested feeding the logs into the SIEM first to assess actual performance. The result was hundreds of alerts every week—far more than the two-person IT operations team could review. They eventually switched solutions. This experience highlighted the biggest pitfall for SMEs selecting EDR: not inadequate technology, but failing to assess how many features they can realistically put to use.

This article offers a balanced, practical comparison of CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and 360 EDR, including how to integrate them with an existing SIEM.

Where the Three Products Differ in Practice

Starting with CrowdStrike: its cloud-native architecture uses a lightweight agent. In our tests, memory usage was 7-12MB, with virtually no noticeable impact on endpoints. Its threat intelligence is among the industry’s best. Last year, when a client was hit by a new ransomware variant, the Falcon platform provided indicators of compromise (IoCs) within two hours. The drawbacks are equally clear: pricing is challenging for SMEs, latency at nodes in China is occasionally high, the Chinese interface needs refinement, and alert rules require manual tuning.

SentinelOne has gained significant momentum over the past two years. Several clients I work with find its automated response capabilities more straightforward than CrowdStrike’s, with rollback and process termination available in just a few clicks. EDR and XDR are bundled, and logs can be sent directly to Splunk and Elastic, keeping integration costs low. Pricing is approximately 30% lower than CrowdStrike’s, but Chinese-language technical support responds relatively slowly, and complex issues often require community assistance.

360 EDR has a large government and enterprise customer base in China. Its main advantage is localization: data stays within China, which is essential for clients with data residency requirements. The RASP capabilities updated last year are integrated into endpoint protection, providing more granular defense than the other two products. However, its threat intelligence quality falls noticeably short of international vendors. Updates to its threat actor profile database lag CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence by approximately 2-3 days. Integration with Splunk and ELK also requires custom development, with occasional compatibility issues.

SIEM Log Integration: Pitfalls Beyond the Textbook

Many sales teams claim their products support SIEM integration natively. In practice, feeding EDR logs into Splunk or ELK can expose inconsistent alert formats, timestamp time zone issues, and event deduplication logic that conflicts with the SIEM. One particularly problematic case involved a client’s SentinelOne logs: a single process launch event was split into three different log types, severely disrupting SIEM correlation analysis.

We recommend validating integration with a lightweight setup first. If you already use Microsoft Sentinel, Azure’s native SIEM, all three EDR products offer native connectors that can be operational within 30 minutes. For Splunk ES, start by sending logs through HEC over TCP and add a buffer queue for high log volumes.

1. Confirm which log types are enabled in the EDR. Avoid enabling everything; prioritize Process Execution, Network Connection, and File Write.
2. Configure field mappings in the SIEM, focusing on timestamp and hostname normalization.
3. Configure intelligent alert thresholds comparable to those in Windows Defender, rather than copying the vendor’s default templates unchanged.
4. After two full weeks, fine-tune the rules using false-positive data. This is the most time-consuming stage, but also the most critical.

If you have not yet deployed a SIEM, consider our sTrust zero trust solution. It includes basic log collection capabilities, so you can add a SIEM later without rebuilding from scratch.

A Practical Way to Balance Cost and Functionality

My approach is straightforward: ask the vendor to conduct a 72-hour test against real-world threats before purchase. Provide phishing samples and malicious hashes intercepted over the previous six months, and check whether the product detects all of them in a sandbox. The test costs virtually nothing, yet helps eliminate products that perform well in presentations but poorly in practice.

For budgeting purposes, a company with 100 employees can expect CrowdStrike Falcon Complete to cost approximately RMB 180,000–220,000/year, SentinelOne Singularity Complete around RMB 140,000–180,000/year, and 360 EDR’s government and enterprise edition approximately RMB 80,000–120,000/year, depending on purchase volume. If the goal is simply to meet compliance requirements and pass an MLPS assessment, 360 is sufficient. For active ransomware defense, we recommend pairing SentinelOne with an email security gateway.

One final consideration: EDR delivers little value without staff to operate it. Too many companies invest heavily in deployment, then leave agents running while alerts go unread and rules remain outdated. In that state, the investment serves little purpose. Calculate IT operations staffing costs before purchasing, or you may question the product’s value when renewal comes around.