Search remains at the heart of any SOC workflow — and this year, QRadar introduced multiple enhancements that significantly improve performance, visibility, and efficiency across search operations.
Here’s a concise overview of the key QRadar Search features released this year and how they improve analyst experience and system performance.
Enhanced Search Progress Visualization
QRadar now provides a dynamic progress bar for searches in Log Activity and Network Activity views.
How it helps:
- Replaces the older spinning animation
- Displays real-time progress percentage and estimated time to completion
Massive Search Performance Boost in Multi-Tenant Environments
QRadar now delivers up to 100× faster searches in multi-tenant deployments when Reference Set filters are used. This enhancement directly improves scalability for environments handling large datasets with tenant isolation.
Enhanced Log Search by Event Collector Name
Searching logs by Event Collector is now more efficient and optimized.
How it helps:
- Faster isolation of data sources
- Easier troubleshooting and ingestion validation
- Better operational visibility for distributed deployments
This is especially useful in large environments with multiple collectors and geographically distributed log sources.
Improved Scattering with Absolute Space Thresholds
QRadar now supports absolute space thresholds on larger Data Nodes.
How it helps:
- Better data distribution across nodes
- More predictable storage behavior
- Improved search performance at scale
This enhancement ensures QRadar maintains performance consistency even as data volume grows.
Enhanced Partial Search Results Visibility
QRadar now shows up to 1,000 partial results during an active search
(previously limited to just 40).
How it helps:
- Greater real-time visibility into long-running searches
- Analysts can spot patterns early
- Enables faster query refinement without waiting for completion
This is a major productivity win for SOC teams handling complex investigations.
Tiered Storage – Smarter, Faster, More Cost-Efficient
Tiered Storage introduces an intelligent way to manage QRadar data based on age and access needs.
How it works:
- Hot Tier → Recently ingested data for fast searches
- Warm Tier → Older data moved automatically based on policy
How it helps:
- Faster search performance on recent data
- Lower storage costs
- Better balance between performance and retention
- Optimized infrastructure footprint
With several more innovations already in the pipeline, QRadar Search will continue to evolve to deliver faster, smarter, and more scalable security analytics.
If you have any questions/suggestions/requests, feel free to email me - ashish.kothekar@in.ibm.com