Journal ·Playbook
QRadar Is Sunsetting: Your Migration Playbook
IBM sold QRadar SaaS to Palo Alto. On-premises is maintenance-only. Forrester advises against new purchases. Here is how to plan a gradual migration using parallel routing through a Cribl pipeline.
Zbigniew Gajuk · 2026-03-14 · 1 min read
For: CISO and SOC · CIO and CTO
What happened
IBM sold QRadar SaaS to Palo Alto Networks and placed the on-premises version in maintenance-only mode. Forrester explicitly advises against new QRadar purchases. The platform that many MSPs chose for its multi-tenant domain capabilities is now a dead end.
Why traditional migration fails
A rip-and-replace migration means 6-18 months of parallel infrastructure, double licensing costs, the risk of a compliance gap, and staff attrition as QRadar skills become unmarketable. Every month of delay increases the cost and the risk.
The parallel routing approach
A Cribl pipeline sits between your data sources and QRadar. During migration, it routes the same data to both QRadar and the replacement SIEM simultaneously. You transition one source at a time, validate detection coverage on the new platform, and decommission the old route when ready.
Your compliance archive runs continuously on S3, independent of which SIEM is active. There is never a gap. Custom DSMs are replaced by Cribl Packs with vendor-neutral parsing. NetFlow, IPFIX, and sFlow processing continues natively through Cribl sources.
Timeline
Most organizations complete a Cribl-assisted migration in three to six months instead of the twelve to eighteen months typical for traditional rip-and-replace. The parallel-run period is shorter because validation happens incrementally, source by source.