AlienVault OSSIM was an open source Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). AlienVault was acquired by AT&T Cybersecurity, now LevelBlue, and OSSIM is no longer available for sale.
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LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Score 3.8 out of 10
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The LevelBlue USM Anywhere XDR platform (replacing the former AlienVault USM) delivers threat detection, incident response, and compliance management.
$1,075
per month
Pricing
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essentials
$1,075
per month
Standard
$1,695
per month
Premium
$2,595
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Considered Both Products
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
Originally my organization leveraged alien value due to the lower cost of entry and ability to manage it as a service provider. Unfortunately, after several years of working with this tool, it became unwieldy to use as it felt that almost every useful report had to be created …
We did not evaluate or use any other product previous to AlienVault [OSSIM]. We had a specific need to meet our audit requirements and AlienVault [OSSIM] provided all the features needed as well as being simple enough to deploy without any dedicated staff. Real-time alerts …
We have not used any other products similar to AlienVault so I do not have anything to compare it to. We did look at a few others when first purchasing, but at this point, I do not recall what they were.
Best bang for the buck. Darktrace did not perform even close to AlienVault. I ran them concurrently. AlienVault consistently found issues that DarkTrace didn't pick up, and the DarkTrace incidents were false positives. At one point, DarkTrace stated I had 2,000 servers and I …
OSSIM is the free version of the Alien Vault USM and comes packed with most of the features you will need to get going. Like most free to use products, it is missing aspects that make the use of the product much more productive.
As an example, you will need a separate system for …
AlienVault OSSIM as the first experience with a SIEM is very fine, especially if your company is an SMB. Every SIEM shares some features in common with other products, features such as log retrieval and normalization. So if you stick with principles, you can learn other SIEM …
AlienVault OSSIM has the upper ante in initial deployment price, being that it's open source. Also, with perhaps the exception of SolarWinds, it has a lower optimal requirements for onsite deployment, hence your OPEX won't be hit very hard by investing in new hardware to suit …
AlienVault USM offers a user-friendly interface and comprehensive features at a lower cost compared to QRadar, making it our preferred choice for effective threat detection and response.
I have used Splunk and QRadar which are quite manual and resource-intensive to get set up. On the other hand, AlienVault USM seems to have everything you need out of the box to get set up.
QRadar is one of the top SIEMs on the market. AlienVault USM is more suitable for companies or clients having a smaller budget, as AlienVault USM is cheaper than QRadar. Regarding features, QRadar trumps AlienVault USM, as it is a product with a vast array of features.
The cost of AlienVault is what sold us on AlienVault. However, considering the amount of time and effort that has gone into getting it set up and realizing that views and reports cannot be shared across groups makes it not worth the savings.
I evaluated Crowd Strike. It didn't provide any insight into my network equipment, only Mac and Windows clients. I wanted a complete SIEM and log manager.
The only other product I've used similar to AlienVault is SolarWinds SIEM (formerly TriGeo). It too could be difficult to implement and maintain, but it's user interface was much worse. While AlienVault USM Anywhere charges for the amount of data being processed, SolarWinds was …
Darktrace - While also a fantastic product, its use case is slightly different from a SIEM, and we found that AlienVault's broad SIEM capabilities complemented Darkrace's focussed use case well. CyberShark - Cloud SIEM solutions do not often allow full control of or access to …
AlienVault USM Anywhere provided the right gamut of features at the right price, with not a great deal of time or effort required to fully implement. As an added bonus, we can tick many checkboxes for various compliance standards, all from one solution. Complexity is an enemy …
We already had familiarity with the platform but we needed cloud support so we upgraded to USM. We reviewed a few other options but decided USM was the best fit our requirements and price point.
The tools reviewed were quite sophisticated. The reason for choosing AlienVault USM was mainly inclusiveness (multiple services integrated) of the solution as well as the cost-benefit ratio. Integrating the solution into our current infrastructure also appeared relatively …
AlienVault USM is considerably more user-friendly, but it does fall short with the search functionality that a query language offers when looking for specific logs/statistics/data.
USM anywhere is easy to deploy and has sufficient documentation to guide administrators throughout the process of configuration and log creation. It also verifies threats against the Open Threat Exchange platform. USM gives remediation advice and insights to all threats …
The price and the ease-of-use, and the support from AlienVault are better. I had a lot of trouble starting out, but they guided me very well. The training provided by AlienVault was fantastic, because I could play without the fear of breaking anything.
In terms of user-friendliness and overall navigation, I think AlienVault USM has the advantage. Also, AlienVault USM provides its own threat intelligence and then integrates it into its SEIM, which is a very helpful feature.
AlienVault was given to us, even though we already had Secureworks. Both SecureWorks and Fireye are more of a managed solution. It's fine to say we'll use AlienVault but it requires a lot of expertise to get it running and alerting correctly. And even then, if no one is …
We had used Splunk, which is not even close to its pricing not at all budget-friendly. Splunk implementation requires more man-power and is a time-consuming process because no default directives are present and in implementation, each and every case needs to be checked. …
I didn't select either product but I have used both. I suspect IBM Qradar is more expensive, however, it is also more responsive, includes support for e-streamer, does parse the "blocked" field in source fire logs, and includes UEBA.
The most obvious scenario in which OSSIM is well suited is in a single office/home office (SOHO) or small business, in which budget is reduced but asset discovery and vulnerability management are greatly needed and appreciated. OSSIM is lightweight and free, so the real challenge to face is to hire or assign an administrator to manage and operate it, instead of any investment on an expensive appliance. Also, as resellers, promoting usage of OSSIM to customers charging for professional services for installation, administration, and maintenance (remember that OSSIM doesn't have official support from AlienVault) is a great asset for the organization.
AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) Anywhere is a cloud-based security information and event management solution that provides effective and affordable threat detection, incident response, and compliance management capabilities. USM Anywhere is well suited to mid-size enterprise environments operating in the cloud. USM Anywhere is also well suited to enterprises whose operations teams require easy deployment and management. Last, USM Anywhere is considered a highly affordable option compared to competitors. USM Anywhere lags competitors in several areas, such as application monitoring, database monitoring, and integrations with third-party solutions such as cloud access security brokers (CASB), DAM, DAP, and DLP.
The USM platform provides the essential security capabilities that work together for a fast and cost-effective way for organizations to have complete visibility into the security of their environment.
With the information gathered during asset discovery, USM will correlated that information with known vulnerabilities for continuous vulnerability awareness. In addition, USM contains an active scanner capable of scanning for over 30,000 known vulnerabilities.
To give better visibility into your network, and possibly detect intrusions that don’t follow behavioral patterns, we offer Netflow information, bandwidth monitoring, and traffic capture, all part of our behavioral monitoring capabilities built into USM.
USM Anywhere doesn't allow you to multi-home sensors. So if you have non-routable networks, you'll need to investigate the on-premise solution too.
You have to be on top of tuning else a constant stream of alerts will cause your SOC staff to begin ignoring alarms.
You have to be on top of tuning else you'll eat your allotment of storage for that month. It is really easy to exceed your storage quota if you don't proactively monitor log sources. USM could do a better job letting you know if a log source is too chatty.
The centralized logging and retention for PCI compliance was our main driver, and it is meeting that need. Otherwise there has been enough frustration with the lack of documentation and the need to customize through the CLI that I would be open to alternatives.
AlienVault OSSIM is far easy to use and manage - provided you know what you're doing. As any SIEM application, there is some background knowledge required in order to take advantage of the product's functionalities, such as the log correlation and analysis. Other than that, the application is quite usable and robust.
Once you are able to navigate the different panels, finding what you need is quite easily. Before getting used it it can be a bit of challenge . Each panel is quite well laid out and the filtering search capabilities are quite strong.
We do have issues with maintenance on the AlienVault USM as the disk fills up from time to time with other data sources. Sources for scanning logs and net flow data isn't calculated in regular disk maintenance and can easily fill up our disk if we do not keep an eye on it with some custom Nagios plugins. The system does properly trim logging data from logging sources properly.
With the latest release of AlienVault USM overall performance has not been an issue. We have noticed single source events per second does not scale well with the overall system. 2,000eps on a vmware system with a single source produces delays of up to an hour for us. Pages, reporting and even raw log searches are rather quick though.
Everything is done through MSSP and installation pro services. Once those hours are burned up, then you're on your own without a lot of help. Typically the pro services hours aren't enough to get past 60 days and MSSP are hit and miss. We had a miss for installation helpers.
Support is friendly but response time has been spotty. Also initially when we signed up there was a lot of pointing us at the documentation, which has been spotty and ad-hoc for what is supposed to be a commercial product. Overall the feel of AlienVault and the support has been of a very new and startup company that is trying to grow up out of it's open source roots, and I'm not sure if they've totally been able to make the transition to being able to meet the expectations of the enterprise customers.
I did not have any experience with "in person" training directly. The free online classes offered for a half a day are based on the actual training offered. These little teasers are very good and well worth your time to learn a few quick and dirty ways of getting more information from your SIEM
The instructor gave detailed overview and went through the labs before allowing us to attempt using them. I enjoyed the balance of time and level of instruction received. The content went deeper that usual and the lab environment was easy to use and all results were consistent. I came away from the course knowing more than i did if I had just read the course notes.
AlienVault USM was a very simple to implement and get up and running. We started with a trial version and had that up and going within an hour of receiving email instructions from the sales engineer. We never had to contact support to get the system up and going. It was extremely easy to convert over to a full license once we started with a paid version.
AlienVault OSSIM as the first experience with a SIEM is very fine, especially if your company is an SMB. Every SIEM shares some features in common with other products, features such as log retrieval and normalization. So if you stick with principles, you can learn other SIEM products as well. If your environment is not of a minimum size, LogRhythm might be overkill for your network, same with McAfee Enterprise Security Manager.
The cost of AlienVault is what sold us on AlienVault. However, considering the amount of time and effort that has gone into getting it set up and realizing that views and reports cannot be shared across groups makes it not worth the savings.
The AlienVault USM is not very scalable. Some scalability can be achieved by installing additional sensors, but this only offers 500eps per sensor and is still overall limited by the installation type of VM or physical. We have also noticed the EPS (events per second) is rated overall and not towards a single source. A single source on a very healthy VMware partition tops out at 2,000eps for us, no matter how we configure it. Maybe this is a problem of the 5.2 release?
OSSIM and the installers didn't really help us optimize at installation. OSSIM went without optimization for almost two years before that fact was noticed. I think this decreased ROI.
Finding and researching incidents is much faster with all data available. Sometimes too much data, though.
Once you hit the 150 asset mark, you have to jump to their unlimited license. There is no middle ground. We were only 10 or so assets above the 150 so we had to chose to either not monitor those assets or pay the price of the upgrade.
AlienVault brings all the information to one place which makes it much quicker to track down problems.
