AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Arcsight by OpenText

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.

Incentivized

In the current lot of hundreds of SIEM solutions out there in the market, ArcSight ESM is fairly less expensive with strong fundamentals in place. The log ingestion, correlation are very well performing and totally worth ROI. However, the tool has lost its way when it comes to staying abreast with current feature curve of SIEM technology and the evolution has not been done by MicroFocus. Search times are high and there is no major plug-in that has been introduced as part of the product life cycle.

Incentivized

• Threat analysis. It can correlate different events happening to detect a pattern or an attack.
• Dashboard provides a clean, single location to see what is going on in our environment.
• Up to date open threat exchange means everything new popping up out there is included and watched for in our environment.

Incentivized

• User friendly interface.
• Easy to create queries and rules to make all the things automatic.
• Backup, maintenance and support of this product are always nearly perfect.

Incentivized

• Creating custom rules is a bit complicated
• Reporting could be improved
• Agent has caused conflicts with a couple of our other applications

Incentivized

• ArcSight is a really complex tool, but it's not that easy to implement and maintain.
• Troubleshooting issues on ArcSight can be hard if you have a large environment.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Overall, it is a good investment in order for an organization to stay compliant and stay secure from all the wild things happening. It is definitely a cost effective tool with some good features including correlation, log storage, reporting and dashboards. If a customer is looking for advanced set of features, then I would highly not recommend this.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If you go for platinum support, it's good as you have priority for support. They will take remote control of your machines and troubleshoot. Also, they arrange requirement SEM depending on the issue.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We are currently using Elastic search as well for better management of our devices and to keep all the loopholes filled that have been created around the non-upgraded version of Arcsight Enterprise Manager. Elastic searches have the latest mechanism to fetch logs and correlated data, as well as process them in a more useful way.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It is recommended for handle small enterprises.
• Cant integrate any threat intel tool so we majorly works through filters.
• It is slow takes time for large searches.

Incentivized