AlienVault OSSIM Reviews

I use the solution for my project.

The solution is free to use. 

However, I have found a lot of issues in general that have given me problems. For example, their stability is not great. 

There is no alarm in my system, so I don't know if that's something right, or if there is nothing attached to my system. It's like there is no alarm in my system.

It's so hard to configure and explore something new on it.

It is not easy to find the steps we need to follow in order to use the solution effectively. 

We've been using this solution for one month. We might use it for three months or so. 

I have not found the stability to be very good. It's not, for example, showing any alarms. 

I cannot speak to technical support. I've never used them.

We did not previously use a different version of the solution. 

The solution is complex to set up. It is not straightforward. 

I set up the solution myself without the help of outside assistance. 

We are using the free version of the solution. 

I'm an end-user of the product. 

I'd rate the solution five out of ten. 

AlienVault's features are all quite valuable. Using the CM to get post pay logs and lateral pay logs to a connection is also helpful.

The biggest thing I always complain about is that the user intake is a very old version. In cloud versions, it is very good, but for on-premises versions, it's not so good. If they want to improve the on-premises version, they should upgrade the SQL.

The user interface could be improved.

The solution is very stable. We've never had any availability issues. Our consultant used a 12 core CPU, but he only used half of it.

From a scalability perspective, it's very good software. It is very scalable because it has a very flexible architecture. You can connect one source in one server, and then you can connect four additional ones off that. You can put one on in front of it and you can put four under it and you can put four each off of that, etc. It's pretty open to scalable architecture.

Technical support was very good. They've always responded on time.

The initial setup wasn't too complicated. We didn't have any problems.

We implemented the solution with the help of a consultant.

You pay monthly for the solution. I think it's one of the best products. If you compare with other companies, like LogRhythm, etc., the top 8 or 10 CMs, I think AlienVault has the best price-performance ratio.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

Its user-friendliness is the most valuable. It is very easy to use and explore. The dashboard is very well packaged and integrated. You don't have to spend a lot of time in configuring it and checking out the RPM etc. 

It is also free and very powerful.

They can add more compliance templates.

I have been using AlienVault OSSIM since 2015. 

It is a quite stable product.

It is perfectly scalable. We have ten in-house users.

I have used Splunk. AlienVault OSSIM and Splunk differ mainly in price. In Splunk, we need to do the correlation ourselves. Alienvault OSSIM is more user friendly. I don't have to learn a particular SQL language to do a query. It provides a new way of creating a query for any security event or management. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. It doesn't take more than 15 minutes, and you are done.

We predominantly deploy it on-premises. We have a few deployments on the cloud, but our focus is primarily on the on-premises deployments.

AlienVault OSSIM is free.

It is a very good solution. It is already more than adequate. It is a perfectly nice and free tool for compliance testing, assessment, and some basic vulnerability. 

I would advise upgrading to its paid version, USM, to get more features. It's well worth the money because of the provided threat intelligence, support, and training. When you upgrade to the paid version, you enjoy all these features. OSSIM doesn't have all these features because it is a freeware. 

AlienVault OSSIM is backed up by AT&T Cybersecurity, which is a Fortune Top 20 company. When you upgrade to the paid version, you also get support from AT&T, which is good.

I would rate AlienVault OSSIM a nine out of ten. I'm very happy with this solution. It is a great product.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

Our clients use this SIEM solution to collect and analyze logs that are generated by different appliances or different machines. It is a correlation tool for event management that gathers all of the events in your environment. This includes different hardware and different operating systems. There are rules in AlienVault that might be triggered based on the logs, and you can tell when there is a security attack or something else that is malicious that comes to your network. These types of events raise a flag and send a notification.

Our clients include banks and other financial institutions.

There are two versions of AlienVault. One is a community edition and the other requires a license. We are dealing with the licensed version and a hybrid-cloud environment.

The most valuable features of this solution are the data correlation and vulnerability assessment.

The price of this solution is very high and it could be cheaper. Normally it is sold to financial institutions, which is why it is high.

I first implemented this solution in 2012, seven years ago.

This solution is very stable. It runs on a Linux box and you only interface with it through the GUI. It works behind the scenes. It has never crashed in the time that I have used it.

Scalability is very good. It integrates with a number of other products, such as the help desk.

Technical support for this solution is very good. They are now owned by AT&T Security, and their people do a pretty good job.

We implement this solution for our customers.

We have a team of twenty engineers. Some work on infrastructure, while others handle security products. I am the head of the security team.

There are two versions of AlienVault available. The Community Edition is free, and the other version requires a license. The licensing fees for the non-community edition are paid on an annual basis, and there are no costs in addition to this.

There is a cloud version of this solution available, called AlienVault USM Anywhere, which defends data that is outside of the premises.

The OSSIM version is an open-source product, unlike AlienVault USM, or the cloud version, AlienVault USM Anywhere. You have to rely on the community for support. If you are a business or a bank or a financial institution then it would be better to go with the licensed version. You get support 24/7, while with the community you cannot find this support. On the other hand, an individual who is using it and can handle the issues should go with OSSIM because it's almost free. As long as you can handle problems, such as when it stops working, that you can fix over a couple of days or during the weekend, then it is fine. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company. The product is majorly used for threat detection of the agents on servers and endpoints. We use Elasticsearch's dashboard. Whenever we check the traffic routing, events, alarms and notification, we also have the dashboard from Elasticsearch that helps us put them in a mode category.

Honestly, I don't know what can be improved in the product. I am trying to get a comparison between AlienVault OSSIM and the other solutions in the market. AlienVault OSSIM failed to provide our company a full insight, while also giving out a lot of false positives. The tool has certain areas where improvements are required.

I have been using AlienVault OSSIM for two years. I am a user of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a three to four out of ten.

I did not use the solution's technical support.

I work with Wazuh and Nutanix, but before AlienVault OSSIM, I have not worked with other products.

I used the paid version of the tool and found it to be expensive. It has been a while since I changed to Securonix. I will have to check whether AlienVault charges per device, user, or log.

I am checking out to see if there are other better solutions in the market that can give me what I want because I need to sell them to other customers. I work with Wazuh myself, but I am looking at other products to figure out which ones are better if I want to start out with something new. I am making a comparison of SIEM, SOAR, and SOC solutions to see which one is better and what the advantages or the pros and cons of each of the tools in the market are. If the customer says that the price is his or her problem, I know which product to offer them.

I have not had a good experience with AlienVault OSSIM.

To be able to support our company's compliance efforts, I got to add Elasticsearch to ensure that we get the maximum results from the solution. We have broken down AlienVault and Elasticsearch and moved to Securonix.

I have used the tool's SIEM component.

I have not really used the product's integration capabilities, especially since I remember that we had faced some challenges with them in the past.

I rate the tool a five out of ten.

We primarily use the solution just to check on devices. OSSIM does a lot of different things to help with this, including a bit of analytics, vulnerability testing, assessment, etc.

The open vault component and the checking of vulnerabilities are the most valuable features. The page management helps with this. If you know how your device is vulnerable, at least you can do something about it.

It's not easy to add a device that doesn't have a steady IP. Particularly when you're not putting a sensor on-site. When you have a sensor on-site, then that sensor speaks to the main sensor. We are trying to look for quality devices that give a dynamic IP, so it makes it practically impossible to add a new device.

If there was a way to do dynamic DNS, I think that would help.

The stability of the solution is fine.

Scalability can be a bit tricky, especially for network devices. We have about 150 devices on the solution right now that I am monitoring.

We didn't previously use another solution.

The initial setup was a bit complex. You've got to do a lot of reading. It's not an intuitive implementation. The deployment didn't take a long time, however.

I handled the implementation myself.

The solution is open-source, so it's free to use.

We did evaluate another solution.

We use the cloud deployment model. I have a server that I subscribe people to.

I would advise others to consider, if they get more customers, to do the commercial version the OSSIM from AlienVault. It's now part of AT&T, so there's a lot of support.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

I use it for monitoring. I use it for getting alerts on various malicious activities, if there are such on my network. I'm using the free version of this product, OSSIM.

As a media company, we follow MPAA, which is a set of controls for media businesses. The other set of compliance that we follow is DPP. We use AlienVault to comply to their standards.

We have various media organizations from which we get data into our network and then it goes out. If you put any control, any device, or anything to sense the traffic, it will say that it's malicious traffic, because of the nature of most of the traffic that we generate. We usually upload or download TV shows or films, they go in and out. The same size of IP packets increase because of the kind of transfer that we do.

In addition to that, we also are into broadcasting. We send the data to broadcasting stations, and from there it gets broadcasted on air.

It has really helped find critical vulnerabilities in our network at times. There was a brute force attack, a web attack, and I was able to discover that using AlienVault. There was a WannaCry in one of my systems, a trojan, and it was generating traffic towards the WannaCry domain. I was able to see that through the AlienVault system. It was not immediate. It was after almost three days that I was able to discover that there was a vulnerability within our network.

The threat alerts it gives me from time to time on harmful code within the network, or if it is generating any network traffic, are very useful. However, it takes some time. It does not give me a prompt response for any such traffic. It takes time to get that alert from the AlienVault system.

I'm using it for discovering assets every day. If there are any changes in my network, I give it additional subnets which have been added. It adds all the assets to my dashboard.

I find it very useful when it is for a small or mid-size enterprise. The problem I see in this product is that it is not meant for a large business or for managing critical business services.

AlienVault-like products are not meant for businesses like the banking sector or insurance and places that require strong regulatory compliance, in my experience, because of delays in response. And sometimes it is very complicated to configure this for specific requirements. Writing APIs, etc. takes time. On the other hand, if you look into other products in the market, it's easy to write APIs or integrate them with other database services or middleware and your application layer services, and get the alerts.

It does not help me to respond to the threats all the time. That's why we are also working with Splunk. Splunk is used by one of our service providers and we can directly ask them to use Splunk instead of any other SIEM solutions.

I find it to be stable. That's why I'm using it. Given that it's free of cost, whatever it gives us is more than enough.

I haven't explored scalability very much but the scalability is open. It's scalable up to a level where we can manage a mid-size business. As I said earlier, it is not suitable for the banking sector at all, because they require stringent controls and monitoring, real-time monitoring, which this tool doesn't have; at least, I haven't seen it. Perhaps it's my bad that I haven't seen this tool give me a proper response, on time. It takes time for it to give a response.

I've used and evaluated QRadar vs AlientVault very extensively - I was working with IBM. I used it for ten years. I used and have compared ArcSight vs AlienVault as well, at my previous organization. At that organization, I also deployed AlienVault because I am comfortable with AlienVault.

Those competitors to AlienVault are very user-friendly, their interfaces are very user-friendly. They have multiple options such as generating reports and getting immediate alerts.

If somebody changes the privileges in the system or some code changes the privileges in the system, AlienVault is lacking there. Machine-learning and artificial intelligence are things that AlienVault should explore. If those were added to it, no product could replace it.

My setup is very complex. The network is segmented and configured differently for different customers.

The initial deployment started around two years ago. It took around one-and-a-half years to make this product stable and to talk to each and every device in my network and give me some sort of report which would actually give me the right posture of my security status. I did the complete deployment myself.

The implementation strategy was there and that's why it took a long time. We were also engaged in other business activities, so it took a long time to make this into a proper deployment.

We didn't have any third-parties involved. It was all mine. I started with the web, through YouTube, through various other social media, and a couple of people who used it earlier. I now have several years of experience. That has helped me a lot in getting this deployed.

There is a financial value. It's giving me some value and I've already had a good amount of results on AlienVault products. I deployed it at multiple stations, three or four cities in India, two in the US, and one in the UK. I have deployed it widely because I find that it gives value for money. If I got the paid version at the right cost, I think it would be the best product available in the market for a business like ours.

A product like Splunk will squeeze you for money if you ask them to provide similar services. So I find this solution very useful in that sense.

AlienVault pricing is the best. Whatever cost you are paying, you are getting a return on every penny. I have advised multiple friends of mine, those who are into the security arena, to go for AlienVault. It's not like your IBM, your QRadar, or Splunk, where the cost is too high.

If your network is flat, if it is not that complicated, then you should go for it. I'm using it free of cost, so I'm very happy with AlienVault.

I'm the only one who's controlling it. I have a team of five. They are my soft team. They monitor all the alerts 24/7. It takes a team of five to maintain it. I lead the security section and among the other five, two are network specialists and three are system administrators.

We implemented the solution for one of our client's e-commerce spaces. Our customer wanted to monitor the complete security posture. 

We really like the solution's architecture. There's a logon, clients, an agent, and then the server. All of these were deployed in a multilayer architecture.

The threat policies of the solution are always very advanced and the best in the market. They are very persistent in terms of keeping up with security protocols.

The pricing of the solution needs to be improved.

There needs to be more support or some kind of training program so users can self-learn the system more effectively.

I've been using the solution for three years.

The stability is quite good. There's no hindrance to the user. It's reliable and doesn't seem to have any bugs or glitches.

The scalability is something I wouldn't be able to comment much on. Since it was on-premises setup, and there was no such dynamic need from the customer in terms of expanding.

There's a team of seven currently working on the solution. Our overall monitoring was divided into three sections. One is a network monitoring, and then there are apps monitoring and monitoring the storage.

We're not involved in the engagement anymore, so I haven't heard if the client has plans to increase usage, however, due to its general limited scalability as hardware, I don't think that they would.

We were in touch with technical support a bit when we were doing the implementation. The training and knowledge they provided was minimal and usually through email. We struggled a bit.

We were pretty limited to AlienVault with this particular client. They needed something on-premises and didn't want to look at cloud options. We've used QRadar and Sentinal in the past, however, for this customer, we decided AlienVault was best.

The initial setup was a bit complex. That may have been multiplied by the fact that there was a lack of skills on the team. If they had more training, it probably would have been a bit easier or more straightforward.

Deployment took us almost two months, including having to set up all of the infrastructure for it. We worked with about 140 monitoring devices. It wasn't too large of a setup. The client wanted us to build and operate something a bit more modern than their older setup. We worked with them to set up a complete 24/7 soft center on-premise. 

The entire setup and deployment took about four months, and that included not just the IT part but the work area as well. We had to secure the room, put in power, supply air conditioners, etc. That's a pretty standard setup in terms of the physical space.

We had four people working on the deployment, one of which was a very senior professional with 20+ years of experience.

We had one internal consultant who did the entire implementation for us.

I'm not sure what the cost of the solution is. It may be in the ballpark of $60,000 to $100,000.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with the product.

We're using the enterprise edition of the solution, the MSSP edition, however, I'm unsure which version it is we're currently on.

Typically, we get requests for QRadar, AlienVault, or Sentinal. QRadar and AlienVault are the top choices for the most part, and we work with both. We try to accommodate our client's preferences.

I'd rate the solution overall at eight out of ten.