Likelihood to Recommend If this is your first experience with a SIEM, this one can get you started. Take the time to learn the ins and outs of the product and you'll most likely be satisfied with it if your company is an SMB. If you need compliance reports, OSSIM is too small for you, you'll need to go with USM or USM Anywhere.
Read full review Arbor has the propensity to deal with even the larger firms. I have been using it for a year span and I don’t have any such complaint which is affecting us in a bad way. I can recommend this to all the companies who want to have a good network behavior analysis and to monitor the problems if there is any chance of it to occur and which has the potential to affect the whole working environment of the company.
Read full review Pros Asset discovery. Once installed in a centric, network-accessible server, OSSIM can poll all your endpoints with common protocols (SSH, SNMP, WMI) to detect and discover site-wide assets to monitor. You only need to group them by your own criteria once added to the product. SIEM Event Correlation. You can define quite complex correlation rules to detect possible suspicious or malicious actions or attempts in your network, in order to categorize them as real threats or as false positives, thus streamlining your risk assessment and management. Ease of installation. The entire AlienVault OSSIM is self-contained in an ISO file, which can be burned into a DVD or just mounted in your server of choice (physical or virtual) for deployment. The installation process is automated and quote verbosed, with options for static IP, email messaging and others. Ease of access. Being AlienVault OSSIM a self-contained appliance, it can be accessed via web by any device that supports a web browser, being that desktops, workstation, mobile devices, etc. The OSSIM dashboard and other features are automatically rearranged to adapt to the particular device being in use. Read full review Arbor's layer 7 countermeasures are very good out of the box, but it is very easy to reconfigure values and see the impact in real-time. Peakflow SP provides fairly detailed traffic analysis and breakdown for top-N data such as top talkers, top ASNs, top ports and so on. They offer "SP Insight" as a product to build in more powerful reporting on the already-collected metrics with an interface very similar to Kibana or one of its many forks. We are not licensed for that so I can't speak to its capabilities. Arbor allows for a good amount of automation. Fast flood detection ensures that if pre-determined thresholds are quickly exceeded, preconfigured mitigations can be started or in the event of an extremely large volumetric attack you can trigger an Arbor Cloud (sold separately) mitigation or a remotely-triggered blackhole announcement to drop traffic to the attacked destination IP address(es) upstream. ATAC (Arbor support) is very helpful. The level of support our organization maintains covers ATAC performing all update functions to all Arbor appliances - SP and TMS. Read full review Cons Creating custom rules is a bit complicated Reporting could be improved Agent has caused conflicts with a couple of our other applications Read full review Arbor is a highly expensive company. this was the major reason behind not going for the Arbor sightline in the first place. Although its features are good but the cost is unjustifiable. The implementation and the understanding of this tool are full of complexity and perplexity. I am looking forward to having a new update on it. They used to update their versions quite frequently but it's been a long time they haven’t updated or maybe it is not in their priority lists right now. Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 by hand. As other tools have come out with the ability to do automated responses such as
Stellar Data processor, we have begun to evaluate alternatives.
Read full review We evaluated Corero and a number of external scrubbing services. In the POC, we found Corero's mitigation capabilities to extremely limited beyond blocking common traffic types at preconfigured rates. It's not impossible to configure custom mitigation methods and countermeasures, but it requires a deep understanding of BPF and bytecode, where Arbor is checkboxes, radio buttons, and dialog buttons that all sit next to a graph showing traffic dropped and permitted by the current settings. I'm not going to enumerate each of the cloud services evaluated because the decision came down to the same reasoning. The amount of traffic we receive is enough that it would be prohibitively expensive for our use case.
Read full review Return on Investment It satisfied a requirement of our audit team (internal and external). Custom written alerts allow us to be proactive for some events. Stable product means we don't spend a lot of time keeping it up and running. Read full review Arbor is good in empower us to monitor the issues in the network. We can get better traffic analytics and reports are quite detailed. The price is quite high which makes it a little hard choice for us. Read full review ScreenShots