AlienVault OSSIM vs. BMC Helix ITSM

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.

Incentivized

It would be 8 for me on recommending BMC Helix ITSM. It provides strong capabilities, significant improvement in the IT operations. There is need to improve user interface simplicity and integration flexibility. It still gives a lot good capabilities comparing to its competitor. For those looking for holistic IT Service Management solutions, this is a great selection.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The Service Asset and Configuration Management capabilities of Helix ITSM are awesome. It can be used as a central repository for all SACM information and seamlessly integrated with Helix Discovery.
• It has the most certified ITIL process modules of any ITSM system. These modules work seamlessly with each other and give you the power to manage any situation effectively.
• As an Administrator of Helix ITSM you have many tools at your disposal to create customizations, workflows. BMC makes it easy to manage the system, leaving time to develop customizations and workflows.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Customization can be lengthy due to the numerous features included in the software.
• New staff members require some sort of hands-on training to get to know all the use capabilities.
• The analytics can be improved to include forecasts and trend analysis.
• Expensive compared to competitors.

Incentivized

We rate it an 8 because BMC Helix ITSM provides valuable features that greatly enhance our IT Service Management. While it meets our needs effectively, there's potential for further improvement in areas like user interface simplicity and customization options. We're satisfied with the platform and look forward to its continued development.

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

At least Remedy is all contained in a single platform, so the interface is consistent. Also, the most heavily performed functions are generally usable. However, to use some of the more advanced modules can be a bit more cumbersome (such as Change Management and CMDB (Not Including ADDM)). So, overall BMC Remedy ITSM is better than some applications like CA SDM or HP SM, but not quite on par with ServiceNow.

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

Their tech support is top notch. They respond and get back to us, even on lower level incidents and issues, very quickly. It is rare that we deal with a support technician who does not know what they are doing.

Satisfied because I didn't have to do it!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Moving to Helix from on premises Remedy provides all the same benefits of ServiceNow with most of the existing customisations we have developed over the last eight years. There was no feature we needed that ServiceNow provided that Helix could not provide. The biggest factor was Helix's ability to use concurrent licences vs ServiceNow's named licences. We have large numbers of partners who use the system infrequently, but they do need to use it to raise changes or manage incidents/problems. ServiceNow would have been much more costly for effectively the same functionality.

Again, always room for improvement, but a very stable product none-the-less.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Positive: an introduction to ITIL and viewing Asset, User Management from the perspective of ITIL, and how BMC has implemented those processes
• Negative: The development team needs to communicate better with the sales and support side, and they need offer an open API
• Negative: Currently the Asset Management side has little security and validation of Asset input: anyone can make API (mostly), at any item, which is a problem that I am apart of solving.
• The UX needs updating, badly. Its quality is poor: it functions, but it is cumbersome, click-heavy and requires several hours to understand how to function with it. Also, it needs to ditch IE11 support, altogether.

Incentivized