AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager

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 is a suitable tool for a large organization with extensive user needs. It is not for a small shop as it may be over-engineered for smaller organizations that don't have teams that can manage a solution of this size. It does have some significant hardware and configuration needs, but that should not deter customers from deploying it in-house. I've seen it deployed in the cloud as well as in-house; the downside to deploying it as a hosted solution is you're forever at the mercy of the vendor for customizations, and they cost an arm and a leg. The simplest things take a long time and cost much more money than necessary, so you can't truly get a custom solution and end up with mostly vanilla services (unless you have very deep pockets.)

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

• A large community where, if help is needed, is usually very helpful and quick to respond.
• Various sites with good information on various issues. If you have a problem, there's a good chance some else already had it and documented it.
• Fairly easy installation of the product if recommendations are followed and prep-work is done.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The right-click feature is disabled in this application and users are unable to copy and paste with mouse or touchpad.
• The application also freezes quite a bit and a user will have to quite often close and reopen browser to get it functioning properly.

Incentivized

While the concepts of Service Desk and EITM were solid. The user interface, tool capabilities, and integrations fell behind the rest of the industry. Too often it seemed like CA bought and rebranded products without fully integrated them with their other products. It was a coat of paint, without the parts under the hood being updated. The overhead for administration was too high and the reporting capabilities were absolutely amongst the worst I've seen.

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

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

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

We are too integrated with CA Service Desk Manager to disassociate anytime soon. We found the more we used the product the more we needed to customize it in order to better integrate with our business processes. There are other alternatives that have many built-in features that had we have foreseen our future requirements... would have chosen ServiceNow or Remedy as our "go-to" ticketing product.

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

• Having CA Service Desk Manager within the company has increased the satisfaction of customer service from 68% to 95%. Teams are getting better customer survey scores and making better efforts to meet their SLAs.
• CA Mobile app has provided agility and collaboration among IT Users and Customers.

Incentivized