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 LogRhythm is good for providing a comprehensive view of the environment. It gives a great outline of whatever is going on in our servers and systems regarding security malfunctions. The SIEM sends real-time notifications when there are some occurrences; like creating a new user and inappropriate login attempts. It also avails a good use case that meets our HIPAA compliance.
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 LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform has an alarm system that generates tickets based on the event and the way it has been configured in the LogRhythm console. Let's say we have a ticket for a malicious email attachment. The ticket will some information like the source of the log, the source IP, destination IP etc. It can be drilled down to obtain specific information like the recipient, source location, file attachment name, SHA hash of the file, source and destination port, time, mac address of the machine that downloaded it etc. This helps the analysts to go to the root of the cause and take actions easily without manually parsing them. The second good thing about the LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform is that it is very easy to use with its well-structured interface. To use LogRhythm, an user barely require any technical skills. A little overview of IP, CIDR, hash, etc. is enough to get your hands on it. It requires no programming or coding skills, as everything is GUI based. It also provides a beautiful visualization dashboard. There is another beautiful feature that it provides for the classification of events, known as cases. Multiple users working on the same platform can create cases and add events to it. They also help to maintain future reference. The third good feature is the search tool which is very powerful. For example, sometimes it is hard to find the users who downloaded a malware from the guest wireless of the institution and not the private network. The search tool helps us in searching the user by automatically correlating the MAC address from the current network logs and the previous logs as the MAC address is the same. It is highly scalable for parsing a large number of logs from various sources. I particularly think this is one of the best software available for log parsing in an organization where non-technical users are working on incident response. This tool has a good amount of flexibility. However, it can only be configured with the LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform Console. In terms of usability, as already mentioned, it is a very easy tool to use, with a GUI based interface. 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 LogRhythm absolutely needs to provide back end support for threat intelligence lists. Performing a linear search on massive lists of IPs on incoming web traffic can bring the SIEM to its knees. LogRhythm should drop its entire code base for implementing lists and simply turn them into hash tables to avoid the excessive cost associated with referencing lists in rules. I haven't seen the code, but the performance suggests O(n). The reporting feature is the worst of all SIEMs, luckily reports are not my primary service offering. LogRhythm should definitely revamp its reporting to be more intuitive. Read full review Likelihood to Renew LogRhythm is focused on SIEM. That is their core business. Cost of operations, feature set and ease of use. The Log Rhythm support team is outstanding. Overall reliability is good. Reporting module needs some improvement and LR is promising that there will be significant improvements in future releases.
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 LogRhythm does a rather decent job of making the functionality advanced (allowing for advanced keyword & field searching, use of "AND" as well as "OR" statements in the search bar) while keeping it accessible (by not requiring a specific syntax to do quick searches). This combined with a user interface that has headings and labels that are intuitive is very helpful.
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 While LogRhythm support is generally quick to respond, the initial response is usually from a first line support engineer with general knowledge of the product. Any advanced or complex issues have always required the assistance of a higher tier of support, directly or indirectly. For a few occasions we actually used our PS hours to work on the issue.
Read full review Implementation Rating Buy professional services. Buy and implement the system if possible. Remember that the end point log configuration may require other teams in your company to assist you in getting the desired logs from all resources. Attend the end user and daily operations training after a period of usage so you are not overwhelmed with information on concepts not yet seen. Don't be afraid to call for help during your first months of use. Don't close any ticket until you are sure the expected results are verified. Use the community forums to discuss issues with your peers. Watch the training videos offered by L R University. 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 LogRhythm was simpler to set up and configure as well as extract information from. It also was less intrusive in terms of how many appliances were needed to implement. We were up and running within 5 hours to start accepting log sources. We selected LogRhythm as well since support is based in the USA in Colorado.
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 The ability to search through logs in a centralized location really helps us to provide RCA (Root Cause Analysis) to management for outages. This helps us to quickly identify the cause of outages and thus saves money due to reduced downtime. Being able to configure the alarms to provide real-time notification (and responses) to security events helps to prevent potential loss due to compromises (such as a fraudulent wire transfer). The initial investment in LogRhythm SIEM is somewhat expensive, however, the appliance is built to your specific needs so you won't have to constantly be upgrading the device as your company grows. Read full review ScreenShots