AlienVault OSSIM vs BMC Track-It!

Likelihood to Recommend

The most obvious scenario in which OSSIM is well suited is in a single office/home office (SOHO) or small business, in which budget is reduced but asset discovery and vulnerability management are greatly needed and appreciated. OSSIM is lightweight and free, so the real challenge to face is to hire or assign an administrator to manage and operate it, instead of any investment on an expensive appliance. Also, as resellers, promoting usage of OSSIM to customers charging for professional services for installation, administration, and maintenance (remember that OSSIM doesn't have official support from AlienVault) is a great asset for the organization.

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Jose Quintero

Support Services Manager

GB Advisors, Inc.Computer Software, 51-200 employees

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Track-It! is great for a small-to-medium sized enterprise that has a fairly small IT department but needs far more control of tickets than just email and spreadsheets. It scales well enough as IT departments grow, adding techs is simple enough, as is changing the workflow.A large company would probably be better off with a different solution. The lack of easy customization, and the shortcomings it has in workflow templates (which would be a nightmare for project management) means it won't scale up that far.

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Verified User

Technician in Information Technology

Government Administration Company, 51-200 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

AlienVault OSSIM

8.1

BMC Track-It!

—

Centralized event and log data collection

8.4

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Correlation

8.0

—

Event and log normalization

7.9

—

Deployment flexibility

8.6

—

Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools

7.4

—

Custom dashboards and views

8.1

—

Host and network-based intrusion detection

8.6

—

AlienVault OSSIM

—

BMC Track-It!

6.7

Software and hardware inventory tracking

—

7.1

License management

—

7.4

Asset lifecycle monitoring

—

7.1

Contract management

—

5.6

Asset relationship management

—

6.1

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.

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Jose Quintero

Support Services Manager

GB Advisors, Inc.Computer Software, 51-200 employees

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Easy implementation and usage.
Help desk tickets tracking.
Assets management and network scanning features.
Option to create sub-tickets for the main ticket or project and assign to different technicians.

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Valery Mezentsau

Senior System Administrator

Muscular Dystrophy AssociationNon-Profit Organization Management, 501-1000 employees

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Cons

It's a free product! Yes, it doesn't have all the capabilities of the USM anywhere, but it does a great job. Can't really complain.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Non-Profit Organization Management Company, 501-1000 employees

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In my experience, we had performance issues that required restarting software services.
The desktop app worked with a lot of errors and very low performance.
Inventory module wasn't working very well. Hope in the most recent version it is fixed.
Would be awesome to have project and change management modules.

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Valery Mezentsau

Senior System Administrator

Muscular Dystrophy AssociationNon-Profit Organization Management, 501-1000 employees

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Usability

AlienVault OSSIM 8.0

Based on 1 answer

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.

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Jose Quintero

Support Services Manager

GB Advisors, Inc.Computer Software, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

AlienVault OSSIM has the upper ante in initial deployment price, being that it's open source. Also, with perhaps the exception of SolarWinds, it has a lower optimal requirements for onsite deployment, hence your OPEX won't be hit very hard by investing in new hardware to suit the appliance. The correlation engine is somewhat more robust that their counterparts in LogRhythm and SolarWinds, and the IDS (both NIDS and HIDS) are more reliable as well in terms of results. Finally, although Tenable SecurityCenter is more robust in dashboards, alerts and reports, it comes short in front of OSSIM in terms of real-time IDS and SIEM correlation.

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Jose Quintero

Support Services Manager

GB Advisors, Inc.Computer Software, 51-200 employees

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Track-It! has flexibility that ServiceNow couldn't offer us. We also didn't want a separate web portal. Track-It allows for more on premise links and integrations that we just couldn't do with ServiceNow. Track-It! was more of a blank slate than the alternatives. It allows us to do more non-IT work in the system without having to make changes to how people work and track outside of the IT department.We liked the reporting and storage solutions much better than the others offered.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 501-1000 employees

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Return on Investment

The only investment here is setting it up and I think seeing it's performance it's a fantastic tool and has a great positive ROI!

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Non-Profit Organization Management Company, 501-1000 employees

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We were able to consolidate down to one ticketing system and build it to fit our needs without any extra add ons.
Adoption did have some trouble with people trying to manipulate the data entry system to match the reports they wanted. This resulted in some wasted time as the system was reset and those individuals were removed from the implementation team.
This was able to eliminate many spreadsheets for tracking project work. This eliminated 'lost' projects and work and kept progress going forward.
The built in reporting replaced hours of work creating reports out of spreadsheets and emails.
We moved our help documents to their Solutions knowledge base and were able to eliminate a separate wiki server for holding that information.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 501-1000 employees

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AlienVault OSSIM vs BMC Track-It!