AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Tenable Vulnerability Management

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

I've been using this product since it began as an open source product, I really like it and for the money, I think it's probably the best choice for most companies who need a product like this. Over the years I've seen the interface change quite a bit and sometimes I think it's a bit unclear how to do certain things and the different packages can be confusing, these are the only reasons I'm giving it a 9 instead of a 10.

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

• Setup of the internal scanner was fairly simple and straight forward.
• An update came out for the internal scanner that allows you to add an Internal Certificate Authority for lookup.
• Has automated reporting to keep executives and compliance departments informed.
• Internal scanner can be configured to auto-update itself.
• "Recast Rules" allows your organization to redefine a vulnerabilities' classification, if it is not applicable or your disagree.
• External PCI scans allow you to remediate before submitting to Tenable.io for review.
• Tenable.io staff was very patient and helpful. They provided some limited guidance with remediation.
• Internal and External scans can be automated. schedule for the automated scans is very granular.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Expensive - You do pay a slight premium for the best product in the space.
• Asset management is difficult to work with if you have a lot of asset turnover, the license can be ''held'' for 3-6 months after the asset is gone from your environment.

Incentivized

We like to renew tenable each year we have had it so far.

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

Overall it is good, it took a little while to understand it and figure things out but once you have a good grasp on it then, it is very good.

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

Support is usually really great at walking you through any steps you need to take when you get stuck on something. There are a few false positives and errors that have come up over the years that required their help to get through. Unfortunately, the steps required to diagnose some problems are more tedious than I think should be necessary. (IE: SQL instances can throw errors that clog up your logs because one plugin affects it in a certain way. The process to diagnose this is to watch timestamps of plugins in a log while monitoring the SQL logs at the same time and using your best guess as to what is causing 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

Tenable.io has a comparable set of features, with excellent support and a competitive price. After less than desirable experiences with another company, we moved to Tenable and haven't looked back since.

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

• Since this is a requirement for our PCI compliance and the cost is relatively low, the ROI isn't really something we need to think too much about, Tenable's pricing is fair and affordable.

Incentivized