Likelihood to Recommend At this point I'm saying a 4. While the marketing material make it appear to be easy to use and it was relatively easy to set up, as previously mentioned, each event description is based upon the individual asset making it nearly impossible for the administrator to be a SME for each asset. For example, if one of the assets reporting is a router, the administrator monitoring alerts would need to know what the various events are that can be triggered as an event for the particular router; however, if the asset is a workstation, the administrator would need to know the various events that are triggered for workstations.
Read full review In my opinion, Datto Autotask is exceptionally complicated to set up, manage, and use on a daily basis. I would think the target market for this product would be someone managing a team of 20 - 50 people, possibly more. In my experience, for it to run properly you will need to dedicate at least half an FTE to running this product in an organization of that size per month. I would not recommend it for companies with less than 10 people or for companies that value quick communication with their clients. I would not recommend it for companies using Datto's RMM product. The integration exists, but it is clearly a bolt-on. They were not developed together and they are slow to talk to each other. Frequently you cannot add details from RMM sessions into the PSA without manually copying the ticket number, and if the ticket is more than a week old, then you can't even find it with the ticket number.
Read full review Pros AlienVault USM is simple and easy to deploy. Sensors can be deployed in as little as 15 minutes through the setup wizard. The USM UI is easy to understand. I've trained multiple analysts who are able to perform their duties on their first day, in part because of USM Anywhere's ease of use. Top-notch built-in compliance templates and reporting features. Read full review The graphical calculations on time spent on requests, how long they were open for, who worked on a ticket last. Grouping by priority so you can determine easier what needs to be addressed sooner rather then later. This also helps if Account Management has conversations a technician is not aware of so they can prioritize efficiently. The email updates that are sent out to the technicians so they are aware of upcoming or stale tickets. Read full review Cons Personally, I've wished I could purchase a service that would configure AV for my environment. I get a lot of traffic on a daily basis and I almost need to hire an analyst that just works on AV. Some of the filters when looking for a specific alert aren't that easy to use. Read full review The GUI is a little dated. Some integrations are limited for not being a Datto product. While not as complex to set up as Connectwise, it definitely requires some serious thought during the initial setup. Email processing could offer more options for parsing keywords and allow for more automation. The mobile app is just not worth using in my experience. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The centralized logging and retention for PCI compliance was our main driver, and it is meeting that need. Otherwise there has been enough frustration with the lack of documentation and the need to customize through the CLI that I would be open to alternatives.
Read full review After using multiple products on the market, Autotask was intuitive and easy to manage.
Read full review Usability Once you are able to navigate the different panels, finding what you need is quite easily. Before getting used it it can be a bit of challenge . Each panel is quite well laid out and the filtering search capabilities are quite strong.
Read full review The work flow is much better then other competitors
Read full review Reliability and Availability We do have issues with maintenance on the AlienVault USM as the disk fills up from time to time with other data sources. Sources for scanning logs and net flow data isn't calculated in regular disk maintenance and can easily fill up our disk if we do not keep an eye on it with some custom Nagios plugins. The system does properly trim logging data from logging sources properly.
Read full review Performance With the latest release of AlienVault USM overall performance has not been an issue. We have noticed single source events per second does not scale well with the overall system. 2,000eps on a vmware system with a single source produces delays of up to an hour for us. Pages, reporting and even raw log searches are rather quick though.
Read full review Support Rating The support we received from alienvault was excellent. They went above and beyond in making sure everything was working as it needed to be. They REALLY want their product implementation to be a success and our security goals be achieved. They are like a member of our security team.
Read full review They are fairly quick at returning a response to a problem and have been able to fix all issues for the most part.
Read full review In-Person Training I did not have any experience with "in person" training directly. The free online classes offered for a half a day are based on the actual training offered. These little teasers are very good and well worth your time to learn a few quick and dirty ways of getting more information from your SIEM
Read full review Online Training It was very well organized and helpful in using the product to the fullest extent. The instructor allowed time for folks who were involved with managed services to receive tuning tips in order to better support their customers. In addition, the course materials were automatically updated when the new version came out.
Read full review Implementation Rating AlienVault USM was a very simple to implement and get up and running. We started with a trial version and had that up and going within an hour of receiving email instructions from the sales engineer. We never had to contact support to get the system up and going. It was extremely easy to convert over to a full license once we started with a paid version.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Splunk 's ES is a paid add-on on top of an already pricey product. Finding a MSSP that supports
Splunk and isn't a 6 figure annual commitment seems unlikely. LogRhythm did not have a cloud-based solution when we were considering SIEMs. Fantastic product though and have a good MSSP base. Devo did not have a MSSP partner base when we looked. Their product is fantastic too. AlienVault USM has good partners to choose from as well as an affordable cloud model, that's why we chose it.
Read full review The portion of Autotask that we've used other companies for prior to using Autotask is the Endpoint Management. The Autotask Endpoint Management (AEM) portal integrates perfectly with their PSA/CRM tools. It's alerting features are much better than the above software as there aren't a bunch of superfluous and unneeded alerts. Instead, it only alerts for things that you specify that you want. Alerts aside, for the PSA/CRM, I don't have much to compare it to as Autotask was the first PSA we tried. It's hard to imagine a PSA having more features or doing a better job than Autotask.
Dan Gospe Chief Operating Officer, and HIPAA Privacy Officer
Read full review Scalability The AlienVault USM is not very scalable. Some scalability can be achieved by installing additional sensors, but this only offers 500eps per sensor and is still overall limited by the installation type of VM or physical. We have also noticed the EPS (events per second) is rated overall and not towards a single source. A single source on a very healthy VMware partition tops out at 2,000eps for us, no matter how we configure it. Maybe this is a problem of the 5.2 release?
Read full review Return on Investment Once you hit the 150 asset mark, you have to jump to their unlimited license. There is no middle ground. We were only 10 or so assets above the 150 so we had to chose to either not monitor those assets or pay the price of the upgrade. AlienVault brings all the information to one place which makes it much quicker to track down problems. Read full review We were able to identify the profitability of our entire client base. We identified a loss of over 1 million dollars for time unbilled consultancy fees using metrics derived from Autotask. Autotask helped us serve our client base in a professional manner, it's like having an entire department at your finger tips. Autotask is the heartbeat of our operation. Read full review ScreenShots AlienVault USM Screenshots