AlienVault USM vs SolarWinds Loggly

• 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.

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• Putting our logs in one place and making them searchable. We use AWS, and CloudWatch has always been a little frustrating in this regard (though it has gotten better recently).
• Deriving metrics from our logs. I think log-based metrics is such a good idea because your logs are the ultimate source for truth in regards to what the hell is going on inside your app. I have really loved the simplicity with which I can just count certain statements and call that a metric because just through the normal course of development certain log statements just naturally become a straightforward recording of an event having occurred.
• Alerts. I actually have a few complaints about email alerts, but just the way I was able to set them up so easily has been huge. Since we started using Loggly, there have been at least 3 bugs that Loggly exposed that were frankly very bad. And withoutt Loggly or without a user reporting them, we would have never known they were happening! This is stuff I tried to set up in CloudWatch in various ways, but because of my own ignorance or perhaps the complexity/limitations of CloudWatch (or the complexity of my stack?), I wasn't getting the information that I needed until I was able to just tell Loggly to send me an email whenever the word "error" showed up.

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• 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.

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• Once the logging limit is exceeded, there are no logs period. Unexpectedly noisy logs often correlate with services misbehaving and potentially leading to disruption. An outage is an awful time to lose visibility into the entire system of apps. Some ways to bridge this gap would be appreciated.
• Filtering by tags is not intuitive in the web interface. You may believe that you are performing the same search and filter as last time since the tags entered are the same, however, this is often not the case. The reliable way to know that you have the same filter is to bookmark the URL. This lack of ease in usability results in devs using Loggly less than they could and implementing logs less effectively during development time (since they don't consider themselves likely to view them anyway).
• Would like to see a way to onboard our less experienced devs to using Loggly effectively.

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• 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.

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• (Positive, actually!) Cost of Acquisition: Loggly is not OpenSource (i.e. Free in this case). Therefore, while you have a cost up front, you have a wealth of support from the people that built it, which can translate into Time savings and/or bringing contractors on-board just for augmentation purposes
• Negative: Loggly covers a lot of the features that other Open Source Projects cover. That being said, it's regulated by supply and demand, and thus it has a certain "desirability" as a commercial (and therefore stable) project. As a result, unless you are an employee working in a company that sees Loggly as a necessary tool, you will probably not be exposed to it on your own
• (Positive): Tagging of information, and filtering of logs makes this product worthwhile from a commercial perspective: You can train your employees, and have them filtering logs in a day. If they get stuck, you don't have to pull internal resources away to support them, you simply open a ticket with Loggly.

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