AlienVault® Unified Security Management®
(USM) delivers threat detection, incident response, and compliance
management in one unified platform. It is designed to combine all the essential security
capabilities needed for effective security monitoring across cloud and
on-premises environments, including SIEM, intrusion detection, vulnerability
management, as well as continuous threat intelligence updates. The vendor states that even for resource-limited IT
security teams, AlienVault…
$1,075
per month
SentinelOne Singularity
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
SentinelOne is endpoint security software, from the company of the same name with offices in North America and Israel, presenting a combined antivirus and EDR solution.
USM anywhere is easy to deploy and has sufficient documentation to guide administrators throughout the process of configuration and log creation. It also verifies threats against the Open Threat Exchange platform. USM gives remediation advice and insights to all threats …
AlienVault USM does a good job of thorough analysis, but it puts more load on my endpoints than SentinelOne. It's more thorough and well-executed than SecureWorks. At the end of the day, I would go with SentinelOne over USM any day of the week. Not only is SentinelOne more …
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.
It works extremely well for investigating the root cause analysis of events because you can see so much detail into what was happening before, after, and around the detective incident. A weak point would be when the AI gets a little over-aggressive or doesn’t quite understand the use case for specific tools. Our RMM tool was detected as a pup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are some minor issues with the platform that can be mildly frustrating, but the overall performance, peace of mind, and ROI make it worth using. The management console is intuitive and easy to learn, the endpoint clients are simple but give IT professionals enough data to make management easy and simple
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.
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.
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.
Their support is good and quick to respond. The one issue we faced was when a non-protection issue arose there was a lot of dancing around trying to figure things out. This was frustrating as it took significantly longer to figure out issues. Lots of repetitive log gathers, screen caps, uninstalls that never seemed to resolve issues. Eventually, the product would be updated and the issue seemed to be resolved, but seemed to be the only solution.
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
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.
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.
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.
SentinelOne had all of the major features that we were looking for. The other products either required too much administrative attention or were lacking key features. For example, one could be uninstalled by the end user. We required that the installation be password protected to protect against end user disabling or uninstalling. One product required manual intervention for all remediation which put to high a burden on limited staff. All products are always being revised so these may no longer be issues but they had a significant impact on our decision.
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?
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.
SentinelOne has already proved its value by stopping attacks that would have gone otherwise unnoticed until much later in their infection process.
The Vigilance team has provided quick response to threats that were not easily contained via the automated response SentinelOne's agents provide. This has given us a significant piece of mind.
