AlienVault USM
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Top Rated
679 Ratings
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
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Top Rated
93 Ratings

AlienVault USM

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Top Rated
679 Ratings
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Score 7.5 out of 100

Based on 679 reviews and ratings

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

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Top Rated
93 Ratings
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Score 5.9 out of 100

Based on 93 reviews and ratings

Likelihood to Recommend

AlienVault USM

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.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

SEM is appropriate for all but the absolute largest networks. It works great for smaller, medium, and even some decent sized networks. Having options for all kinds of data to easily be ingested and have the events normalized out of the box is great. The price is really right when compared to other products. Some competitors are priced by number of events and in a locked down environment; this means millions of events so price climbs fast on these other products. Agents are easily deployed and can be used in images. The number of event connectors for ingesting data is large and built into the product and constantly updated. Updates are easy.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
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Feature Rating Comparison

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

AlienVault USM
7.2
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
7.7
Centralized event and log data collection
AlienVault USM
7.1
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
8.6
Correlation
AlienVault USM
7.7
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
7.8
Event and log normalization
AlienVault USM
7.7
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
7.5
Deployment flexibility
AlienVault USM
6.7
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
8.1
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools
AlienVault USM
6.9
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
8.1
Custom dashboards and views
AlienVault USM
6.9
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
4.9
Host and network-based intrusion detection
AlienVault USM
7.7
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
8.9

Pros

AlienVault USM

  • 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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Matthew Stacks | TrustRadius Reviewer
Matthew Stacks
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

  • It does a great job of notifying us when accounts have been locked out. We can then find out the device on the network where the login attempt occurred.
  • Searching for incidents is now a lot faster with the implementation of the HTML 5 interface.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Cons

AlienVault USM

  • 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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Christian Holton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Christian Holton
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

  • All SolarWinds product suffer from slow response times in management portals. SolarWinds SEM is no exception. While it is much preferred over a "thick client" there is much room for improvement in speed.
  • If you use the email alert features with SolarWinds make sure to prepare you staff and team for the large amount of emails they could receive. Make sure to reduce the number of alerts so your team does not ignore the alerts.

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Adam Morrison | TrustRadius Reviewer
Adam Morrison
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Likelihood to Renew

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 6.5
Based on 19 answers
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.

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Aaron Rothstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Aaron Rothstein
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) 7.3
Based on 2 answers
It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Usability

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 6.9
Based on 35 answers
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.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) 6.7
Based on 5 answers
If you are familiar with SolarWinds then you can use this product it's as easy as that. If you have never used a SolarWinds product then it will take a minute to get how they do reports and make dashboards but that being said the tool is great and can make things very easy once you get a feel for how it works and get everything setup how you like it.

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Tim Short | TrustRadius Reviewer
Tim Short
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Reliability and Availability

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 6.4
Based on 3 answers
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.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic

Performance

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 7.3
Based on 3 answers
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.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic

Support Rating

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 7.3
Based on 28 answers
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.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) 7.0
Based on 26 answers
The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material.

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Brandon Demko | TrustRadius Reviewer
Brandon Demko
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In-Person Training

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 4.5
Based on 1 answer
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

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic

Online Training

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 8.5
Based on 6 answers
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.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic

Implementation Rating

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 6.4
Based on 39 answers
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.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

AlienVault USM

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.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

I inherited SolarWinds and did my best with it. Once I felt like I pushed it to it's limits and my expectations of what a SIEM should do over time changed, I started looking at other products. SolarWinds: Has great support, a good amount of online documentation, the best native alerting rules and triggersOSSIM: Has cross-source correlation built in, threat pulses are updated hourly, completely freeElastic SIEM: What we eventually moved to. It took some time to get up and running. It does the best job with event retention and searching, has anomaly exploring machine learning jobs, and feels like it gives the best view of what's going on in the environment. With Wazuh HIDS deployed on every machine, it also gives FIM capabilities while also providing extra context in any threat hunting incidents.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Scalability

AlienVault USM

AlienVault USM 6.3
Based on 3 answers
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?

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic

Return on Investment

AlienVault USM

  • 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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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
View all 387 answers on this topic

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

  • SolarWinds LEM has made a positive impact on our organization because we are now able to demonstrate to auditors that we are compliant with the various regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, etc.
  • The license renewal costs are reasonable and fall within our budget every year. Much less than if we were to incur fines of being out of compliance.
  • We were able to save money by deploying the system into our VM infrastructure and not have to spend money on physical appliances/servers.

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Roger Mialkowski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Roger Mialkowski
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Screenshots

Pricing Details

AlienVault USM

General

Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level set up fee?
Optional

AlienVault USM Editions & Modules

Edition
Essentials$1,0751
Standard$1,6951
Premium$2,5951
  1. per month
Additional Pricing Details
—

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

General

Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
—
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Editions & Modules

—
Additional Pricing Details
—

Rating Summary

Likelihood to Recommend

AlienVault USM
7.5
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
5.8

Likelihood to Renew

AlienVault USM
6.5
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
7.3

Usability

AlienVault USM
6.9
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
6.7

Reliability and Availability

AlienVault USM
6.4
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
—

Performance

AlienVault USM
7.3
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
—

Support Rating

AlienVault USM
7.3
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
7.0

In-Person Training

AlienVault USM
4.5
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
—

Online Training

AlienVault USM
8.5
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
—

Implementation Rating

AlienVault USM
6.4
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
—

Scalability

AlienVault USM
6.3
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
—

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