LevelBlue USM Anywhere vs. Logstash

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
The LevelBlue USM Anywhere XDR platform (replacing the former AlienVault USM) delivers threat detection, incident response, and compliance management.
$1,075
per month
Logstash
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
LevelBlue USM AnywhereLogstash
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$1,075
per month
Standard
$1,695
per month
Premium
$2,595
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
LevelBlue USM AnywhereLogstash
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
LevelBlue USM AnywhereLogstash
Considered Both Products
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Graylog and Logstash are worlds faster than AlienVault. Additionally, we can automate report generation on these platforms. AlienVault USM however, gives us the benefit of cloud management, rather than relying on on-prem/cloud infrastructure. AlienVault USM also comes with many …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
We selected AlienVault USM because it was a lot less expensive than many other SIEM tools in the marketplace.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
If you look at AlienVault USM, you will have to look at OSSIM too. For very small enterprises with limited budget or no budget at all, OSSIM might be a good alternative, it is the free version of AlienVault USM, but that means you are on your own with it. Another competitor is …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
We chose this mainly for price reasons. The only other "big fish" competitor would be splunk and the price was night and day different.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
The AlienVault Unified Security Management is much more affordable than the above mentioned products. Installation and configuration is simplistic and provides much of the same dashboards and raw log viewing. The AlienVault USM does not include extra parts such as specific …
Logstash

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
LevelBlue USM AnywhereLogstash
Small Businesses
SentinelOne Singularity
SentinelOne Singularity
Score 8.9 out of 10
SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
CrowdStrike Falcon
CrowdStrike Falcon
Score 9.1 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
CrowdStrike Falcon
CrowdStrike Falcon
Score 9.1 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
LevelBlue USM AnywhereLogstash
Likelihood to Recommend
9.7
(390 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.2
(18 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.7
(34 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
6.4
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(25 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
4.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.3
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
6.4
(38 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
6.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.6
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
LevelBlue USM AnywhereLogstash
Likelihood to Recommend
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
Perfect for projects where Elasticsearch makes sense: if you decide to employ ES in a project, then you will almost inevitably use LogStash, and you should anyways. Such projects would include: 1. Data Science (reading, recording or measure web-based Analytics, Metrics) 2. Web Scraping (which was one of our earlier projects involving LogStash) 3. Syslog-ng Management: While I did point out that it can be a bit of an electric boo-ga-loo in finding an errant configuration item, it is still worth it to implement Syslog-ng management via LogStash: being able to fine-tune your log messages and then pipe them to other sources, depending on the data being read in, is incredibly powerful, and I would say is exemplar of what modern Computer Science looks like: Less Specialization in mathematics, and more specialization in storing and recording data (i.e. Less Engineering, and more Design).
Read full review
Pros
LevelBlue
  • 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
Elastic
  • Logstash design is definitely perfect for the use case of ELK. Logstash has "drivers" using which it can inject from virtually any source. This takes the headache from source to implement those "drivers" to store data to ES.
  • Logstash is fast, very fast. As per my observance, you don't need more than 1 or 2 servers for even big size projects.
  • Data in different shape, size, and formats? No worries, Logstash can handle it. It lets you write simple rules to programmatically take decisions real-time on data.
  • You can change your data on the fly! This is the CORE power of Logstash. The concept is similar to Kafka streams, the difference being the source and destination are application and ES respectively.
Read full review
Cons
LevelBlue
  • 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
Elastic
  • It is heavy i.e., intensive as of now. Need to reduce overhead to save CPU/RAM consumption
  • Need to be more Kubernetes-friendly. Should support auto-scaling and K8s observability
  • Initial configuration is still complex. A seamless config procedure is still required
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
No answers on this topic
Usability
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
As I said earlier, for a production-grade OpenStack Telco cloud, Logstash brings high value in flexibility, compliance, and troubleshooting efficiency. However, this brings a higher infra & ops cost on resources, but that is not a problem in big datacenters because there is no resource crunch in terms of servers or CPU/RAM
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
No answers on this topic
Performance
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
No answers on this topic
In-Person Training
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
No answers on this topic
Online Training
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
Logstash can be compared to other ETL frameworks or tools, but it is also complementary to several, for example, Kafka. I would not only suggest using Logstash when the rest of the ELK stack is available, but also for a self-hosted event collection pipeline for various searching systems such as Solr or Graylog, or even monitoring solutions built on top of Graphite or OpenTSDB.
Read full review
Scalability
LevelBlue
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
Elastic
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
LevelBlue
  • 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
Elastic
  • Positive: LogStash is OpenSource. While this should not be directly construed as Free, it's a great start towards Free. OpenSource means that while it's free to download, there are no regular patch schedules, no support from a company, no engineer you can get on the phone / email to solve a problem. You are your own Engineer. You are your own Phone Call. You are your own ticketing system.
  • Negative: Since Logstash's features are so extensive, you will often find yourself saying "I can just solve this problem better going further down / up the Stack!". This is not a BAD quality, necessarily and it really only depends on what Your Project's Aim is.
  • Positive: LogStash is a dream to configure and run. A few hours of work, and you are on your way to collecting and shipping logs to their required addresses!
Read full review
ScreenShots